The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on children in the past. Yet there have been few studies of hunter-gatherer children and very few focussed on pre-contact Aboriginal children.

Children, however, have become one focus in our work of re-analysing Roonka, a mid to late Holocene burial ground in South Australia. I will focus in this seminar on the child burials and what they might reflect about past children and childhoods.

Judith Littleton is Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Auckland. She has worked on bioarchaeology research projects in the Middle East, Australia, Mongolia and New Zealand as well as in the area of medical anthropology (TB in contemporary New Zealand and the Pacific).