Rock Art and Children: Towards an Inter-Generational Perspective on Past and Present Visual Cultures

Abstract

There is a growing awareness that children have been overlooked and neglected within archaeological analyses and interpretations of past societies (e.g., Lillehammer 1989, 2015). The reason for this is manifold (see Crawford et al. 2018; Cunnar and Hogberg 2015; Derricourt 2018; Langley and Lister 2018), but an apparent difficulty is that it is hard to denote the physical presence of a gendered person through analyses of material culture alone. Children are no exception. As other subaltern groups, children tend to become invisible in archaeological analyses, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, how can analyses of rock art be used to study children and childhood in the past?