About the Exhibition

Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past is a collaborative project between the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Cambridgeshire County Council, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Children outnumbered adults for most of human history, yet they rarely appear in the stories that museums tell. A past without children is incomplete. This exhibition 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 find out about children’s lives.

We invite you to look closely to seek glimpses of children's lives in East Anglia and across England from 1 million years ago to the 20th century.

To read more about the process of putting together the exhibition please see our blog.