Experiencing Childhood in Ancient Athens

Material Culture, Iconography, Burials, and Social Identity in the 9th to 4th centuries BCE

Emma Gooch (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

362 Seiten

2025
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-894913-8 (ISBN)

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Experiencing Childhood in Ancient Athens uses literary sources and archaeological and iconographic evidence to investigate children's identities throughout the ninth to fourth centuries BCE in Athens and Attica, the city's surrounding hinterland. The book presents detailed analyses of mentions of children in ancient sources, scenes showing children on Geometric, black-figure, red-figure and white-ground painted pottery, and carved marble grave markers, as well as child burials. Examples of each are thoroughly catalogued and extensively illustrated. The analyses conducted identify material cultures of children and childhood - objects used by children themselves, and objects used when caring for children - that can be used to investigate children's identities in houses and in society across the extended life course, so in life and after death.

The research presented compares the range of objects associated with children at different times and in different contexts to suggest how children's identities - and how Athenian society conceptualised them and childhood - changed throughout the Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods, as the Greek polis system was established and Athenian democracy developed. The evidence considered suggests childhood became an increasingly distinct stage in the ancient Greek life course throughout the period 900 to 323 BCE but it also demonstrates that children did not necessarily became more prominent in Attic society as a consequence. It suggests that children's identities, and the symbolism of them, in many ways remained constant; with children always prized for the stability and continuity they represented but appreciated for their role in perpetuating society with increasing frequency over time and more when society was under threat.

Ultimately, the author suggests major socio-political change impacted children's experiences of childhood and what it meant to be a child in ancient Athens primarily because of how it affected the agency of their family members, especially the women responsible for caring for them: warfare and political transformation concentrated in the Classical period gave women more agency to influence the range of material culture made for children, making characterisations of them in art at once more realistic and more common, even when other evidence suggests children were in fact probably less visible in society.

Emma Gooch holds a PhD in archaeology from Newcastle University. Her PhD was awarded in 2021, and was funded by a Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership studentship. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in Classics at Newcastle University, and an Early Career Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies. Her research explores identity and relationships in ancient Greece, with a focus on children and women. She is also interested more broadly in material culture and materiality, iconography, the household archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, and connections between humans and animals in antiquity.

1: Introduction
2: Material Culture, Iconography and Burials: A New Methodology for Exploring Childhood in the Past
3: Experiencing Childhood in Ancient Athens: Life
4: Experiencing Childhood in Ancient Athens: Death
5: Childhood in Ancient Athens: A Social Experience

Erscheinungsdatum	02.05.2025
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 21 mm
Gewicht	668 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-19-894913-8 / 0198949138
ISBN-13	978-0-19-894913-8 / 9780198949138
Zustand	Neuware