Toddlers’ Outdoor Play, Imagination and Cultural Formation

Discussion on toddlers’ outdoor play practices in various cultural spaces is rare in literature. In Australia, toddlers’ physical development and well-being is promoted but less attention is given to cultural nuances of outdoor play. We ask the question: How does outdoor play impact on toddlers’ imagination and cultural formation? Conducted in three Australian long day care (LDC) sites, an ethically approved project “Studying babies and toddlers: Cultural worlds and transitory relationships” examines the process of three Australian toddlers’ outdoor enculturation. The concepts of imagination and play from Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory are drawn upon in relation to Hedegaard’s institutional practices model, to link contextual relations between society, community and family. Cultural formation processes in toddlers’ outdoor play, we argue, are more completely understood when daily life across home and local community is acknowledged. Data findings illustrate complexity of movement and experimentations in cultural conditions, where different spaces hold possibilities for imaginative transformations in toddler’s play. Implications suggest toddlers’ imaginative and culturally responsive outdoor play aligns with availability of interested adult/peers, shared family and community values, and varied local spaces. In this way, affective and dynamic outdoor interactions imbue cultural formation of toddler’s play and imagination with local personal meaning.

From the ground up. Depositional history, memory and materiality

Archaeologists often take stratigraphy for granted, using it for building chronologies, recognizing various natural and cultural formation processes, and understanding relations between features and settlements. But for the last few decades there has been a subtle shift in the way that we approach stratigraphy – in terms of both the kinds of techniques that can be applied (residue analyses, micromorphology, Harris matrices and so on) and the interpretive frameworks that can be employed. Perhaps it is not stratigraphy that we are talking about per se, but rather depositional practices – the many ways in which people make and alter archaeological deposits – in addition to the different interpretive frameworks that we apply to these physical accumulations.

Restless corpses: ‘secondary burial’ in the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties

The historically documented burial samples of the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties allow a detailed analysis of the circumstances that led to dismemberment, evisceration, disturbance, exhumation and reburial over a millennium. The results may provide deeper and more broadly applicable insights into relevant cultural formation processes of élite burials.