Care, Socialization and Play in Ancient Attica scrutinizes in how infants and young children were nursed, cared for and socialized in the oikos (family unit). In what ways were mothers and fathers emotionally engaged in their offspring or were they merely indifferent? What were the developmental consequenses of growing up in multiple relationships? How were young children engaged in various types of play in everyday life and what toys were made for and handled by infants and young children? The developmental significance of toys and play is highlighted, as well as their cultural and sacral functions in ancient Athenian society. This book reconstructs the social and behavioural world of infants and young children in ancient Greece based on a rich collection of archaeological finds from the classical period. It presents a selection of never-before-seen child artifacts which uncover groundbreaking evidence supporting new ideas on child development.--Publisher description.

Research on children and childhood in ancient Greece is a field in its infancy. This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach called Developmental Childhood Archaeology. In essence it is an archaeological study based on a collection of material relation to childhood in ancient Attica, dating back to 480-300 B.C. That is, various types of toys, iconographic evidence of children on vases and graves steles, primary written sources on children's lives, and the view on children in the Greek Classical period.

Explores the connections between art and play in ancient Greek thought, especially that of Plato and Aristotle.

In a time of acute crisis when our societies face a complex series of challenges (race, gender, inclusivity, changing pedagogical needs and a global pandemic) we urgently need to re-access the nature of our engagement with the Classical World. This edited collection argues that we need to discover new ways to draw on our discipline and the material it studies to engage in meaningful ways with these new academic and societal challenges. The chapters included in the collection interrogate the very processes of reception and continue the work of destabilising the concept of a pure source text or point of origin. Our aim is to break through the boundaries that still divide our ancient texts and material culture from their reception, and interpretive communities. Our contributors engage with these questions theoretically and/or through the close examination of cultural artefacts. They problematise the concept of a Western, elitist canon and actively push the geographical boundaries of reception as both a local and a global phenomenon. Individually and cumulatively, they actively engage with the question of how to marshal the classical past in our efforts to respond to the challenges of our mutable contemporary world.

This collection employs a multi-disciplinary approach treating ancient childhood in a holistic manner according to diachronic, regional and thematic perspectives. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses classical studies, Egyptology, ancient history and the broad spectrum of archaeology, including iconography and bioarchaeology. With a chronological range of the Bronze Age to Byzantium and regional coverage of Egypt, Greece, and Italy this is the largest survey of childhood yet undertaken for the ancient world. Within this chronological and regional framework both the social construction of childhood and the child’s life experience are explored through the key topics of the definition of childhood, daily life, religion and ritual, death, and the information provided by bioarchaeology. No other volume to date provides such a comprehensive, systematic and cross-cultural study of childhood in the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, its focus on the identification of society-specific definitions of childhood and the incorporation of the bioarchaeological perspective makes this work a unique and innovative study. Children in Antiquity provides an invaluable and unrivalled resource for anyone working on all aspects of the lives and deaths of children in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Painted vases are the richest and most complex images that remain from ancient Greece. Over the past decades, a great deal has been written on ancient art that portrays myths and rituals. Less has been written on scenes of daily life, and what has been written has been tucked away in hard-to-find books and journals. A Guide to Scenes of Daily Life on Athenian Vases synthesizes this material and expands it: it is the first comprehensive volume to present visual representations of everything from pets and children's games to drunken revelry and funerary rituals. John H. Oakley's clear, accessible writing provides sound information with just the right amount of detail. Specialists of Greek art will welcome this book for its text and illustrations. This guide is an essential and much-needed reference for scholars and an ideal sourcebook for classics and art history.

"An examination of the combined subjects of ancient Greek art and religion, dealing with festivals, performance, rites of passage, and the archaeology of death, to name a few examples, to explore the visual, material, and textual dimensions of ancient Greek religion"--