Tiny Archaeologies

Project summary

Reconstructing the world of children in Late Bronze Age Greece

The aim of this research project is to redress the omission of children from archaeological research in the Aegean, introduce the interdisciplinary study of children and childhood to Greek archaeology, and place it to the forefront of prehistoric archaeology in the Old World. Moving beyond traditional approaches, this project puts forward a child-centred approach in which Mycenaean children are linked to aspects of time, space, culture and identity, and can reveal their own identities and form their own relationships to their peers and to the adult community.

Project outline

The core of the project is to develop a new interdisciplinary approach to Aegean archaeology. The evidence from Mycenaean Greece provides an excellent case study of a society with varied attitudes towards children. The methodological approach incorporates:

1. data collection (from burials, depictions, texts, architectural space and children’s material culture)
2. source criticism combining, where appropriate, the disciplines of archaeology and art history, physical anthropology, developmental cognitive neuropsychology and sociology of childhood.

The research methodology goes substantially beyond the conventional limits of present scholarship on the topic as it employs the strengths of inter- and multi-disciplinarity that will enable the achievement of the goals of the project and its successful completion and initiates fresh interdisciplinary productive lines of thinking about childhood in the past.

Publications

• in press. 'Children and Death in the Bronze and Early Iron Age Aegean', in L. Beaumont et al. (eds), Children in Antiquity: Perspectives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean. Routledge.
• 2018. 'Of white hair and feeding bottles: Exploring children-elderly interactions in prehistoric Aegean', in Gr. Lillehammer and E. Murphy (eds), The Young and the Old in Past Societies, pp. 65-71. AmS-Skrifter Series.
• 2018. 'Children and Death in the Bronze and Early Iron Age Aegean', in L. Beaumont et al. (eds), Children in Antiquity: Perspectives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean. Routledge.
• 2018. 'Of white hair and feeding bottles: Exploring children-elderly interactions in prehistoric Aegean', in Gr. Lillehammer and E. Murphy (eds), The Young and the Old in Past Societies. AmS-Skrifter Series.
• 2015. '"What would the world be to us if the children were no more?": The archaeology of children and death in LH IIIC Greece', in Z. Theodoropoulou-Polychroniadis and D. Evely (eds), Festschrift in honour of Mrs Matti Egon, pp. 57-67. Oxford: Archeopress.
• 2010. 'Children at work in Mycenaean Greece (ca. 1680-1050 BC): A brief survey' in L. Brockliss and H. Montgomery (eds), Children and Violence from the Greeks to the Present, pp. 162-167. Oxford: Oxbow.
• 2004. 'More than little perishers: the case of child burials in Mycenaean Greece', Ethnographisch-Archäologische Zeitschrift 45, pp. 365-375.