UF Archaeological Study Finds Children Had Fun and Learned
Children in 18th-century Spanish colonial households in St. Augustine, Fla., had toys and games, but they also started early to learn their future roles as men and women, the study reveals. [Really!]
...snip...
“The main goal of childhood was to get children ready for their adult lives,” said Jamie Waters, who did the research for her thesis in anthropology at UF.
This comes as no surprise to anyone with even a tiny smattering of knowledge about the history of childhood in western cultures. Why is it news?
OK, perhaps I'm being too rough (she's a grad student; and this seems to be just a finger exercise) but archaeologists seem to have a habit of rushing things into the popular press even if they have nothing to say. When I was much younger I spent a few summers working on two widely-separated digs and in both cases the project director spent a lot of time contacting and being interviewed by reporters, setting up exhibits for visitors to the sites, etc. Publicity at times seemed to be more important than scholarship. She seems to have learned the first rule of archaeological "science:" keep the press informed.
Read the whole thing here.
3 comments:
Well, the pressure is always on to get the next grant in archaeology, isn't it? If the situation is anything like here in Britain, it's become a hot topic on TV, and I don't blame the archaeologists for making the most of it. (Next year it'll probably be cookery programmes again...)
And often the actual projects aren't very exciting, however academically significant, so the pressure is on to play up whatever bits and pieces might attract the press's wandering attention. Plus, journalists do have an amazing knack for picking up the most trite and banal things a historian or archaeologist might utter during an interview. The report as a whole is more interesting than that first quote suggests, I think. Although I'm curious: how can the archaeologists tell that boys played with certain objects and girls with others?
Sharon,
You are quite right that grantsmanship is the name of the game and has been so for many years. I'm not sure that there's anything particularly interesting in the article -- it pretty much confirms what we already knew about the subject. I would be much more impressed if she had found something that contradicted our expectations. Your point about how do we know how artifacts were used is of course quite perceptive. This a basic problem with material culture studies.
Public-relations people are paid to write up non-stories. No biggie.
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