ONE OF THE first archaeologists explicitly to focus on gender in archaeology, Liv Helga Dommasnes, writes, “I would like to suggest that we treat gender as a means to bridge the gap between theory and empirical studies in modern archaeology. The great advantage of gender as an analytical tool is that it operates at all levels in society, from the structuring of daily life to cosmologies” (1992:12). This chapter outlines major historical developments in archaeological study of gender arrangements in the past and in the practice of archaeology, and reviews current research that focuses on sex, gender, or both. First, an example from the southwestern United States illustrates the pervasiveness of gender in human life, and how thinking with gender can bridge many kinds of archaeological data to build more complete understandings of human history.
For more than 2,000 years, Puebloan families of the El Morro valley of western New Mexico built houses and villages, farmed and hunted, and developed an elaborate ritual system. A century of intensive archaeological study here has focused on chronology, settlement pattern, ecology, social and political organization, and craft specialization. What does considering gender add to the already detailed archaeological understanding?
James Potter argues that late-thirteenth-century changes in El Morro valley settlement pattern, architecture, and faunal assemblages result from a primarily conceptual change in which “the architectural equivalent of the community, the village, became a solid metaphor for the female-male dichotomy.” Out of an earlier, more varied pattern, pronounced dualisms emerge around A.D. 1275 in architecture, use of landscape, and faunal resources. Villages built in this period consist of contiguous masonry room blocks centered on an open plaza. Some settlements, however, are circular and some rectangular, and evidence shows they were planned this way from their founding. Neither defense, labor pooling, ritual integration, information exchange, nor migration can account for this pattern. Distribution of wild bird bones, especially from species that play key roles in Puebloan ritual today, instead suggest that conceptual, symbolic structures play a role. Raptors, including hawks, eagles, and falcons, dominate the avian faunal assemblages from rectilinear sites such as Atsinna and Pueblo del los Muertos. Waterfowl such as ducks, geese, and cranes dominate assemblages from circular sites, such as Cienega and Mirabal. None of the avian bones exhibit burning or cut marks; they were probably not food remains. Rectilinear sites are located on high, defensible mesa tops. Circular sites are located on valley floors near the most fertile farmland. Guided by Zuni and other Pueblo ethnographies, Potter suggests that raptors are symbolically linked with warfare and hunting, two explicitly and emphatically masculine activities in Pueblo societies, while migratory waterfowl are associated with cyclical processes such as fertility and seasonality. In Zuni oral traditions, ducks are invariably referred to as females (Potter 1997, 2002).
Given that most societies recognize two or more genders and that gender usually provides a rich subject domain for metaphor, why should El Morroans intensify material enactment of gendered dualities in architecture, community organization, and ritual practice at this particular time? Throughout the Puebloan world, the late thirteenth century was a time of environmental stress, large-scale migration, and population aggregation. Evidence for craft production, food preparation, and burial ritual suggests that male and female economic and ritual responsibilities became increasingly segregated, formalized, and complementary as corn grinding moved from small enclosed rooms to communal grinding rooms and open work areas such as rooftops and plazas. Ethnographies attest that corn grinding was a female task, also seen in distinctive occupational stress markers on female skeletons. Evidence for weaving, a masculine activity in the Pueblos, appears in communal ceremonial rooms called kivas (Crown 2000). Formal segregation of male and female ritual responsibilities—still practiced ethnographically—were then enacted physically as well as conceptually: women fed the gods while men clothed them. Ritual space became dichotomized by gender, between the outside/public/plaza/feminine aspect and the inside/private/kiva/masculine aspect (Potter 2002).
Gender, in this study, does not inhere only in human bodies and grave offerings, although sexed skeletons and their accompanying tools, adornments, and other personal items play important roles. Architecture, tools, and even faunal and floral remains may have been gendered to those who manipulated them in the past, resulting in patterns we can recognize today.
The concept of gender comes from a grammatical term, referring to the categorization of nouns in many Indo-European languages as masculine, feminine, and neuter. Feminist social scientists borrowed the term “as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” and a way to highlight the “fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex” (Scott 1986:1053). Gender refers to relationships between concepts of male and female, masculine and feminine, men and women; it leaves open the possibility of there being more than two categories and even a spectrum. Anthropologists sometimes define gender as “the social values inscribed on sex,” and view sex as pertaining to the body. Most cultures recognize differential distribution of penises, vaginas, uteruses, lactation, semen, menstruation, pregnancy, upper body strength, and the ability to sexually penetrate or be penetrated. The significance of that patterning varies among cultures, however, and also among theoretical positions.
Gender is a universal structuring process, but there are no gender universals. Gender’s content, expressions, and functions vary among cultures and may change slowly or rapidly. Gender may organize labor, organize sexuality, facilitate finding appropriate sex partners, facilitate enculturation of offspring, generate and regulate ranges of variation at any level of social integration. Gender categories are continually produced and reproduced through discourse and action in which women and men, and others outside or between these two categories, control resources, production, and reproduction. The relationships of gender to other social structuring principles—seniority, class, ethnicity, labor specialization, organization of reproduction—are also mutable and negotiable. Gender studies should be about relations and processes, not fixed categories.
Not everyone in a society is gendered in the same way or to the same extent. Gender is relational—one is always gendered for someone (Dommasnes 1996:8). Slaves and war captives, placed outside society, may not be gendered to their masters. Children may be outside gender until society genders them (Joyce 2000a). Therefore, although most societies have two categories that translate reasonably well as masculine and feminine, many have additional categories; beyond assigning most sexed bodies and reproductive roles to such categories, not much can be taken for granted. We therefore cannot make assumptions about gender arrangements in past societies, but must investigate gender and think with gender when investigating all kinds of archaeological questions and all kinds of archaeological data.
Sociocultural anthropologists can see gender in action in living societies; archaeologists will find little of use in the concept of gender unless we can link the concept to the material remains it is supposed to elucidate (Dommasnes 1996; Sørensen 2000). Methods must include all the usual archaeological techniques for meticulous and systematic recording and analysis of many kinds of evidence; cautious use of analogy, ethnography, and historical records; and constant attention to assumptions, prior expectations, and theoretical frameworks.
Traditional approaches begin with sexed skeletons, analyzing burial assemblages for consistent associations, then looking for similar items in nonburial contexts, as in Liv Gibbs’s (1987) study of changes in gender arrangements between the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Denmark. Sexed skeletons can be examined for occupational stress markers, such as patterns of arthritis and muscle attachments, infection or nutritional stress, and dietary changes (Bridges 1989; Cohen and Bennett 1993; Hollimon 1992). Some begin with ethnographic or historical cases, identifying tools and facilities associated with activities usually performed by men or women, then looking for archaeological traces of these activities, in order to study gendered divisions of labor (Costin 1997) and gender prestige and hierarchy (Sweely 1999; Crown 2000).
Janet Spector’s pioneering framework of task differentiation worked backward from accounts of the kinds of work that men and women did in the ethnographic present to make inferences about past divisions of labor (Spector 1983). This approach has many strengths; it considers all aspects of an activity, not just ones that are highly visible or highly valued in the researcher’s own culture. Who butchers and cooks bison meat and who processes bison hides might be just as important to the success of the social group as who kills the bison. Cooperative activities undertaken by family groups are given as much attention as individual activities and control of end products. Spector now questions her initial assumptions about binary sex/gender systems and the reliability of historical records, but many archaeologists in the United States continue to study gender and labor with this framework.
Many archaeologists see these approaches as relying too heavily on sex and gender categories that arise primarily from unexamined Western ways of thinking. Focusing on gender ideology, gender systems, and gender roles in their own cultural contexts generally works better for archaeologists (Dommasnes 1996). Material culture does not passively reflect society, but can be manipulated in actively changing gender constructs. Archaeologists, therefore, must engage with the concepts of reflexivity and materiality (see Taylor, chapter 18; Sørensen 2000). John Barrett (1988:14) argues, “The archaeological study of gender does not depend upon a methodological breakthrough rendering specific gender activities visible in the ‘archaeological record.’ It must be founded instead upon the critical realization that gender relations and conflicts are historical forces. From this position, we can recognize that gender discourse is always structured by control over certain human and material resources.” Methods for accomplishing this must include multiple lines of evidence, critically examining assumptions, recognizing individual variation and volition as opposed to relying on normative concepts, and willingness to employ modes of inference beyond hypothesis testing, such as hermeneutics,1 relational analogies, and cautious use of the direct historical approach.2 The history of gender studies in archaeology demonstrates a variety of approaches, and no single orientation prevails today.
Although gender archaeology is often said to have emerged in the 1980s to address the invisibility of women in archaeological interpretations of the past and the undervaluing of women’s labor in archaeological practice, archaeological interpretations always have been gendered, albeit implicitly and largely from an androcentric point of view, and women have always done archaeology.
Even in the nineteenth century, physical anthropologists assigned sex to human skeletons, and archaeologists attributed certain kinds of tools, ornaments, and structures to the activities of women and of men. Social meanings of sex in the past could not be directly observed, so inferences about the lives of men and women, if considered at all, stemmed from projection of present-day values into the past. Accounts of human action have been, until recently, predominantly accounts of male action, not because male behavior is more visible materially but because “we work with theories of action and change that privilege male behaviour” (Roberts 1993:16).
Women archaeologists have worked in the field, museums, laboratories, and classrooms alongside men and on their own for more than a century (Claassen 1994; Díaz-Andreu and Sørensen 1998; Levine 1999). Acceptance of prevailing gender norms as “natural” affected women’s careers in archaeology, constraining most to the archaeological housework of museums, laboratories, and narrow analytical specializations (Gero 1985:344), and limiting their opportunities for the higher-valued activities of fieldwork, teaching, and theoretical synthesis. Despite overt discrimination, many women conducted fieldwork in most parts of the world. Harriet Boyd, for example, began excavations at the Early Minoan village of Gournia, Crete, in 1901. A supporter of women’s suffrage, she argued that proper study of history would prove women’s lives had not always been “tame and without influence” (Zarmati 1995). Most women archaeologists prior to the 1980s, however, disavowed agendas and allegiances we would now term feminist (Hays-Gilpin 2000; Reyman 1992).
The response of the social and biological sciences to feminist critiques of the late 1960s and 1970s ultimately had important repercussions in archaeology, but not at first, in North America. The New Archaeologists of the 1960s and 1970s omitted gender from their program of investigating culture processes. Why? “It seems,” Alison Wylie suggests, “that the new generation of archaeologists shared with their predecessors a number of (largely implicit) presuppositions; despite other differences, they all tended to treat gender as a stable, unchanging (biological) given in the sociocultural environment. If the social roles that biological males and females occupy can be assumed to be the same across time and cultural context—to be ‘naturally’ theirs—gender is not a variable that can be relevant in explaining culture change” (Wylie 1997b:93).
Scandinavian archaeologists began to question the invisibility of women in archaeological interpretations when, in 1974, Gro Mandt taught a University of Bergen course on prehistoric women. Graves and grave goods became the “first target,” and Liv Helga Dommasnes’s (1976) doctoral thesis emerged from this effort. In 1979, a group of archaeologists gathered in Norway to examine sex roles in prehistoric society and address the question, Were they all men? (Bertelsen et al. 1987; Dommasnes 1992; Naess 1996), which really meant, Where are all the women? They presented empirical evidence for women’s labor, graves, and symbolism in rock art and figurines, and discussed theory and methods. Dommasnes argues that this was an important phase in the development of an archaeology of gender because “results arrived at through the accepted procedures could, after all, not easily be dismissed as biased and of no value,” although they were criticized for having a value-laden, political motivation. “The illusion of scientific validity was useful” at the time, and “without explicitly encouraging them, processual archaeology played an important role in paving the way for feminist and other approaches that in time came to challenge its very basis” (Dommasnes 1992:4–6).
Gender archaeology as a collective effort to study women and gender arrangements in the past gained considerable momentum in 1985, when Scandinavian archaeologists founded the journal KAN (Kvinner i Arkeologi i Norge, now in English as Women in Archaeology in Norway). Emma Lou Davis published an explicitly feminist approach to studying the Paleoindian occupation of southern California in 1978. Discussion groups focused on gender convened during Theoretical Archaeology Group meetings in Britain from 1981 onward. Gender studies in North American historical archaeology began to cohere at about this time (Spencer-Wood 1996; Siefert 1991). In Classical archaeology, the Women in Antiquity enterprise began in 1975 with Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, which inserted women into the picture but left the “normal” field of study as male (Brown 1997).
In the United States the first widely cited call for archaeological study of gender based in feminist theory appeared in Archaeological Method and Theory in 1984. In calling for more than just finding women, Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector (1984:2) argued that archaeology should not only “formulate an explicit theory of human social action,” following Hodder’s (1982a,b) post-processual formulation of this notion, “but also, as part of this, an explicit framework for the archaeological study of gender.” Conkey and Spector began with a critique of androcentric language and reconstructions of past lifeways, discussed the influence of feminist theory in cultural anthropology, and provided examples of how archaeologists might go about a more objective and inclusive study of gender arrangements. Because “the organization of gender behavior relates to and is intimately a part of most other aspects of past cultural systems in which archaeologists have always been interested,” they predicted that “archaeologists will have to understand gender dynamics at some level” in order to address just about any research objective. Several years later, frustrated with the underwhelming response to this article, Conkey and Joan Gero challenged a group of colleagues to try thinking about their data with gender in mind; the conference, and the edited volume it created, is often cited as the foundation for the emergence of gender archaeology (Gero and Conkey 1991). Conferences devoted to gender and archaeology convened in the United States (Claassen 1992; Claassen and Joyce 1997; Rautman 2000; Sweely 1999), Canada (Walde and Willows 1991; for commentary, see Hanen and Kelley 1992; Wylie 1997b), England (Donald, and Hurcombe 2000a,b), and Australia (Du Cros and Smith 1993; Balme and Beck 1995) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bacus et al. (1993) provided an extensive annotated bibliography of early publications. Outside Anglophone and Scandinavian nations, different languages and histories have produced interesting variations in emerging archaeologies of gender and women (Díaz-Andreu and Sørensen 1998 and Koloski-Ostrow and Lyons 1997 on Europe; Díaz-Andreu and Gallego 1994 on Spain; Coudart 1998 on France; Kookinidou and Nikolaidou 2000 on Greece; Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon 2002, worldwide).
One strategy to move beyond finding the women in the archaeological record links the practice of archaeology with archaeological interpretation through exploration of equity issues and history of women in archaeology (Nelson et al. 1994). Linda Hurcombe notes that “the study of gender in ancient societies seems inseparable from the place of gender in our own society” (1995:87). Many of Hurcombe’s women students wanted to discover evidence that women in the past were hunters, a desire stemming from the high value Europeans place on hunting as an elite leisure activity, and the assumption that hunting was the most highly valued activity in the past as well. This bias is not limited to naive students. Most studies of the earliest occupation of North America characterize the Paleoindians as big-game hunters, to the near exclusion of any other topic. Before radiocarbon dating, the only way to refute the dominant position that the human presence in North America was relatively recent was to excavate sites with stone tools associated with extinct Pleistocene fauna. Characterizing Paleoindians as big-game hunters from the start is understandable, then, but the perpetuation of this narrow interpretation of ancient lifeways is more complicated and has a lot to do with gender. Reviewing the Paleoindian literature, Joan Gero quantified what North Americanists have known for decades—that “women are almost invisible in ‘Early Man’ research, both as subjects and as objects of research” (Gero 1993:33). Men do virtually all of the fieldwork, edit most volumes and journals, study large mammal bones, and replicate and study fluted projectile points. Women tend to study flake tools, nutting stones, and small faunal remains; they present fewer conference papers and edit fewer publications: “The material symbols of Early Man, the fluted points and the big-bone recoveries, are socially made, socially maintained, and socially reproduced” (Gero 1993:37).
Conkey (1993) argues that it was necessary to degender the past before we could engender it: a first step was to deal with pervasive androcentrism. While many archaeologists continue to pursue an archaeology of gender as an enterprise that aims to find gender, archaeological theoreticians such as Conkey, Spector, Gero, Gilchrist, and philosopher Alison Wylie challenge disciplinary paradigms to produce instead a gendered archaeology that interrogates archaeological inquiry (Roberts 1993; Conkey and Gero 1997:428–429). These approaches are interwoven, not either/or alternatives. Conkey and Gero argue that feminist archaeology should be dangerous and transformative, questioning fixed disciplinary arrangements, including the basis of knowledge itself. Conscious incorporation of feminist scholarship in archaeology focuses more on developing different perspectives than specifically on women. What does the great sweep of human history look like from the perspectives of the many different people in it, and not just from the point of view of white, heterosexual men (Brown 1997:13)? Like critical theory, this approach engages with influences of a scholar’s own cultural heritage, values, and goals.
Most of the approaches outlined in this historical overview are still current; gender archaeology has a short history. As we move from an archaeology of gender, looking for women and evidence for gender differences in the archaeological record, to a gendered archaeology, which deploys gender in new ways of doing archaeology, archaeologists increasingly recognize that this enterprise has a political baseline; gender and sex can no longer be treated as simple natural facts (Conkey 1993:4).
Regional Studies
Syntheses of women’s history in particular regions of the world include Margaret Ehrenberg’s (1989) interpretation of women in prehistory in Europe and Sarah Pomeroy’s (1991, 1995) texts on women in the Classical world. More recent and more explicitly critical studies address Africa (Kent 1998; Wadley 1997), Europe (Moore and Scott 1997), the Mediterranean (Koloski-Ostrow 1997), and the Americas (Bruhns and Stothert 1999), including Mesoamerica (Joyce 2000a), the southwestern United States (Crown 2000), and the Pacific Northwest (Bernick 1999). These regional studies connect long-term history to ethnography, demonstrating with multiple lines of evidence that gender arrangements vary and change. Some focus on women because women have been left out of earlier accounts. Others look for gender arrangements among men and women to advance understanding of topics such as prestige systems, organization of labor, craft specialization, religion, and ideology.
Ecofeminism and the Goddess
Most feminists in the 1970s and 1980s accepted biological differences but minimized their effects on behavior and personality differences, which they viewed as culturally and historically constructed. Eco-feminists, in contrast, take the association of vaginas, uteruses, menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation as constituting a universal, unchanging feminine essence with distinctive behaviors and personality traits of nurturing, pacifism, and cooperation, in contrast to masculine propensities to violence and competition. Ecofeminists interested in archaeology have promoted the notion of a more or less universal Mother Goddess, whose peaceful worshipers were defeated in Europe and the Near East by marauding patriarchal Indo-European horse nomads in the Bronze Age. With that fall, European society took a turn for the worse, which has persisted into modern times.
Based in the work of Marija Gimbutas (1991) and James Mellaart (1967; Barstow 1978), this theory has been expanded and popularized by many nonarchaeologists (Eisler 1987). Most archaeologists who have examined both the evidence and ecofeminist interpretation are critical of it (Conkey and Tringham 1995; Hays-Gilpin 2000:98–99; Meskell 1995, 1998a,b; Tringham and Conkey 1998). Archaeologists point out that goddess proponents gloss figurines from many times and places as the “same thing,” regardless of their context. Relatively few figurines actually have exaggerated female sexual characteristics, such as large breasts and buttocks; the vast majority of Paleolithic images display no sexual attributes. Although weapons provide a key, even dominant element in the material culture of Bronze Age Europe, and the mounted warrior is a dominant force in early European history, it is also the case that warfare is unambiguously recorded in the material evidence from Neolithic Europe—before the patriarchal nomads arrived.
Beyond “Man the Hunter”
The “man the hunter” (Lee and DeVore 1968) scenario for human evolution was countered by a “woman the gatherer” model as early as the 1970s (Linton 1971; Tanner and Zihlman 1976; see Jordan, chapter 26). Zihlman explains how this work simply “drew on the broad spectrum of data emerging from multiple areas of research that did not support the hunting hypothesis. Incorporating this information, we proposed reasons why women during human evolution must have been active participants in subsistence and several dimensions of social life, in addition to their centrality in reproduction” (1997:98). Barbara Bender (1979) calls most foraging societies gatherer-hunters to reflect the actual subsistence balance; except in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, the bulk of the diet usually comes from the gathering rather than the hunting. Recent research shows that evidence from paleoanthropology, primatology, archaeology, and comparative ethnography, as well as paleoenvironmental data, coincide to suggest that hunting emerged relatively late in human prehistory, perhaps half a million years ago, perhaps more recently, while monogamy, well-defined gender roles (as distinct from sex roles), and systematic gender inequalities are much more recent developments, and most important, cannot be attributed to genetic patterns, as sociobiologists have claimed (Roosevelt 2002).
The man the hunter interpretation of Stone Age life relied on androcentric ethnographic accounts focusing on big-game hunting by males to imply all hunting was always highly gender segregated. The fascination with the lone hunter is a bias of Western sport hunting, which isolates hunter from family and society, and separates the act of killing from complex systems of travel, preparation, logistics, butchering, processing, and distribution. Recent considerations of archaeological approaches to hunting technology and organizational strategies attend to subtle aspects of our analytical frameworks that, for example, privilege bow-and-arrow and spear hunting over trapping, snaring, and cooperative game drives, and value large game over small. Gatherer-hunter ethnographies shows that women take part in many activities associated with meat procurement—butchering, processing, trapping, snaring, driving, and sometimes even using weapons to spear or shoot large game (Wadley 1998). In the Arctic, Inupiat people classify women as hunters because they ritually attract the game that men kill (Bodenhorn 1990:61). Men often reserve the right to handle weapons, but not always.
Applying these insights to archaeological evidence in southern Africa, Wadley (1998) infers a change from spear hunting of seasonally available large game animals to snaring and trapping small browsers around 10,000 B.P. This shift would have reduced seasonal variation in the availability of meat while preserving the overall quantity of meat available. Floral and faunal evidence suggest increased sedentism and the scheduling of mobility around plant food seasonality. If men controlled the earlier spear hunting pattern, women may have gained more control over band mobility at this time.
Likewise, using ethnoarchaeological methods of observation and interviewing with Dene hunters of sub-Arctic Canada, Brumbach and Jarvenpa (1997) highlight task settings, spatial organization, and manipulation of material culture. Contrary to the man the hunter/woman the gatherer model, they conclude that “women’s roles are more flexible and expansive, even in hunting-intensive contexts” (1997:415). By talking with Chipewyan people about maps, artifacts, and life stories, they found that organization of labor and use space among these hunter-gatherers was affected by gender, but in ways determined more by sociopolitical factors than inherent or biopsychological universals. They apply results to general models of spatial organization, assess the utility of Binford’s (1980) forager/collector framework (described by Jordan, chapter 26), and otherwise generate not only data but theory.
Interrogating the Rise of Gender Asymmetries
As early as Engels (1942), the cultural evolutionary scenario bestowed egalitarian gender relations on hunter-gatherers and pinned the appearance of patriarchy on the rise of states. Others implicated the early emergence of a constrained domestic sphere for women that contrasted with men’s public sphere. Although women exercise power in the household, the argument went, they ultimately lose power through separation from, then domination by, the more encompassing domains of men.
One cannot assume universal limitations created by women’s reproductive role because local variations and solutions devised everywhere include pooling labor, sharing child care (even nursing), controlling birth spacing and number of offspring, and expanding women’s roles after their childbearing years. Careful attention to ethnography, historical records, and archaeological evidence allows us to replace assumptions with specific and diverse case studies. Most studies of the rise of states focus on territorially organized states. But when state leadership is strongly linked to kin group, women sometimes serve as rulers, wield economic power, and take key roles in ritual. In the Bone Ranks of the Korean kingdom of Silla, for example, women were equal to men within each rank (Nelson 1997). Similarly, kinship outweighed gender in Native American chiefdoms in Florida (Trocolli 1999), and parallel descent systems among the Inka elite facilitated leadership roles for women until the Spanish conquest of Peru, when women lost rank and power, in part due to Spanish interpretation of female leadership as witchcraft (Silverblatt 1987).
Cultural anthropologists have clearly demonstrated that many nonstate societies structure gender arrangements around equal and interpenetrating complementary gender categories. Archaeology, likewise, needs to view gender systems as structuring difference in more than one way, not necessarily with pervasive inequality. In addition, the sex/gender system in any given culture is not necessarily the single most significant determinant of status or power. “One community may think about all its members on the basis of their contribution to production, while another may evaluate women through notions of reproduction but divide men according to their political power” (Sørensen 2000:141).
We should ask who is unequal in what contexts—political, economic, ideological, in terms of ritual roles, in the family, and among professions or ethnic groups. The concept of heterarchy has proved particularly useful for thinking about societies with more than one source of power and more than one way of ranking of individuals and families. Evidence from hoards and burials leads Janet Levy (1999) to conclude that both men and women had access to ritual roles and authority in the Danish Bronze Age. Women’s rituals emphasized deposits of artifacts in watery places, perhaps referencing fertility, while men undertook ritual processions and combat. At the same time, settlement evidence suggests a relatively egalitarian society. Diversity, ambiguity, complementarity, and fluctuation perhaps suggest ongoing negotiation of relative positions of power characterize interpersonal relationships here, rather than rigid rankings based on gender and wealth.
Archaeology of Life Cycles
Seniority is often far more important than gender and always intersects with gender in structuring social arrangements, but different communities recognize different life stages among their members. In Mesoamerica, for example, gender is never independent of age, and age strongly determines relative standing in the community (Joyce 2000a: 182). That age was an important axis of differentiation in the region for a very long time can be inferred by examining depictions of the human form from many times and regions. Groups of seated figurines from Formative period Chiapas depict both males and females as aged (with wrinkles) and wealthy (based on clothing and adornment), while armless standing nudes appear to represent youthful females (Lesure 1997). Formative figurines from Chalcatzingo depict series of female life stages (Cyphers Guillén 1993). Tlatilco burials have no clear markings of sex, but age classes extend across the sexes (Joyce 2000a:183).
At any given moment, juveniles might have comprised 50 percent or more of the individuals in a prehistoric community. Little systematic attention to the physical presence of children, their roles, activities, and identities, appears in the archaeological literature to date, paralleling the past neglect of women. Children are feminized in that they are classified as not male, not powerful, and lacking agency (Rothschild 2001). Because children are not expected to be economically productive in our own culture, we miss the important roles children held in the past—in food production and processing, procuring firewood, taking care of younger children, and even craft production.
An archaeology of children is emerging (Lillehammer 1989; Deverenski 1997; Moore and Scott 1997). What did dying young mean in the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el Medina, where burials were segregated by age (Meskell 1999)? How did toys and play fit into frameworks for learning survival skills and economically important tasks such as making pottery in the U.S. Southwest (Kamp 2001)? How does Mesoamerican iconography reveal socially defined transitions, life cycle events, and even the cultural construction of sex differences through life cycle events (Joyce 2000a)?
In Western culture today, children have an innate sexual identity and simply need to be taught how to behave as a good exemplar of their sex, but Aztec adults “worked to craft new people out of the raw material of infants and children” (Joyce 2000a: 146). Aztec metaphorical speeches addressed to pregnant women liken children to feathers, to maguey about to sprout and blossom, and to chips of flint. A child is a product made by the gods, with the help of humans who perform the required ritual actions. The child is seen as nonhuman at birth, but adults and the gods begin to make it human and gendered when the umbilical cord is buried—by the hearth if the child is to be made a girl, on the battlefield if it is to be made a boy (2000a:147). Next, a bathing ceremony used miniature versions of adult tools, weapons, and clothing. Additional sequences of changes in hair, costume, and ornaments created social identities, as well as adult gender and work roles. Joyce concludes, “Where European ideologies view maturation and personal identity as inevitable expressions of natural essences, Aztec ideology, like other Native American ideologies, viewed personal identity as something that required work to produce and was open to much wider variation” (2000a: 150).
Individuals past reproductive age or peak productive performance may also be left out of traditional accounts of the past. Classic period (A.D. 1150–1350) Hohokam burials in the Phoenix, Arizona, area include some postmenopausal women who have a wider variety of grave goods than women of childbearing age. These include ritual items more often found with men of all ages. Some older elite women apparently served as ritual specialists in this society. Socioeconomic status and either community membership or ethnicity also apparently influenced access to specialized roles in this society (Crown and Fish 1996).
Traditional scholarship presents men as gender neutral, the norm against which women are compared. For feminists, gender includes the cultural conditioning of both sexes; men too are gendered, and we can study masculinity in the past as well as the present. Replacing a male-centered archaeology with a female-centered one accomplishes nothing, and “until we start treating male roles as well as women’s as explicitly gendered, man will remain the human norm in most of our minds, woman a case for special study” (Dommasnes 1992:12).
Masculinist studies in the social sciences insist on divergent, multiple masculinities rather than binary oppositions. Bernard Knapp (1998:105) proposes that “if there is to be any seriously-considered debate on gender within a social archaeology, it must engage both feminist and masculinist perspectives, consider how to reconceptualise the categories within which we construct the past, and define new and alternative means of archaeological interpretation.” This means exploring not just how male dominance over women is constructed and maintained, but also studying power relations among men and the origin of hegemonic masculinities.
Joyce’s (2000b) study of Mayan depictions of male bodies suggests many were intended for the sensual gaze of other males in the context of all-male rituals and competitions. Yates (1993) argues that human figures in Scandinavian rock art might just as well depict two kinds of men (mature/immature) as male/female pairs. Barfield and Chippindale (1997) study prehistoric rock art on Mount Bego in southern France, concluding that depictions of weapons here do not just mean male but are emblems of adult males. Figures of cattle, plows, and field systems, with or without actual depictions of phallic humans, reflect status and wealth as well as masculinity. Rock engravings did not just reflect prevailing ideas about what was masculine for this society but were actually made by individuals as part of becoming men, perhaps as part of initiation ceremonies.
Archaeologies of Sexuality
“Archaeologists have ignored sexuality largely because of the presumption of heterosexuality as the norm. It is self-evident, and any discussion is superfluous” (Dowson 2000:164). A few have called for an archaeology of homosexuality, but most archaeology of sexuality is based in broader body-oriented studies drawing on Foucault’s (1980) argument that sexual identities are historically and culturally situated (Voss and Schmidt 2000:3), Judith Butler’s (1990; 1993) ideas about gender as performance, feminism’s focus on the personal and sensual domains of life, and recent questions about whether sex is, after all, a binary, biological given. Archaeologists critical of the male/female duality cite three kinds of sources: medical literature on sex differences (Blackless et al. 2000; Fausto-Sterling 2000), history of sexuality (Laqueur 1987), and comparative ethnography, with particular reference to Melanesian societies in which boys are “made” men via same-sex sexual contact (Yates 1993) and North American “two-spirits” (or berdaches) (Hollimon 1997; Jacobs et al. 1997).
An archaeology of sexuality must include not just choices of sexual partners but “any situation where sexual practices or meanings contribute to the construction of personal or group identity” (Voss and Schmidt 2000:2). To some extent, sexual activities contribute to the formation of the archaeological record; sometimes we can identify what Tim Taylor (1996) calls sex toys. Excavations of historic brothels, prisons, and other localities of nonconjugal sexual activity expand our understanding of nonnormative segments of our own society (Siefert et al. 2000; Casella 2000), as does the archaeology of areas where sexual activities were precluded or constrained, as in medieval nunneries (Gilchrist 2000) and Spanish colonial missions (Voss 2000b). Depictions in art thus far provide the most fruitful avenue for study, as in McNiven’s (2000) studies of Greek vase painting. Who is depicting having sex with whom reveals a great deal about power, age, and privilege as well as gender.
The emerging domain of queer theory provides another approach to sexuality in the past, but can potentially move far beyond this topic. Queer began “as a challenge to essentialist constructions of a ‘gay’ identity . . . In contrast to gay and lesbian identity, queer identity is not based on a notion of stable truth or identity,” and applies to anyone who feels (sexually, intellectually, or culturally) marginalized (Dowson 2000:163). Queer archaeologies (Dowson 2000; Meskell 1999; Voss 2000a) promise not only to challenge heterosexist interpretations of the past, but to help foreground individuals as active social agents.
Critics see queer theory, hermeneutics, and poststructuralist thought as potentially undermining not only the scientific foundations of archaeology, but the political goals of feminism. Will these approaches result in a radical relativism, in which any one interpretation is as good as another, in which women’s voices are lost in the cacophony? Wylie (1992:30) counters that data resist many interpretations—not everything goes, and quite a few things clearly do not go. In addition, “if any general lesson is to be drawn from reflection on feminist practice, it is that politically engaged science is often much more rigorous, self-critical, and responsive to the facts than allegedly neutral science, for which nothing much is at stake.” In fact, few archaeologists have ever argued a radically relativist position. Only the most powerful and successful could possibly believe the world could be constructed any way they choose. “Any who lack such power, or who lack an investment in believing that they have such power, are painfully aware that they negotiate an intransigent reality that impinges on their lives at every turn” (Wylie 1992:25).
This emphatic rejection of the relativist position should not be taken as an endorsement of a “science as usual” which incorporates systematic biases against women and people of color, in regard to teaching, research funding, and publication (Moss 1999:250; Wylie 1997a). Feminist critiques of science by Sandra Harding, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Evelyn Fox Keller, and others apply to archaeological theory and practice as much as to biology, medicine, and the rest. Archaeologists studying gender are more likely to recognize that “politics and the substantive products of knowledge are essentially inseparable” (Conkey and Gero 1997:427) and to challenge the processes of archaeological inquiry by policing language and expunging Western stereotypes from public interpretation of the past and of other cultures. Some still argue that “mankind” and “ancient man” refer to all humans, but using those terms results in visualization of active adult males making history while others remain passive and in the background.
The visual component is apparent in depictions of “ancient” men, women, and children in textbooks, magazines, children’s stories, and museum dioramas. The vast majority depict males as the protagonists of almost every activity, but especially emphasize males stalking, hunting, and killing large game, such as mammoths and cave bears. Males tend to appear standing, in the center of the image, often just outside the family’s cave home, while females and children sit or squat at the side or in the background (Moser 1998). These representations stem from a back-projection of modern stereotypes, and do not rest on empirical evidence for human activities, division of labor, or gender arrangements in the past. They are not just bad science, which most scientists would freely admit, but actually perpetuate more bad science in subtle, largely unconscious ways.
Scientists have favored hypotheses that either put adult males in active roles or do not consider human agency at all. Patty Jo Watson and Mary Kennedy (1991) note that theories about the origins of agriculture in the eastern United States have deployed a mutualistic model in which plants domesticate themselves in the context of ground-disturbing human activities, or a model in which male shamans cultivate gourds for ritual purposes, then begin to grow other plants. Several lines of evidence, however, from ethnography to plant remains, suggest that women were just as likely as men to have domesticated wild plants, and later to have developed new strains of maize, actively adapting this tropical plant to a temperate climate. To formulate this equally plausible hypothesis, Watson and Kennedy had to break down taken-for-granted equations in the minds of earlier scientists, men:hunt:active against women:plants:passive. In this case, the authors accept the women:plants relationship but remove the assumption that women were passive, for which there is no evidence. In producing a hypothesis with a more objective foundation, they do better science.
Thinking with gender, like applying agency-based models of action rather than system-based ones, often leads to a focus on small-scale activities, households, and individuals. This can be done within a scientific framework, but it may lead to other questions, concerns, and goals that require other ways of doing archaeology. Many feminists advocate extrascientific approaches by insisting that thinking and feeling are not separate, and by embracing cognitive styles that favor ambiguity, nuanced understandings, indigenous views, and the idiosyncratic and individual. They wish to increase visibility of human agency in knowledge production, make public how we produce archaeological knowledge, admit ambiguity, emphasize interpretive activities, and collaborate across disciplines, with students, and with communities (Conkey and Gero 1997:429; Conkey and Tringham 1996; Spector and Whelan 1989; Romanowicz and Wright 1996; see Gardner, chapter 7).
Feminism’s recent emphasis on diversity encourages recruitment of ethnic and racial voices to archaeological discourse, as well as gendered ones. Feminist archaeology shares with post-processual approaches an appreciation of multivocality, so we see increasing inclusion of multiple points of view and diverse agendas in conferences, field projects, and publications. Madonna Moss writes, “Some aspects of feminist methodologies stem from the realization that there can be multiple, valid interpretations of the past, multiple prehistories. Feminist archaeologists are typically self-reflexive, recognizing the personal as political. Many have tried to take stock of the effects of their archaeological research on local communities, and considered how to communicate and share the value of research with these communities” (1999:248). For some, this includes incorporating the views of descendant populations, such as Dakota families descended from people living at the Little Rapids site in Minnesota, where Janet Spector (1993) conducted archaeological research and a field school. Others consciously arrange field projects in more cooperative and less hierarchical ways. For others, a black feminist perspective not only provides a more nuanced understanding of slavery on southern United States plantations, but can fill a theoretical gap “for historical archaeology within nations where the devastating policies of colonialism and imperialism, including slavery and genocide, shaped societies in the throes of economic, political and social transformations” (Franklin 2001:109). In many parts of the world, indigenous people are increasingly joining the ranks of professional archaeologists, blurring boundaries between those who study the past and those who are studied, and facilitating mutually respectful personal and intellectual connections between archaeologists of different backgrounds (Moss and Wasson 1998).
Archaeology can contribute to understanding gender processes in the present and future as well as in the past. Conkey (1993) suggests archaeologists should use the past to challenge the present, rather than merely to explain the present (also a post-processual theme; see Shanks, chapter 9). If archaeologists do not do this, popular writers will, as we see in the proliferation of goddess literature. Archaeology is necessarily about change and long-term stability, about materiality, about real people, and so is one of the most materially grounded of the social sciences. Archaeologists, more than other social scientists, have developed myriads of ways to handle fragmentary, ambiguous, and equivocal empirical data; successfully discuss culture histories, developmental trajectories, social, technological, and ideological processes at any spatial or temporal scale; and produce detailed understandings of past lives. Archaeology, not just the archaeology of gender, should have much to offer other disciplines that take the study of gender and sexuality as central concerns.
Special thanks to participants in the Gender and Archaeology Conference series, and my students who worked hard on the 2000 conference in Flagstaff. I have relied especially on works by Cheryl Claassen, Meg Conkey, Liv Helga Dommasnes, Thomas Dowson, Roberta Gilchrist, Bernard Knapp, Lynn Meskell, Sarah Nelson, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Janet Spector, David Whitley, and Alison Wylie, and have enjoyed actual and virtual conversations with many of them, for which I extend my thanks.
1. Hermeneutics, a term borrowed from literary criticism, is the study of the relationship between the interpreter and meaningful material (Shanks and Hodder 1995).
2. The direct-historical approach involves making strong analogy between the ethnography of contemporary peoples and their true ancestors who lived in the same place.
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