Biocultural Perspectives of Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence in the Past: Challenges, Complexities, and Interdisciplinarity

This article offers an introduction to this special issue which focusses on emerging biocultural insights into non-adult lives. The five papers included in this issue are deliberately temporally, geographically and topically diverse to showcase the range of bioarchaeological investigations, perspectives and frameworks that are currently being developed and explored within this area of research. Yet, despite this diversity, the studies presented are unified by their focus on the experiences of non-adults in the past, and the emerging ways in which new methods, perspectives, and investigations can reveal ever more about these, often ephemeral, lives. This introductory paper contextualizes these works within the field of bioarchaeology more broadly, highlighting the significance, importance and value of continuing to explore biological, social and cultural aspects of young individuals to gain an ever-increasing understanding into infanthood and childhood in the past.