Roman childhood was not simply a matter of age. It was a gradual process through which identity was shaped by law, ritual, family structure, labour, and status. In the Roman world, a child did not automatically become a full social person at birth. Instead, childhood unfolded through a series of transitions that slowly brought an individual into the household and wider community. Archaeology, inscriptions, literary texts, and bioarchaeological evidence all show that this process could vary enormously depending on whether a child was free-born, enslaved, fostered, male or female, or growing up in a mobile family shaped by migration across the empire.

In a sense, a Roman child was born twice. The first birth was biological, the moment of physical delivery, which usually took place in the domestic sphere under the care of women. This was a dangerous moment for both mother and child. Infant mortality was high, particularly in the first weeks of life, and many newborns did not survive. This early fragility shaped Roman attitudes to infancy. The days immediately after birth formed a liminal period, known as the primordia, during which the infant remained especially vulnerable. Only at the end of this phase did the child undergo what might be called a social birth, the dies lustricus. On this day the infant was purified, formally named, and incorporated into the family. The giving of a praenomen and nomen was not just a practical act of identification, but a sign that the child had entered the social and religious life of the household. Protective amulets often marked this transition, with boys receiving a bulla and girls a lunula, objects that signalled both care and divine protection.

Yet Roman childhood was never experienced in the same way by all children. Legal status fundamentally shaped a child’s life. A free-born child grew up under the authority of the paterfamilias, whose legal power structured the household and determined much of the child’s place within it. Childhood in this context was tied closely to hierarchy, inheritance, and family continuity. For children born into slavery, however, life was very different. These children, known as vernae, were legally the property of their owners, and their upbringing was defined by the needs of the household. In some elite and imperial settings, enslaved boys were raised in specialised training institutions known as paedagogia, where they were prepared for service as attendants, scribes, or servants in aristocratic households. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence from Rome, especially from the Palatine and Caelian hills, suggests that these children could receive careful training and presentation, not because their individuality was valued in the same way as that of free children, but because they formed part of the display of elite status. Foster children, or alumni, occupied a more ambiguous position. They might be raised in another household, treated in many ways like family, while also performing labour or learning a trade. Their place was often emotionally meaningful but socially and legally unstable.

Recent work on the archaeology of Roman childhood has also highlighted the importance of migration. The Roman Empire was a highly mobile world, and children were caught up in those movements. Some travelled with parents who moved for trade, military service, or work, while others may have moved to join relatives or enter new households. At places such as Delos, inscriptions show that the children of migrant families could retain their father’s ethnic designation, preserving an identity connected to their place of origin even when growing up elsewhere. At the same time, isotopic analysis of tooth enamel from cemeteries such as Isola Sacra suggests that child mobility was more common than once assumed. Some children buried near Rome had not spent their early years in the same region. Migration could also reshape family structures. In a city such as Rome, filled with soldiers and other incomers from the provinces, uncles and other extended kin often played a crucial role in supporting younger relatives. In this sense, Roman childhood was not always rooted in a single stable nuclear family, but in broader and more adaptive networks of kinship and support.

Education in the Roman world was equally varied. It was not limited to formal schooling, but included the wider process through which children learned language, behaviour, labour, religion, and social expectations. In elite households, fathers often oversaw aspects of their sons’ education, especially in literacy, public behaviour, hunting, or military skills. But children also learned from those around them more generally, including nurses, servants, and dependants. In bilingual or bicultural households, servants could even play a key role in language acquisition. Archaeology occasionally preserves traces of this process in striking ways. In houses at Ephesus, for example, alphabet exercises scratched into plaster walls at child height give a rare glimpse of learning in progress, embedded directly in the material fabric of domestic life. Girls, too, could receive forms of education that were socially significant. The most famous example is that of the Vestal Virgins, selected between the ages of six and ten and trained over many years in the rituals and laws of one of Rome’s most prestigious priesthoods. This reminds us that some children occupied important religious roles long before they reached adulthood.

Roman childhood also depended heavily on the wider family. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives could all take part in child-rearing, especially in situations shaped by migration, death, widowhood, or economic strain. Evidence from Roman Italy and Late Antique Gaul suggests that grandparents were often an important resource, whether through co-residence, care, or early education. Maternal relatives may in some cases have played especially prominent roles, simply because women tended to marry younger and were therefore more likely to have living siblings and parents during their children’s early years. Childhood in the Roman world was therefore often supported by a broader network than the simple parent-child unit.

The archaeology of Roman childhood is challenging because children often leave fragmentary traces, but those traces are increasingly visible. Burials reveal patterns of treatment, commemoration, and age-specific care. Domestic spaces preserve toys, feeding vessels, and traces of learning. Inscriptions record grief, affection, family pride, and loss. Bioarchaeology sheds light on diet, health, growth, disease, and mobility. Religious evidence shows how protection, ritual, and status shaped the earliest phases of life. Taken together, these materials reveal that children were not marginal figures in Roman society. They were central to the reproduction of households, the transmission of status, the organisation of labour, and the maintenance of social order.

Roman childhood was therefore not a single universal experience, but a process of becoming, shaped at every stage by inequality, expectation, and belonging. Some children were heirs to family names and property, some were trained for service, some moved across the empire, and some entered sacred roles while still very young. All were part of a world in which personhood was not assumed at birth, but built gradually through ritual, law, kinship, and daily practice. The archaeology of Roman childhood allows us to recover this process in all its complexity and to see childhood not as a passive prelude to adult life, but as a vital and revealing part of Roman society itself.

Source: Crawford, S., Hadley, D.M. and Shepherd, G., 2018. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood, Oxford University Press. 

What was it like to grow up in ancient Egypt? Across three millennia of pharaonic history, childhood was shaped by two powerful forces: extreme fragility and an early introduction to adult responsibilities. Far from being a protected or clearly separated phase of life, childhood was a period of transition — from dependence to participation in the social, economic, and religious life of the community.

In a society marked by high infant mortality, the relationship between parents and children was shaped by uncertainty. Many children did not survive their earliest years, and this reality influenced how childhood itself was understood. Children were not viewed solely through a sentimental lens. Instead, they were seen as future heirs and successors, essential to the continuity of the family. Their responsibilities extended beyond life: they were expected to care for their parents in old age and maintain their funerary cults after death, ensuring offerings were made and the deceased continued to exist in the afterlife. Family, therefore, was central. Large families were highly valued — often described as the “only wealth of the poor man” — and notably, children born with disabilities were not excluded but accepted as full members of society.

Education in ancient Egypt was deeply shaped by social status. For the children of elites and officials, learning took place in formal settings such as the at seba (“room of learning”) and later the per ankh (“House of Life”), often attached to temples. There, students were trained in writing (especially hieratic), mathematics, and specialised knowledge for careers in administration, religion, or scholarship. They also studied wisdom texts that promoted maat — the principles of truth, justice, and social order — and, in some cases, engaged in physical training such as wrestling. For most children, however, education looked very different. It was not centred on texts, but on observation, imitation, and practice. From a young age, children learned by watching adults and gradually taking part in daily tasks. Across all social levels, one element remained constant: discipline was harsh. Whether in schools or workshops, children were subjected to slaps, caning, whipping, and even confinement in stocks. Such methods were not exceptional but part of a broader belief that obedience had to be enforced and behaviour shaped.

For the majority of children, work began early. As soon as they were able to walk and follow instructions, they became an active part of the household economy. Children carried out a wide range of tasks: cooking, brewing, caring for animals, and assisting in agricultural labour such as sowing, gleaning, or protecting crops from birds. In some regions during the New Kingdom, boys were even involved in training baboons to harvest fruit from palm trees. Others entered workshops, where they learned trades such as pottery, carpentry, or rope-making through apprenticeship, starting with simple, repetitive tasks and gradually acquiring skill. In more extreme cases, children were enrolled in the army at a young age. They did not serve as soldiers, but as servants to the troops, exposed early to the harsh realities of military life.

Despite these demands, childhood was not without moments of play. Archaeology reveals a range of toys, including rag dolls, wooden paddle dolls, and articulated animal figures. Children also played group games — from marbles to physical contests — and participated in board games such as senet and mehen, which were enjoyed across Egyptian society. Storytelling also played a key role. Oral tales featuring animal protagonists, such as stories of conflict between cats and mice, entertained while also conveying moral lessons. Through play and storytelling, children engaged with the cultural values of their society in ways that were both informal and formative.

Children were considered especially vulnerable, not only to illness, but also to supernatural dangers. As a result, their protection combined practical care with magical practices. Parents used remedies alongside spells to treat illness, while children wore protective amulets such as scarabs (symbolising rebirth) and the wedjat eye (for health and wholeness). Deities such as Bes and Taweret were closely associated with the protection of children and the household. Even the body itself carried protective meaning: the sidelock of youth, worn on the side of the head associated with life, was believed to ward off harm. 

Infants, however, occupied an ambiguous position. They are rarely shown in idealised family scenes in tombs, suggesting that very young children were seen as not yet fully integrated into society, their status uncertain until they survived the most vulnerable early years. In death, children were buried with many of the same objects as adults — amulets, jewellery, and protective items — rather than with toys. This reflects a perception of the afterlife not as a continuation of childhood, but as entry into the broader, enduring social and cosmic order.

Childhood in ancient Egypt was not defined by innocence or separation from adult life. Instead, it was a process of becoming — becoming a worker, a family member, a participant in society, and ultimately, a link in the chain between the living and the dead. From the first steps taken in the household to the responsibilities carried into adulthood and beyond, children were never peripheral. They were central to the functioning, continuity, and belief systems of ancient Egyptian society.

Source: Marshall, Amandine, and Colin Clement. Childhood in Ancient Egypt. The American University in Cairo Press, 2021.

What did children actually do in the Bronze Age?

At Hama in Syria, the answer seems to include far more than watching adults work. Fingerprints preserved on pottery suggest that children were directly involved in ceramic production, and not just at the margins. In some phases, they appear as part of a reorganised labour force tied to increasing production, wider exchange, and the pressures of a growing urban economy.

Hama, on the Orontes River, preserves one of the longest archaeological sequences in the region. Over time, its ceramic industry changed markedly. In earlier phases, pottery seems to have been made by a relatively mixed workforce, including male and female adults and adolescents. Later, during the Early Bronze Age, that pattern shifted. The evidence points instead to an older adult male pottery workforce operating alongside a distinct cohort of children.

This picture comes from the study of fingerprint ridge breadth on ceramic objects. Because the spacing between fingerprint ridges increases as the body grows, these traces can be used to distinguish children from adults with some confidence, especially before adolescence. Rather than treating each print in isolation, researchers analysed the whole assemblage statistically, allowing them to reconstruct the demographic profile of the people handling the clay. The result is not a romantic image of children idly playing in workshops, but a much more structured and revealing picture of labour.

At Hama, the children identified through these prints seem to cluster most clearly in the age range of roughly 8 to 12 years old. Their fingerprints occur on pottery in ways that suggest direct participation in production. On some vessels, child and adult fingerprints appear in the same areas, which strongly suggests that children were repeating the same gestures and bodily routines as experienced potters. This looks like learning, but not necessarily in the neat sense of a long-term apprenticeship leading to a professional career. It may instead reflect a system in which children were drawn into repetitive, supervised tasks because their labour was useful.

That point matters. Hama was not a sleepy village workshop. In Period J (ca. 2500–2000 BCE), it became a centre for the production of standardised ceramics, including the mass-produced Hama goblets. In that context, bringing children into the ceramic industry appears to have been one way of increasing output. The evidence suggests not simply craft training, but a broader strategy of scaling production in response to intensified regional exchange and social coordination. Children, in other words, may have formed part of the labour solution.

The study becomes even more interesting when different kinds of objects are separated out. Miniature vessels seem to have been made largely by younger children, around 7 to 8 years old. These are best understood not as trivial side-products, but as evidence of imitation, experimentation, and what might be called play-copying. Children were reproducing the forms and gestures of adult potters on a smaller scale, learning the feel of clay through practice. Yet these miniatures should not simply be written off as toys. Some show features that connect them to wider ceramic traditions and more formalised making practices, suggesting that even small hands could be operating within a larger social and productive world.

Figurines add another dimension. Their makers seem to include children and adolescents across a broader age range, beginning around 8 or 9 and continuing into the teenage years. Here too, the evidence points to activities that blur the line between practice, creativity, socialisation, and production. Figurine making may even have provided a kind of bridge between childhood play and the more disciplined demands of workshop labour.

What emerges from Hama is not one simple model of Bronze Age childhood, but a much more revealing one. Children were learning through doing, but they were also contributing to an increasingly organised industry. Their presence in ceramic production was not accidental, and it was not merely decorative to the story. It was built into the structure of work at a moment when Hama was becoming more connected, more productive, and more specialised.

These fingerprints place children firmly within the productive world of Bronze Age Hama. They show that play, learning, and labour did not exist as separate spheres, but could merge within the same acts of making. A miniature vessel, a figurine, and a standard pot may capture different points along the same continuum: imitation becoming training, training becoming repetition, and repetition becoming labour of real economic value. At Hama, these tiny marks in clay point to a far more unsettling reality, the incorporation of children into a highly organised system of production whose scale and labour demands have been compared to those of nineteenth-century Britain. 

Reference: Sanders, A., Lumsden, S., Burchill, A.T. and Mouamar, G., 2023. Transformations in the roles of men, women, and children in the ceramic industry at Early Bronze Age Hama, Syria and contemporary sites. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 70, p.101501.

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(12/03/2026)

When we imagine life in the Paleolithic, our attention often turns to hunters, artists or toolmakers. Yet children formed a substantial part of these communities. During the Magdalenian period (c. 21,000–14,000 cal BP), children may have constituted as much as 40% of the population, making childhood not a marginal stage of life but a central component of prehistoric societies. Archaeological evidence increasingly shows that children were not passive dependents but active participants in the economic, social and symbolic life of their communities.

One of the most striking aspects of Palaeolithic childhood is the physical presence children left behind in caves. Cave systems across Europe preserve traces of young individuals who entered these spaces alongside adults. Child-sized footprints have been discovered in the clay floors of caves such as Le Tuc d’Audoubert, Niaux and Fontanet, demonstrating that children were present during activities taking place deep underground. At Gargas, infant hand stencils were created by an adult holding a baby’s hand against the cave wall while blowing pigment over both hands, leaving a shared imprint that speaks to the integration of even the youngest members of the community in symbolic practices.

Children also left marks through what archaeologists call finger flutings, lines drawn in soft clay surfaces. In the cave of Rouffignac, these marks have been identified as the work of children between two and five years old. Some appear high on the cave walls, suggesting that adults lifted children so that they could leave their own traces alongside those of others. Although representations of children in Paleolithic art are rare, they do exist. A stone engraving from Gönnersdorf in Germany depicts women and girls dancing, with one figure possibly carrying an infant in a back carrier, offering a glimpse of social life in which children were present and visible.

Learning in Paleolithic societies was deeply embedded in everyday life. Rather than occurring in formal settings, skill acquisition took place through observation and participation. Archaeologists have identified what could be described as Paleolithic “classrooms” at Magdalenian sites such as Pincevent and Étiolles in France. Spatial analysis of flint debris suggests that expert knappers worked near the hearth while novices, likely children, sat slightly further away, watching and attempting to reproduce the techniques they observed. In this way, knowledge was transmitted through proximity to experienced practitioners.

Evidence for apprenticeship also appears in Paleolithic art. Certain pieces of portable art display poor workmanship when compared to more accomplished examples, suggesting that they were produced by inexperienced individuals learning the complex motor and cognitive skills required to master established artistic styles. Children also seem to have learned by reusing and transforming adult objects. At the site of Isturitz, fragments of projectile points were roughly modified by children to create pendants or play objects, showing how learning and experimentation were intertwined.

The material record also reveals that Paleolithic children had access to a range of objects that may have served as toys or playthings. Miniatures appear to have played an important role. At Isturitz, archaeologists found a miniature antler bâton percé, a tool normally used as a spear straightener, that shows heavy polishing from repeated handling, suggesting prolonged use. Portable art objects may also have functioned as dolls or play objects. Small carved figures, such as a bone bear or bison head and an antler lion from Isturitz, display extensive polish, indicating that they were frequently carried and handled.

Some objects suggest an even more sophisticated form of play. Perforated bone discs known as rondelles, found at sites such as Laugerie-Basse, Mas d’Azil and Raymonden, have been interpreted as early optical toys. When spun, these discs could create the illusion of movement, functioning in a way similar to a thaumatrope. Other activities may have included clay modelling. While the famous clay bison sculptures from Le Tuc d’Audoubert are large and complex works, it has been suggested that children practiced by moulding smaller clay animals, a behaviour observed among children in many recent hunter-gatherer societies.

Burials offer further insights into how children were valued in Paleolithic communities. The famous double child burial at Sunghir (from the earlier Gravettian period) contained thousands of ivory beads and numerous grave goods that would have required an enormous investment of time and labour. The richness of the burial suggests that these children held an ascribed status, meaning that their social standing may have been determined by birth rather than personal achievement.

Archaeological and ethnographic evidence also suggests that newborns occupied a liminal position within society. In many Paleolithic and traditional societies, infants were not immediately regarded as fully integrated members of the community. They were often kept in what has been described as an “external womb”—swaddled or attached to the mother—until they survived the most vulnerable early period of life. Only then would they undergo a form of “social birth”, marked by naming ceremonies or other communal rites.

The skeletal remains of Paleolithic children also reveal the fragility of early life. Many individuals show signs of stunted growth or enamel hypoplasia—defects in tooth enamel that indicate episodes of physiological stress. These conditions suggest that children frequently experienced nutritional shortages or illness, particularly during the dangerous transition of weaning.

Taken together, these traces allow archaeologists to reconstruct a picture of childhood that was both challenging and socially meaningful. Children learned through participation, experimented with tools and artistic practices, played with objects adapted to their scale, and took part in communal activities that included exploration of caves and symbolic expression. Far from being peripheral figures, they were deeply embedded in the rhythms of Paleolithic life.

Understanding childhood in the Paleolithic is important because it reminds us that there has never been a single, universal way of experiencing or understanding childhood. By studying how prehistoric societies cared for, taught and integrated their youngest members, archaeology helps us reflect on our own assumptions about learning, development and the role of children in society today. It also reveals that curiosity, experimentation and play have long been part of how humans learn about the world—an insight that remains highly relevant for education and for the ways we think about childhood in the present.

Reference: Langley, M.C., 2018. Magdalenian children: Projectile points, portable art and playthings. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 37(1), pp. 3–24.

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(06/03/2026)