Historical Archaeology of Childhood and Parenting

April Kamp-Whittaker is a Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Chico and Co-Director of the University of Denver Amache Project.  Her research has focused on the archaeology of community and the development of social networks and neighborhoods and the archaeology of childhood. She has worked on historical and prehistoric projects across the U.S. and tries to find new ways to connect audiences to archaeology through public presentations, exhibits, and curriculum. Jamie Devine is an independent scholar and business professional. She graduated with her MA in Archaeology at the University of Denver and holds a BA in Business from Adams State University. Her archaeological research interests have mainly focused on the archaeology of childhood and women in military forts during the 19th and 20th centuries. She was an integral part of a ten year excavation project of the first military fort in Colorado, Fort Massachusetts (1852-1858). In 2013 she was the project director for the survey completed at the Ludlow Massacre site. Her publications include Bringing Joy and Laughter to Camp: A Study of Children Living in Military Forts, The San Luis Valley Historian (2013) and Soldiers and Porcelain Dolls- The Children of Fort Garland, Colorado, Central Magazine (2012). She also created a website traveling-anthropologist.com highlighting her experiences traveling the globe. Jamie has spent over 20 years working in small business and large corporations. Currently you will find her in software engineering and painting colorful artwork using the pseudonym La Gringa Loca. She and her husband live in Houston with their children. Suzanne Spencer-Wood is a Professor Anthropoloy at Oakland University and was Associate of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University 1992-2019. She organized the first two conference symposia on gender research in historical archaeology in 1989 at the Joint Archaeological Congress and the Chacmool Conference, and has several publications on feminist theory and gender research in historical archaeology that address mothering in homes and institutions for children, and children’s social agency, including her 1991 chapter in The Archaeology of Inequality, her 1994 chapter in Those of Little Note: Gender, Race and Class in Historical Archaeology, her 1994 article on playgrounds in The Landscape Journal, her 1996 chapter in The Study of American Culture, her 2003 chapter on playgrounds and children’s gardens in Shared Spaced and Divided Places, her 2017 co-authored article on the American playground movement in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and her 2019 chapter on the global Sloyd educational movement in Materiality in the Making.

• Chapter 1. Introduction to the historical archaeology of children, childhood and parenting.- Chapter 2. Childhoods in Bioarchaeology: The Importance of Categorizing and Analyzing Age.- Chapter 3. Early Medieval English childhood and grave goods: mortuary symbols of emotion, affection and parenting?.- Chapter 4. Materializations of Changing Western Patriarcal Beliefs about Children, Childhood and Parenting, Socialization Practices and Diverse Children’s Social Agency.- Chapter 5. The manager’s children: family space and a private life in the nineteenth-century asylum.- Chapter 6. San Pedro Maya Youth in British Colonial Yucatan.- Chapter 7. Practicality and ideology: Examining site selection for American children’s institutions.- Chapter 8. Children of the Ludlow Massacre: Socialization, Americanization and Immigrant Children in Early 1900’s Colorado’s Coal Mining Communities.- Chapter  9. Between Māori and Missionary Worlds: The chiefly childhoods of Rongo Hariata Hongi and Ripero Hongi in early nineteenth century Bay of Islands, New Zealand.- Chapter 10. The Science of Child-Rearing: Mothering in the late 19th -early 20th century.- Chapter 11. The Rise of the Child Consumer and Interpretations of 19th -20th Century U.S. Domestic Sites.- Chapter 12. Incarcerated childhoods: The discourse, experience, and material culture of children’s play in a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp.- Chapter 13. Parental Investments and Childhood Responses on the Frontier: The Relationship between Children, Parents, and Context.- Chapter 14. Children in Context: Lessons for All Archaeologists from a Historic Perspective.