Children, gender and the material culture of domestic abandonment in the late twentieth century

Only in recent years have archaeologists begun to view childhood as an important aspect of social organisation, along with gender, class and ethnicity. However, while the material culture of children is a severely underdeveloped area of study (Sofaer Derevenski 1994) and the ethnographic study of contemporary childhood has only just attracted the attention of sociologists (Jenks 1996; Ribbens 1994), historians have studied children for several decades. Ariès was one of the first historians to critically examine childhood as a subject of investigation (Ariès 1962). His observations regarding the radically contingent nature of our understandings of what a child is and whether or not the concepts ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ exist in any recognisable form in comparison to our own, are critical to any discussion. Jenks (1996) uses the term ‘biologically immature people’ as distinct from the culturally loaded term ‘children’. Like the relationship between sex and gender, the distinction between biological and social age is fraught with problems (Sofaer Derevenski 1994).