Unearthing Childhood is a recent publication that presents different avenues archaeologists may pursue to find the missing children of the deep past. The book begins with a chapter that identifies children as a missing population in prehistory, presents the selected mechanisms for finding children in the past, and provides an overview of hominin prehistory as a guiding framework. Subsequent chapters are designed to illuminate pathways to accessing childhood in the deep past, including chapters on birth, motherhood, and infancy; children in family life; weaning, eating, and health; clothing, adornment, and bodily shaping; knowledge and skills; fun, games, toys, and culture; conflict and violence; and aspects of death, dying, and commemoration.

Derricourt is very careful and deliberate in setting up the parameters, frameworks, and limitations of this work. He uses a very particular definition of prehistory; namely, “societies that preceded the emergence of civilization” (p. xii). This definition of prehistory invokes an evolutionary framework that has largely fallen out of favor at a time when the very concept of prehistory is being questioned. This definition also allows a large body of work related to children and childhood in the past to be omitted from this study because the author feels that historical, urban, and modern childhoods are not useful for understanding childhood in the distant prehistoric past. He argues that civilization has transformed childhood in fundamental ways, that studies including iconographic and literary sources are biased toward elite children, and that modern understandings of childhood are inherently ethnocentric.

Derricourt argues that the missing children deep in the human past can be best understood through the careful application of ethnographic analogy and comparisons with our closest primate relatives. Interestingly, he notes the challenges of using ethnographic analogy for this purpose due to the inclinations of past ethnographers to focus their interests away from children, while acknowledging that studies of our closest primate relatives have been very attentive to issues that integrate “children” into broader studies of primate communities. The chapters that follow combine ethnographic analogy; studies of primates; insights about australopithecines, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic; and archaeological evidence, particularly, but not exclusively, from European Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age sites to illustrate the potential for identifying and interpreting childhood in prehistory.

This book, in many ways, stands apart from other studies of the archaeology of childhood, and it represents a unique and important contribution to the literature. It is easy to recommend this book for people thinking about children, childhood, and social organization more generally in the deep human past, and for students in a seminar on the archaeology of childhood. Although ethnographic studies with an eye to archaeological application have been part of the literature for nearly two decades, this particular approach is quite novel.

Unearthing Childhood connects to the work of archaeologists in very particular ways, but more specifically builds on previous work in cultural anthropology. Derricourt draws on archaeological literature that critiques the absence of children in archaeological interpretations, mostly from works from the early, emergent years of this area of interest. He engages far less with the work that has been undertaken since that time to redress the absence of children. Most people interested in the archaeology of childhood would no longer argue that children are “missing,” but rather that great strides have been made in general method and theory, as well as particular case studies to illuminate the lives of children in the past. Many of these contributions come from scholars who are studying “civilization” and who also acknowledge the need to import ideas about children from the present to the past with great care. A failure to connect to these ideas results in some missed opportunities that would have enhanced this important work.

The advertising print for Unearthing Childhood calls the book “groundbreaking” and the first book-length survey of childhood in prehistory. The book, however, raises many issues addressed elsewhere in the literature, largely by women scholars. In addition, it draws primarily on the work of a senior male ethnographer, and its sole back-page endorsement comes from a senior male archaeologist. While it is not right to blame the author for packaging and promotion, it is ironic that a book designed to recover the lives of “half the human world” is being presented in a way that downplays significant work by more than half the practitioners of the discipline it targets.