“Child’s Play: A Distorting Factor in Archaeological Distribution”, 1981-07 ():
Recent discussions of deposit formation and disturbance in archaeology ignore the possible perturbation of artifact distribution by children’s play.
Experimental data indicate some results of such activity, and suggest that it should be borne in mind when reconstructing behavior patterns based on depositional history.
[April Nowell:]
The catch is that the first (or what academics call ‘senior’) author, Gawain, was just over a year old at that time. His father, Norman, a British archaeologist specialising in Mesoamerica, decided to engage in experimental archaeology. In a vacant area of grassland, Norman created an artificial trash heap composed of non-biodegradable materials, including half-gallon wine bottles, liquor bottles and juice cans, a beer bottle and aluminium beer cans (some partly crushed).
During the following 3 days, the senior author, at the time 1.2 years old, engaged in ‘child-play’ activities at and around the trash pile for a total of 3 30-minute periods; concentration on the task for more than 30 minutes at one time was difficult, although it was, even in the solitary mode, one with which the experimenter was familiar. All locomotion during the experiment was quadrupedal or tripedal (when one hand was used to move an artefact).
The senior author proceeded to roll bottles downhill, ‘casually’ toss cans in the air, remove pull-tabs and generally scatter trash around the lot. Norman made some preliminary conclusions after the second 30-minute period:
During the same session one of the wine jars previously rolled was picked up, the screw cap removed, and various pieces of bark and twig from the path inserted into the jar. The discovery of such unexpected vessel contents in many archaeological contexts would be regarded as the result of structured ‘ritual’ behavior; the present observation shows that similarly non-logical circumstances can result from unstructured ‘child-play’.
However, a growing number of archaeologists have argued that children distort the archaeological record only if we think that our task as scientists is to reconstruct the behavior of adults. If we think our goal is to reconstruct human behavior more broadly, then children’s use and modification of objects simply adds to the rich history of an artifact’s ‘life’ or its ‘biography’.