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The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica. Traci Ardren and Scott R. Hutson, eds. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. 309 pp.
The seemingly preferred outlet for scholarship on children and childhood in archaeology is in the form of edited volumes. The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica is the fifth edited volume in a decade that gathers together works on childhood and archaeology, and it is the second to do so with a particular regional emphasis. It is the first volume to focus on children in Mesoamerica. As the most recent published scholarship on childhood in archaeology, the volume offers a breadth of methodological approaches and thoughtful theoretical discussions that significantly move the archaeology of childhood forward in its development as an area of inquiry.
Scholarship theorizing a place for children in archaeological studies has been linked deliberately to broader theories of gender, identity, and practice that demand a consideration of how childhood was constructed and performed in daily life and in ritual contexts. This theoretical position is well presented in coeditor Traci Ardren's introduction to the volume, is eloquently synthesized in Rosemary Joyce's commentary, and is effectively...