Photos of Jane Baxter (CAS’93) talk “Reflections on 25 years of the Archaeology of Childhood”
Dr. Jane Eva Baxter is an alumnus of Boston University (CAS 1993) where she majored in Archaeological Studies. She graduated with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2000 and that same year began as a tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at DePaul University. Dr. Baxter is an award-winning college educator and the author/editor of six monographs and over 30 peer reviewed articles. Her research interests are on the archaeology of childhood, the archaeology of labor and identity, historic cemetery studies, and archaeological pedagogies.
The Archaeology of Childhood is a field of study with distinct origins and a relatively short history. This talk will be a personal one that reflects on the archaeology of childhood when I was preparing the manuscript for my first book, The Archaeology of Childhood (Alta Mira 2005) and revising the manuscript for the second edition (Rowman and Littlefield 2020). This first-hand perspective will be used to give some insight to the emergence of childhood studies in archaeology, its growth and maturation as a subject over the past 25 years, and future directions for how we research and write about childhood as the field continues to grow.