Children as playful artists

Children’s agential behaviours in the archaeological record have often been overlooked. Despite efforts to centre children in the past through ‘an archaeology of childhood’, there remains a fundamental challenge of rigorously distinguishing children’s behaviours from those of adults. In Upper Palaeolithic art, this has been addressed through the analysis of anatomical measurements of traces produced by hands and figures, demonstrating that children were often engaging in artistic behaviours. However, the dependency on anatomical measurements limits the cases for Upper Palaeolithic children’s art. We here integrate developmental psychological research on children’s drawings into a framework within which children’s art in the Upper Palaeolithic record can be identified, without needing to rely on anatomical measurements. This work emphasises the intangible dimensions of narrative and play inherent within modern children’s art making behaviours as a starting point for understanding children as artists in the Upper Palaeolithic. Focusing on a case study of the Panel of the Masks from Las Monedas cave (Cantabria, Spain), this approach is demonstrated to have significant potential in both detecting children’s art and appreciating the playful nature of its making. We further propose ways that this approach can be employed to identify additional cases of children’s art in the Upper Palaeolithic record through specific methods that facilitate in-depth analysis of the properties of possible cases of children’s art.