Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past (30 January 2016 – 29 January 2017)
ARCHIVED EXHIBITION
Li Ka Shing Gallery
A medieval funerary monument of a lady with her four
sons and eight daughters from Aldenham, Hertfordshire.
MAA Z 22616. Photography by Dave Webb.
Find glimpses of children lives in East Anglia and across England from 1 million years ago to the 20th century, on display in the Li Ka Shing Gallery until January 2017.
Children outnumbered adults for most of human history, yet they rarely appear in the stories that museums tell. This exhibition, the first on the topic, aims to redress the balance.
Some objects on display will be familiar: a doll, a sledge, a baby’s feeding bottle. Other artefacts won’t look like children’s objects: pots with small fingerprints, a tiny handaxe made 400,000 years ago, goldwork as fine as a human hair. By looking carefully at all of this evidence, we will discover children’s lives and the part they played in society.
The exhibition is funded by a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is a joint project between Cambridgeshire County Council and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Visit the exhibition’s website for more information.