Children and childhoods have been a neglected topic within historical archaeology, often with a limited or only passing reference to children when a toy is uncovered at a site. However, since the 2000s, the study has started to gain favour in the field as archaeologist’s transition away from simply noting the presence of children into more in-depth discussions of children as social agents. Negotiating the archaeology of children and childhood in America is difficult given the spectrum of definitions, ideologies and social constructs; for example, how does the author define children or childhood? What are the temporal and spatial ranges of the study? And how is the intersectionality of identities such as class, ethnicity, gender, and race addressed by the author? On one hand, the threat is that the author can be overly ambitious and attempt to cover every subtopic, every time period, and every culture, thus presenting the audience with a disjointed bricolage of writing that only touches upon important issues without providing a thorough analysis. On the other hand, the author runs the risk of neglecting the diversity of the past and thus can create a work that homogenizes the study of children and childhood. The key for the scholar is to discuss the heterogeneity and intersectionality of the past while also narrowing the scope of the work into a concise narrative. For the most part, Jane Eva Baxter is able to accomplish this difficult task in her book, The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence. This book is very much a sequel to Baxter’s 2005 book, The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture, in which she discussed similar topics but without the explicit purview of ‘American Childhood’. While restricting the range of childhood and adolescence to one nation helps to narrow the focus of the book, it also brings up a question: is there a monolithic identity of being American? Baxter attempts to answer this question by stating that,

中文翻译：

---

美国童年和青春期的考古学

在历史考古学中，儿童和童年一直是一个被忽视的话题，当玩具在现场被发现时，通常对儿童的提及有限或只是一闪而过。然而，自 2000 年代以来，随着考古学家从简单地注意到儿童的存在转变为更深入地讨论儿童作为社会代理人，这项研究开始在该领域获得青睐。考虑到定义、意识形态和社会结构的范围，在美国就儿童和童年的考古学进行谈判是很困难的；例如，作者如何定义儿童或童年？研究的时间和空间范围是什么？作者如何处理诸如阶级、种族、性别和种族等身份的交叉性？一方面，威胁在于，作者可能过于雄心勃勃，试图涵盖每一个子主题、每一个时间段和每一种文化，从而向观众呈现出一种杂乱无章的写作，只涉及重要问题，而没有提供彻底的分析。另一方面，作者冒着忽视过去多样性的风险，因此可以创作一部将儿童和童年的研究同质化的作品。学者的关键是讨论过去的异质性和交叉性，同时将工作范围缩小为简洁的叙述。在大多数情况下，Jane Eva Baxter 能够在她的《美国童年和青春期考古学》一书中完成这项艰巨的任务。这本书是巴克斯特 2005 年著作《童年考古学：儿童、性别、和物质文化，她在其中讨论了类似的话题，但没有明确规定“美国童年”的范围。虽然将童年和青春期的范围限制在一个国家有助于缩小本书的重点，但它也提出了一个问题：美国人是否存在单一的身份认同？巴克斯特试图通过声明来回答这个问题，