Introduction

One of the most active areas of archaeological innovation in the last half of the twentieth century was the exploration of gender. Never a single, unified project, this topical area of attention was able to bring together archaeologists representing every theoretical perspective - from culture historical through processual, postprocessual, and even evolutionary archaeology (see Processual Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Evolutionary Archaeology). After more than 20 years of development of this topic, most contributions still take the form of individual papers, usually included in edited volumes. This is one indication of the breadth of participation by a very large number of people in developing archaeologies of gender. Early in the history of the development of archaeologies of gender, Cheryl Claassen, who did much to sustain this level of energy by organizing the three conferences on gender in archaeology starting in 1991, noted another important characteristic of participation in this emerging topical area: many, perhaps most, of the participants were graduate students or recent recipients of doctorates.

The lack of theoretical unity among the many people contributing to archaeologies of gender has at times been seen as a weakness, particularly from the point of view of explicitly feminist scholars. Their most urgent concern was with the possibility that archaeologists pursuing questions of gender would simply create an appearance of long-term stability for present-day gender relations, ‘naturalizing’ present inequalities. Remarkably, other archaeologists saw quite the opposite danger: that use of explicitly feminist theoretical perspectives would impede the progress of ‘objective’ research on gender in the past, or that such research would be marginalized because mainstream archaeologists would find it unacceptably political.

Despite the large numbers of contributors to the development of archaeologies of gender over the past 20 years, and the very visible venues where work of this kind has appeared, it is probably true that today, some archaeologists view this as a specialty with which they do not need to engage. This is unfortunate, because while archaeologists of gender have not developed special methods to ‘see’ men and women in the past, they have developed sophisticated perspectives on the social implications of material remains whose potentials go far beyond such simple goals. Archaeologies of gender fundamentally transform understandings of classic archaeological questions such as the development of agriculture, the emergence of institutionalized social distinctions in early sedentary societies, and the ways that wealth and power could be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people in the most stratified states. In this article, some of the big moments in the history of archaeologies of gender are briefly reviewed first, and then some of the key interpretive and methodological approaches taken by archaeologists working around the world on questions of gender are outlined. Finally, future directions for this line of archaeological inquiry are suggested. It is clear that there is no reversing the impact of the extraordinary florescence of archaeological research on gender of the past decades.