Landscape, Gender, and Sex

Many authors have called attention to the notion of landscape as a product of the rise of capitalism and its attendant social inequities, especially in class and gender. Through the advent of landscape painting, and the linear perspective that permitted such imagery, wealthy landowners could commission portraits of their holdings. Not only did this distinctly Western gaze objectify the surrounding world, distancing and removing it from direct experience, the vantage also marked possession and feminization of landscape by the men who contracted for the works. In other words, the mere concept of landscape is loaded with connotations both of control and of hierarchical gender relations.

Just as landscape embodies cosmology, history, and social identity, it can also materialize gender. Specific features of earth or sky may be identified as female, male, or other genders, often with implications of primordial (and perpetual) acts of sexual reproduction. Recognition of gender attribution in antiquity commonly depends on availability of ancient texts, depictions, or strong cultural continuities from the past.

Earth and sky are frequently creator deities, but neither partner is universally male or female. While the idea of Mother Earth is acknowledged as widespread across time and cultures, in ancient Egypt, texts and images distinguish earth, along with nourishing flood-waters of the Nile, as male. In other cases, gender identities are attributed to portions of the land, or to individual celestial bodies. Of the latter, sun and moon are regularly, though not universally, recognized as male and female, respectively, while individual stars or planets are more varied. Among the Maya, for example, Venus was and is emphatically male, the younger brother of the Sun, one of the earliest and most influential deities in creation.

Within the earthly plane of ancient Greece, a gendered landscape materially unified rural and urban worlds. According to Cole, the most important sanctuaries of Artemis, goddess of wilderness and fertility, were located in the countryside, with replicas within city limits. While the shrines themselves expressed societal unity implicitly, ritual processions of women between the two enacted it explicitly, because women’s unprotected movements were behavioral if not material testaments to the security and stability across society’s spatial expanse.

In a complementary vein, customary gendering of activities may attach gender identities to the specific spaces where those activities are carried out. Seclusion and gendered exclusion in nunneries and monastic landscapes are among the most striking examples, well attested with material evidence. At the other end of a continuum of exclusivity, some gender-specific activities - often for performance of ritual - may keep one or another gender off-limits only for the duration of the event. The latter sort of instance leaves little or no material trace for archaeologists to discern. In between those extremes of archaeological visibility one can cite instances from gendered landscapes as mutually contrastive as the arctic north and equatorial Africa.

In the Arctic, structuralist analysis of Inuit worldview links women with winter, the sea, and marine life, while men are associated with summer, land, and terrestrial animals. McGhee’s examination of Thule artifacts, their inferred uses, and the sources of raw materials suggests that a similar gendered distinction of time and space ordered the Thule world a millennium ago and more. Linkage of women with ivory from sea mammals and men with hunting gear made from terrestrial materials is one part of the conclusions reached. According to Bodenhorn’s recent ethnographic work in northern Alaska, a similar worldview may lie today behind men’s valuation of their wives’ abilities to ‘call’ to sea mammals, and bring them close for the men to hunt. In this account, men may do the physical work of the hunt, but they do it in a female landscape realm and rely on women’s skills to complete the act.

This collaborative partitioning of a gendered Arctic landscape contrasts with the findings of historical archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnoarchaeology in iron smelting of Tanzania. There, place names are glosses of words for men’s and women’s genitalia, and for actions in sexual intercourse, such that an ancient smelting furnace tower is a phallus, a nearby river is named for vaginal fluid, and other localities constitute steps in coition, especially men’s actions. From Schmidt’s combined analytic perspectives, the material landmarks complement verbal labels, the whole conveying a complex but unified message of social and sexual hierarchy and male prowess, and equating the process of iron smelting with reproduction. More to the point, customs regarding women’s exclusion from the smelting process confirm the visual message of the landscape, linking success in metallurgical production with success in procreation, and by extension with societal prosperity.