Because archaeologies of gender began with the question ‘‘where are the women?’’ much of the literature in this topical area has consisted of empirical contributions to knowledge of particular times and places. Thus there are edited books and special issues of journals on gender in Africa, Asia, and various regions of the US, among others. Such edited volumes usually adopt culture-historical or culture-evolutionary models, but explicitly include consideration of women’s contributions in the past, often highlighting those instances in which women were active agents of change. Culture-evolutionary or culture-historical approaches are also common in the still-rare monographs in the field. For example, in their 1999 study of women in the ancient Americas, Karen Olson Bruhns and Karen Stothert provided a culture-evolutionary overview of women’s place in economy and society in the ancient Americas, as evident in the numerous case studies they reviewed and synthesized. Sarah Nelson’s influential 1997 book Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, while organized around a critique of androcentrism in archaeology itself, demonstrates the proposed alternative approach through a global cultural evolutionary narrative that asks what women’s contributions were at various points in human history around the world. Studies such as these draw needed attention to the absence or assumed passivity of women as social actors in other archaeological accounts of cultural evolution.
Other works take the study of gender as a means to propose new methodological perspectives. One long-term debate, both within and outside archaeologies of gender, was whether there should be methods specific to the study of gender, and if so, what these methods were. Reduced to its basic, this is the question of how archaeologists can see women (and by implication, men) in the past. Archaeologists of gender in fact have exploited the entire existing archaeological toolkit in pursuit of evidence of differential treatment of people in the past along lines of sex, and of differences in the experiences and activities of people of different socially recognized genders. The entire suite of distributional analyses used in household archaeology, for example, has been marshaled to support identification of gendered spaces and divisions of labor along the lines of gender in places as widely separated as Europe and Mesoamerica.
Studies of gender have not been limited to the small-scale settings where normative models of gender relations derived from late twentieth-century ideologies associating women with a private, domestic sphere lead archaeologists to expect to see women. Significant studies of political economy of states and of prestate societies asked the question, ‘‘what were the political and economic roles of women in these societies?’’ The answers proposed showed that women were significant political actors even in complex societies where official political roles were reserved for men, particularly when women’s roles in production for the state are included. In Elizabeth Brumfiel’s articles on Aztec society, she demonstrates that household labor was reorganized with the development of the state in ways that relate to intensification of demand for cloth produced by women in domestic contexts.
As she and others have noted, the importance of cloth in the Aztec economy created opportunities for women to assert special status in both the household and state. Brumfiel’s writing has been extremely influential, making her 1992 article in American Anthropologist the secondmost cited journal article on gender in archaeology, after the 1984 paper by Conkey and Spector.
Archaeologists have amply demonstrated that a public/domestic dichotomy cannot be projected into the past without losing much of the picture of ancient political economy. As Julia Hendon argued in a 1996 article in Annual Reviews in Anthropology, which is among the top ten cited articles on gender and archaeology, political and economic action begins in the household. Archaeologists of the more recent past have posed direct challenges to the assumption of a timeless feminine domestic sphere by tracing how ideologies of female domesticity were built up over the course of the nineteenth century. This ‘cult of domesticity’ was promulgated through the use of material culture recovered in archaeological research such as serving wares and decorative objects. Historical archaeologists have documented the continued engagements of women as laborers outside this emerging domestic sphere in a wide range of historic settings, from plantations where enslaved African women reproduced social and cultural relations even under the most oppressive conditions, to the brothels of urban centers where sex trade was practiced, and the prisons, mining settlements, and camps of striking laborers typical of modern industrial societies.
Two analytical approaches come closest to being core methods of gender archaeology, mortuary analysis and analysis of art. Burials have repeatedly figured as possible sites were the relations between biological sex and cultural statuses could potentially be clarified. Mortuary and bioarchaeological studies of human remains have documented telling distinctions in treatment of the dead along lines of sex or inferred social gender identities, including differences in nutrition, in burial orientation, and in materials buried with the dead (see Bioarchaeology; Individual, Archaeology of in Prehistory). Drawing on ethnographic documentation, Sandra Hollimon has pursued a particularly careful set of explorations of the possibility to identify third genders in Chumash cemeteries, given the known presence and frequency of such statuses in historic Chumash communities. Drawing on sophisticated biocultural understandings of sex itself as encompassing variations beyond normative male and female, Rebecca Storey has proposed that an individual burial at Classic Maya Copan may have been intersexed, and recognized socially as a different gender.
Scholars have examined how men, women, and additional genders were represented in ancient societies using approaches common to study of symbolism and ideology in visual media (see Interpretive Art and Archaeology). Some of the most abundant, and earliest, work of this kind was accomplished in Classical, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian archaeology by art historians. Typically, studies began by identifying signif-iers of male and female genders, sometimes explicitly considering the possible existence of alternative genders. Bodily features, such as breasts, genitalia, facial hair, waist-to-hip ratios, and musculature are often used to identify males and females. Depictions of anthropomorphic forms in rock art, in areas as distant as Norway and South Africa, have been the focus of such studies, identifying different forms of bodily masculinity as well as differences between males and females (see Rock Art). Ann Cyphers proposed that figurines from Chalcatzingo, Mexico, recorded different stages in the female life course, including specific developments related to stages of pregnancy, providing a parallel expansion of feminities. Costume and modifications of the body, including sex-specific hair treatments and body ornaments, are common secondary attributes identified in such studies of gender in visual imagery. In some studies, the distributions in burials of ornaments of the kinds depicted in sex-specific imagery are considered as a second line of evidence to assess the inferred gender differences.
Among the most explicitly theoretical discussions of gendered visual representations are the many contributions to debates concerning the meanings of Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines of Europe and the Near East (see Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Europe, Northern and Western: Early Neolithic Cultures; Europe: Neolithic). Exaggerated physical features on some of these figurines have been identified as evidence of fertility cults in which women’s bodies were valued as symbols of broader fecundity, as sexualized toys intended for men, as self-portraiture of pregnant women, and as ambiguous images that sometimes clearly conflate suggestions of male genitalia with apparent female bodies. A broadly debated question in figurine studies worldwide is whether the apparent predominance of female representations indicates that the makers of these small-scale human images were normally women. Joyce Marcus has developed a particularly strong argument in which she links the dominance of female images in early figurines in Oaxaca, and their distribution in household contexts, to female veneration of female ancestors.
None of these innovative studies employed methods uniquely developed for finding gender in the past. Together, they demonstrate that no method available to archaeologists cannot be pressed into service in an archaeology of gender. As with other archaeological topics, a common strategy is to draw on multiple lines of evidence to strengthen arguments.
The fact that gender archaeology has no specific unique methods does not imply that archaeologies of gender have not been sources of archaeological innovation. The archaeology of gender has involved critical reassessment of a core archaeological methodology, ethnographic analogy. As the social anthropologist Henrietta Moore has noted, most of the studies produced by early ethnographers assumed a correspondence between sex and gender, a universal dominance of males in the public, political sphere, and a more limited and passive position of women. Reliance on informants who were usually male means that most ethnographies do not represent any contestation of gender ideologies. Specialists in gender have addressed this weakness in the main source of interpretive models for all archaeology, including conducting new ethnographic research attentive to the complexity of gender among hunter-gatherers and small-scale societies where economic, political, and social relations could be reexamined with gender and archaeology in mind.
Archaeological reevaluations of ethnographic sources have resulted in analyses of the exercise of authority and control by women obscured by androcentric analyses of state-level societies, like those of the Classic Maya or Aztecs. Ethnographically informed studies of native North American hunter-gatherers, like those of Hetty Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa, show how parties that ranged out from home bases to pursue, process, and bring back game were constituted of men and women recruited along lines of age rather than by parties segregated by sex. Margaret Conkey, writing about the hunter-gatherers of the European Paleolithic, suggested that when separate bands came together at seasonal gathering places, multiple dimensions of identity including but not limited to sex would have been brought to the foreground as band members navigated complex social relationships. These studies suggest strongly that other dimensions of difference within society, such as age or skill, may often have been more significant bases for distinctions within society than sex/gender. These studies have shifted focus from gender identity (assumed to be congruent with sexual identity) to sex/gender difference, which can be much more fluid and multidimensional.
Archaeologists working on questions of gender have also developed broader critiques of androcentric assumptions taken for granted by archaeologists. The fact that archaeologies of gender assumed prominence at a time when women were moving into the field in unprecedented numbers is undoubtedly significant. Androcentrism may have been more obvious to women archaeologists because it did not ring true with their own experiences. For example, male viewing perspective and modern sexual orientations projected into the past led generations of archaeologists to interpret female figures as sexual imagery. Women, also among those who viewed and possibly used such objects in the past, would not necessarily have shared the same sexualization of the female body. Arguments like those of Ann Cyphers that figurines showing women in different stages of pregnancy were made and used in rites of passage during a female life course are based on a notably different experiential perspective from the one that saw these same objects as intended for male viewing.
A second example of the critical interrogation of androcentric assumptions are innovative discussions of the possible roles of women in early plant cultivation and pottery production. Both arguments propose that women would have been agents of change due to their detailed and intimate knowledge of the materials being manipulated, as the assumed principal participants in food preparation. In both cases, archaeologists propose that human beings in general, and women in particular, may have been more active in fostering change than in traditional models. This shift to a more active view of human intervention, based on critically examining the assumed passivity of women that was an accepted part of earlier archaeological models, has broader significance.
The methodological innovations of archaeologies of gender are not limited to critiques of previous approaches. While there is no specific method for detecting women (or men) in the past, participants in archaeology of gender have pursued the core question of when and how one can talk about gender difference in sophisticated ways. An increasing number of archaeologists have asked specifically how we might study gender in the past if we did not begin by projecting a modern two-sex/two-gender model that encourages the interpretation of dichotomous distributions as evidence of gender segregation. Bioarchaeologists have been particularly important participants in this process. Early on, archaeologies of gender often began with sexed burials to try to arrive at diagnostic patterns associated with male or female identity. The assumed simple correspondence model, though, ignores both the actual continuity of distribution of biological characteristics such as body size, and the presence in biological populations, even if at a low frequency, of persons whose chromosomal sexual identity is neither normative male nor normative female. Bioarchaeologists, with their greater understanding of both the procedures of sex assignment in analysis and of real biological variation, have been open to identifying possible intersexed individuals. Working with ethnographic models, bioarchaeologists have been the first to ask how people whose gender identity was neither normative male nor normative female, so-called third or fourth genders, would appear in mortuary populations where they were known to have existed, such as in native North American societies.
Other archaeologists inspired by contemporary studies of gender as a product of specific social practices have turned to the archaeological record to examine how different societies in the past went about producing the experiences of embodied personhood that are gender. If gender is not simply a cultural recognition of innate dichotomous sexual differences, then sex/gender systems were outcomes of experiences beginning in childhood and continuing throughout life, reinforced by everyday habits of work, by rituals of the life cycle, and by the representation of normative sex/gender in discourses, some of them recorded in permanent visual and textual forms. These analyses have led far beyond questions of sex/gender alone, to explicit consideration of sexuality and the nature of personal experience of embodiment in the past. These archaeological discussions lead far from the initial roots of archaeologies of gender in a quest to find the women missing from most accounts of the past.
World History
