Kathryn A. Kamp

Where Have All the Children Gone?: The Archaeology of Childhood

Current images portray childhood as primarily a time of play and learning, de-emphasizing childrens economic contributions and relegating them, like women, to the less-visible realm of the home. Ethnographic and historic literature amply demonstrates that age categories are constructs and, thus, exhibit considerable temporal and cross-cultural variability. Nevertheless, archaeologists have tended to ignore prehistoric children, perhaps viewing them as only peripheral to central research concerns, or to treat them stereotypically. The archaeological record provides opportunities for the exploration of numerous aspects of childhood and archaeologists are encouraged to respond to the challenge.

Discovering childhood: using fingerprints to find children in the archaeological record

Experimental replications show that ridge breadth measurements from fingerprints on archaeological artifacts can be used to estimate the age of the individual who produced the prints. While the greatest amount of variability in human ridge breadth is due to the growth during development from birth to adulthood, there is also variability due to hand and body size, sex, and ethnicity. Despite these confounding variables, the variability due to age is great enough to allow the separation of childrens prints from those of adults using ridge breadths. The utility of this measurement is illustrated with a short case study using ceramic vessels and figurines from northern Arizona. This discovery has great potential for illuminating some of the roles that children played in prehistory.

Evaluating consistency in typology and classification

Typological systems are essential for communication between anthropologists as well as for interpretive purposes. For both communication and interpretation, it is important to know that different individuals using the same typology classify artifacts in similar ways, but the consistency with which typologies are used is rarely evaluated or explicitly tested. There are theoretical, practical, and cultural reasons for this failure. Disagreements among archaeologists using the same typology may originate in the typology itself (i.e., imprecise type definitions, confusing structure) or in the classification process, because of observer errors, differences in perception and interpretation, and biases. We review previous attempts to evaluate consistency in typology and classification, and use consensus analysis to examine one well-established typology. Both consensus and disparity are apparent among the typologists in our case study, and this allows us to explore the kinds of forces that shape agreement and diversity in the use of all typological systems. We argue that issues of typological consistency are theoretically and methodologically important. Typological consistency can be explicitly tested, and must be if we hope to use typologies confidently.

Primitive weapons and modern sport : Atlatl capabilities, learning, gender, and age

Abstract Even uncontrolled “experimentation” such as sporting use of early hunting gear can provide insights into archaeological questions. Analyzing the records of a standardized atlatl competition over eight years offers some insights into spear thrower capabilities, learning curves, and the use of weapons by women and children. The sample is now large enough to provide a plausible analog to prehistoric atlat capabilities, allowing us to judge ethnographic accounts and archaeological expectations. Atlatl skills can be acquired fairly rapidly by any adult or older youths. The atlatl should reduce the importance of body size and strength, and all but the youngest members of a society should be biologically capable of atlatl use where sociaL rules allow it.

From village to tell : Household ethnoarchaeology in Syria

The central task of ethnoarchaeology is the development of reliable associations between the structure of material remains and the cultural systems that generated them. Careful documentation of the distribution of objects and architecture in a Syrian village is used to generate understandings of the relationships between social variables and physical remains.

Lizard Man Village: A Small Site Perspective on Northern Sinagua Social Organization

ABSTRACTA preliminary assessment of results from the excavation of Lizard Man Village, a small Sinagua pueblo and pit house site near Flagstaff, Arizona, suggests that the Sinagua were less hierarchically organized than some recent work has argued. Small sites like Lizard Man have a wider range of goods, facilities, and burials, and thus evidence of a greater participation in economic, ritual, and social systems than might be expected in a strongly centralized system.

A Use-Wear Analysis of the Function of Basalt Cylinders

ABSTRACTVesicular basalt cylinders are a common, but somewhat enigmatic, artifact found in the Sinagua area. This study focuses on 55 basalt cylinders recovered during excavations at Lizard Main Village during the summers of 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1988. The comparison of use wear on experimental vesicular basalt cylinders used to work wood, to remove the kernels from dried corn, to smooth a clay disk, and to scrape a ceramic vessel suggests that at least some of the archaeological specimens may have been used in pottery manufacture. This hypothesis is further supported by traces of clay remaining imbedded in many cylinders.

Children and their Childhoods: Retrospectives and Prospectives

Abstract In the twenty-five years since its birth, the archaeology of children and childhoods has made considerable progress. The misconception that the child is a natural category with little cultural variability has been successfully challenged, as have the notions that children were culturally unimportant and archaeologically invisible. Archaeologists have developed a wide variety of techniques for ‘finding children’ using both embodied traces such as fingerprints and other evidence from artefacts and their distributions. Despite considerable advances, the archaeology of childhood is still not adult. Archaeologists still tend to rely over-heavily on certain artefact types. Other avenues for investigating childhood, such as the theory of affordances, need to be more extensively explored. Furthermore, children are still not as central to our theories of cultural dynamics at both the micro and macro level as they should be. Archaeologists remain to be completely convinced that the child is central to archaeological theory or that without examining this aspect of the human experience, explanations of past cultural dynamics are invariably flawed.

A Ritual Spindle Whorl Deposit from the Late Classic Maya Site of E1 Pilar, Belize

Abstract Excavations near the ceremonial precinct of El Pilar, an important Maya center in Belize, exposed a Late Classic period concentration of almost 200 broken limestone spindle whorls. A program of experimentation demonstrated that the whorls were purposely destroyed, possibly as part of a ritual event or events. Such rituals may have been part of a strategy to enhance the status of spinners by honoring deities associated with spinning.

A SINAGUA ACROPOLIS

Abstract New Caves is a late Northern Sinagua site on the slope and top of a large cinder cone at O’Neill Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona. Mapping the whole site and excavating selected rooms allows us to interpret the architecture in terms of adaptations to the time and circumstances of late Sinagua life and to the peculiar conditions on O’Neill Crater. New Caves shows features suggesting use as a defensive citadel, terraces and other features allowing use of steep unstable slopes, and unusual pithouses and other architectural forms specialized to provide protection from wind and weather in an exposed location. Abstract Cuevas Nuevas es una excavatión Norte Sinaguense del periodo tardío, situada en las laderas del volcán O’Neill cerca de la ciudad de Flagstaff, Arizona. La elaboración de mapas y planos del terreno así como el excavar algunas habitaciones, nos permitió interpretar la arquitectura en términos de la adaptación y las circunstancias de vida Sinaguense de dicho periodo. Estas interpretaciones se contextualizan en las condiciones específicas del volcán O’Neill. Las características de las Cuevas Nuevas sugieren su uso como ciudadela defensiva con terrazas inestables e inclinadas y casas subterraneas “pithouses”, así como otras formas arquitectónicas especializadas para la protección del viento y climatología adversa en lugares expuestos