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Each of us was once a child and it is impossible to imagine a society without children. Yet children have been notably absent from archaeological narratives, particularly in the Spanish borderlands where they generally appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools. The SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project seeks to expand our understanding of the rich and varied lives of children in the Spanish borderlands through archaeological examination on the Ranchos de Taos Plaza of northern New Mexico.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Ranchos de Taos Plaza is one of the oldest and most picturesque of the Colonial Hispanic villages of the northern Rio Grande. Built during the 1790s, the Saint Francis of Assisi Church is the focal point of the village. Every year thousands of tourists, artists, and worshipers flock to the village hoping to be temporarily transported to a time when horse-drawn carriages, the haunting Alabados (hymns) and Corridos (ballads) of Catholic worshipers, and the excited sounds of children’s play reverberated through the back lots and corners of these now crumbling adobes. But children are notably absent from the plaza today. The transformation of the village to a tourist attraction has led to high property values as families have been gradually forced to move to the outskirts of town.

Many in the village see this loss and the reduction of the plaza to a tourism town as part of a broader process of American imperial expansion. Despite the acknowledged benefits of a public education system, they feel that the introduction of a wage labor economy, the influx of American trade, and the imposition of the American educational ideals by the turn of the 19^th-century has led to major changes in child-rearing practices and widespread misconceptions about traditional religious values, most notably the flagellant practices of Los Hermanos Penitentes. The residents and priests who have helped to shape our research agree that we can not tell the story of the Penitente without first telling the story of their children. The archaeology of childhood on the plaza investigates a broadly held sentiment that the Anglo educational system has discriminated against Spanish-speaking children while eroding traditional religious and family values. Through excavation, we are documenting the nature and distribution of children’s artifacts as a measure of their incorporation into American consumer culture; one symptom of this larger issue. The childhood project reinforces traditional community values while enabling us to develop culturally relevant teaching aids for archaeology in the public schools.

Children are well-represented in the archaeological record of the plaza, and this underscores the general belief that the archaeology of childhood is key to understanding the history of the village, the impacts of American consumerism, and the transition from Catholic to public education with its unintended effects.Over the past two field seasons, we have recovered hundreds items pertaining to their lives from the mid-1800s to the present. These include miniaturized stone grinding tools (for grinding wheat or corn); hand made clay toys; depression era tea sets, doll parts, jacks and marbles, clothing parts, mechanical train parts, and child care implements; and modern plastic Leggos, Barbie doll parts, action figures, and plastic and metal pendants, beads, and jewelry of all kinds (some pictured here). Mixed with these assemblages are pencil fragments, pencil lead, chalk, and crayons.

These artifacts reveal different aspects of children’s lives including work, play, and education. To date, most items have been recovered from household excavation units where the owners and other elders have been available to provide interpretations, recollections, and stories related to their childhood on the plaza. In 2009 we will expand our excavations to include the historic Catholic school, now closed, that is adjacent to the plaza and we will document historic trash dumps in the Parish where we have found child-related artifacts associated with houses.