Unearthing childhood by Robin Derricourt

Author:Robin Derricourt [Derricourt, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781526128096
Google: x3O5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-05-31T04:13:38+00:00

Children’s finger fluting on the cave walls of Upper Palaeolithic Gargas, France

The significance of finger fluting is open to debate. The adult markings may well have been designs to record information about place. But given the difficulty of access we can envisage a whole family or small band entering the cave together and allowing their small children to imitate their parents with what we would today describe as finger painting.

The linkage to shamanism of many detailed images and scenes of humans and animals in Southern Africa’s Later Stone Age rock art has been widely discussed. Some note that where geometrical patterns are found they are not so different from those produced by modern children, and have raised the untestable question of whether children may have been responsible for creating some of these.100

The evidence noted here is of signs which have survived. The artistic output of prehistoric children in intangible materials, their temporary work on temporary locations, is lost to us.

In a different kind of art, at the Upper Palaeolithic Enlène cave (close to Tuc d’Audoubert in the Pyrenees) rather crude engravings on bone have been suggested as the work of apprentices, and the site has even been claimed as a training workshop: ideas which it would be hard to prove or disprove.101 The quality of artwork does not need to reflect the age of the artist.

A different type of artwork is the carvings of footprints found in open-air sandstone sites in the US Midwest, attributed to prehistoric agriculturalists. Careful and detailed engravings seem to include the feet of young children.102

POTTERY AND CRAFTS IN PREHISTORIC FARMING COMMUNITIES

The new technologies developed in prehistoric agricultural groups required new kinds of learning and apprenticeships. But it is a challenge to find evidence of trial work by the young. Pottery made experimentally by children may end up unfired and dissolving back into earth, although there are plenty of examples of badly made pots that could be the work of learners.103 Metal pieces would be melted down for reuse, items made of organic material may not be recovered in the archaeological record and even trial stone tools may be reworked by an expert.

Working with textiles and fabrics is one of the key crafts in any farming community. Early Bronze Age burials at Mokrin in Serbia, where over 300 graves were excavated, had sewing equipment in child and adult female graves, and bone needles were most common with children (presumed to be girls) aged 6 to 13.104 By contrast, knives, found with adult males, were not buried with any juveniles.

In Iron Age graves in central Italy, equipment associated with weaving like spindle whorls accompanied burials attributed to girls.105 Spindles are common in the burials of the later Iron Age of the Wielbark culture of Eastern Europe.106

Among a small-scale indigenous group studied in Mexico, mothers were typically teaching their daughters weaving from the age of 9. Styles of teaching could vary – when children were allowed to proceed by trial and error there was greater innovation in the pattern used.

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