An archaeology of childhood: Children and material culture in 19th century America.

Abstract

This dissertation is designed to investigate children in behavioral, non-mortuary contexts in the archaeological record. This research centers around three main objectives. These objectives are: (1) To demonstrate empirically that children produce structured artifact distributions in the archaeological record, (2) To demonstrate that behavioral patterns and artifact types may be used to investigate how children were socialized in past cultures, and (3) To investigate how children in the 19<super>th </super> century were socialized, with a particular emphasis on gender roles. Archaeological data for this study come from five sites representing a variety of domestic settings that were occupied between 1820 and 1900. These sites include: The Felton Farmhouse in Westland, Michigan occupied from 1859 to 1930; The William Conner House in Fishers, Indiana occupied from 1827 to 1874; The Orange Grove Plantation in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana occupied from 1776 to 1920; O'Brien and Costello's Bar and Shooting Gallery in Virginia City, Nevada, a boarding house occupied from 1860--1900; and the Schuyler Mansion Orphanage in Albany, New York occupied from 1886--1914. Spatial analyses of artifact distributions and activity areas at each site are undertaken on two levels. The first level of analysis uses a visual assessment of artifact distributions combined with a Kruskal-Wallis test to demonstrate the presence of patterns in children's artifact distributions. The second level of analysis uses a visual assessment of artifact distributions and Fisher's exact and Phi tests to focus on the relationships among children's artifacts, adult-personal artifacts, and yard features. The results of these analyses are compared on an inter-site level to assess how ideals of 19<super> th</super> century childhood were translated in a variety of domestic settings. Results of these analyses demonstrate that children's artifacts produced structured patterns of distributions in the archaeological record that could be used to study how children were socialized in past cultures. These results also elucidate the diversity of childhood experiences in 19<super>th</super> century America, and indicate that cultural ideals of children's behavior, gender roles, and material culture were not always actualized in practice. These results also suggest that differences in child rearing practices were most directly related to whether a site was located in an urban or a rural setting, rather than other social variables.