The Rise of the Child Consumer and Interpretations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century U.S. Domestic Sites

The widespread availability of mass-produced material culture marketed for use by children in the nineteenth century has enabled archaeologists to use these objects as pathways to studying the lives of children in the past. Many of the basic categories of toys available in the marketplace remained consistent over a relatively long period during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While types of toys have some consistency, historians of children’s material culture have shown a significant shift in marketing around the turn-of-the century that targeted children rather than adults to create childhood desires and identities around toys and other types of objects. By focusing on changing patterns of household consumption connected to advertising as well as on production as seen through types of objects encountered archaeologically, a more nuanced picture of children, and children in the context of families, becomes possible in archaeological interpretations.