Real understanding of past societies is not possible without including children, and yet they have been strangely invisible in the archaeological record. Compelling explanation about past societies cannot be achieved without including and investigating children and childhood. However marginal the traces of children's bodies and bricolage may seem compared to adults, archaeological evidence of children and childhood can be found in the most astonishing places and spaces. The archaeology of childhood is one of the most exciting and challenging areas for new discovery about past societies. Children are part of every human society, but childhood is a cultural construct. Each society develops its own idea about what a childhood should be, what children can or should do, and how they are trained to take their place in the world. Children also play a part in creating the archaeological record itself. In this volume, experts from around the world ask questions about childhood - thresholds of age and growth, childhood in the material culture, the death of children, and the intersection of the childhood and the social, economic, religious, and political worlds of societies in the past.

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Contents: 1) Children, childhood and society: an introduction (Sally Crawford and Gillian Shepherd); 2) Past, present and future in the study of Roman childhood (Mary Harlow, Ray Laurence and Ville Vuolanto); 3) The pitter-patter of tiny feet in clay: aspects of the liminality of childhood in the ancient Near East (Alasdair Livingstone); 4) The child's cache at Assiros Toumba, Macedonia (Diana Wardle and K. A. Wardle); 5) Transitions to adulthood in early Icelandic society (Chris Callow); 6) Had they no shame? Martial, Status and Roman sexual attitudes towards slave children (Niall McKeown); 7) Vital resources, ideal images and virtual lives: children in Early Bronze Age funerary ritual (Paul Garwood); 8) Companions, co-incidences or chattels? Children in the early Anglo-Saxon multiple burial ritual (Sally Crawford); 9) Poor little rich kids? Status and selection in Archaic Western Greece (Gillian Shepherd).