Gwendolyn Ruth Jones

GWENDOLYN JONES, then a graduate student at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Work Hard, Play Harder: The Archaeology of Childhood in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Fields,” supervised by Dr. Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria. We were all children once, yet children are rarely discussed in archaeology, and even more scarcely the focus of archaeological research. Coal-mining communities are fruitful sites for research on American capitalism, labor organizing, poverty, immigration, the second industrial revolution, and more. These company “patch” towns were an American approach to feudalism, where the land, housing, and store were all owned by a coal company in order to keep mining families in a system of debt bondage. Despite this, children’s roles in these important matters are often ignored, and there is no archaeological research published on the experience of growing up in these patch towns. In this project, material evidence of children in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region is analyzed to better understand these children’s daily lives. Historical records and oral history interviews contextualize the children’s toys, school supplies, and household objects collected over decades of excavations in Eckley. Most research on childhood centers the middle class, but this project highlights the unique experiences of working-class children at home, at school, at work, and at play.