Constructing histories while events continue to unfold is a perilous task, one that also has highly political dimensions. This article does not claim to be a complete history of archaeologies of gender. Instead, it identifies a series of key conferences and publications that pushed the field of gender archaeology forward in the 1980s and 1990s. The outline of events mainly concerns the English-language literature, above all, the literature from North America and Great Britain. Within the
English-language literature, important contributions were also made by archaeologists in Australia. In parallel, archaeologies of gender were developed by Scandinavian archaeologists, such as Erika Engelstadt and Mary Louise Stig Sprensen, often publishing in English as well as Scandinavian languages. In Germany, Femarc, the Women’s Network in Archaeology, began in 1991 and continues to operate a website to this day, again in both English and German. Archaeologies of gender are less developed in other regional traditions in archaeology, but the international extension of interest in related questions that developed over the same period of time is still noteworthy.
Many histories of archaeology of gender credit an article by Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector in Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, published in 1984, as a particularly influential starting point. In this article, Conkey and Spector outlined a ‘task-differentiation’ approach to identifying women in archaeological sites, using ethnographic analogies to establish the tasks that would have occupied men and women in different societies. Concern has been expressed about singling out this article as a kind of origin point for archaeology of gender, based on the indisputable fact that there were preexisting works by archaeologists concerned with understanding gender relations using archaeological data. For example, at least as early as 1960, Tatiana Proskouriakoff published a pathbreaking study of women in Classic Maya art. This beginning was followed up in 1976 by Joyce Marcus’ consideration of evidence for women’s roles in Classic Maya politics. In 1982, archaeologist Mary Pohl published a pathbreaking study of the roles of Classic Maya women in relation to the raising of animals. About the same time, archaeologists working on the ancient societies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and neighboring regions were actively developing accounts of the roles of women in these ancient societies, in books like the 1983 Images of Women in Antiquity.
It is thus worth asking why the 1984 paper by Conkey and Spector has been cited by many people as a turning point in their ability to write about gender as a legitimate topic. Two things stand out: first, the article is methodological; it proposed a framework for identifying evidence of gender. Second, the method is rooted in the concept of gendered divisions of labor, an anthropological base that many archaeologists found helpful in initially making a transition to gender analysis. These perspectives also underwrote the Wedge Conference, organized by Conkey and Joan Gero, which brought together archaeologists working on a variety of technologies to follow through on analysis of gender in 1988. The published volume from this conference, 1991’s
Engendering Archaeology, is perhaps the secondmost widely cited point of reference for archaeologists of gender, and was a landmark that, among other things, launched the newly coined term ‘engendered archaeology’.
It might be fair to say that archaeologies of gender have been struggling with the legacy of this initial orientation ever since. By linking gender to production, archaeologists opened the door to examining gender in what processual archaeologists saw as the most determinative aspect of social life, subsistence, and the economy. Contributions to Engendering Archaeology argued for the significance of factoring in differences in the economic roles of men and women in models of past societies, and demonstrated an ability to address these questions with materials of many different kinds. The method advocated in the original article, however, was inherently dependent on cross-cultural analogies subject to critical re-examination. Since these analogies were derived from ethnography conducted in the contemporary world, in societies that already had experienced colonial engagements of unknown transformative effect, they ran the risk of incorporating presentist perspectives and validating modern gender arrangements as universal. Moreover, most authors took for granted an equation of dichotomous biological sex with a primary division of all human populations into a relatively homogeneous group of males, and an equally homogeneous group of females. Later researchers in archaeology have worked hard to develop alternative approaches that do not assume a dichotomy of genders grounded in the two-sex model. But they contended with their own histories of advances based on making precisely this assumption.
The philosopher Alison Wylie, writing an introductory paper in Engendering Archaeology, called attention to the trajectory for future research that could be predicted given the beginning of archaeology of gender as a search for women in the past. Comparing archaeology to other disciplines, such as history, she predicted that archaeologists would find it necessary eventually to question the very concepts of analysis with which they were working. While most subsequent authors cited Wylie, we nonetheless took the short cut provided by associating gender with two preexisting sexes, between whom there was assumed to be a separation of tasks, something we could potentially see archaeologically in dichotomous distributions of features, artifacts, and floral and faunal remains.
The Wedge Conference was influential precisely because of its shared programmatic direction. A second conference, held at almost the same time, is equally important in the history of development of archaeologies of gender even though participants shared no common project or assumptions. This was the 1989 Chacmool conference on gender in archaeology. Organized by students of archaeology at Calgary University, this open-attendance conference provided a forum for an international group of archaeologists who proposed an astonishing array of approaches to understanding gender in the past. Many of the international participants already had taken part in conferences or publication projects in which gender was one dimension of human variation being considered, some of which were grounded in a more openly feminist critique of archaeology than generally characterized North American gender studies of the time. The sheer diversity of the papers included in the Chacmool conference volume is testimony to the already existing activity of archaeologists who had arrived, more or less simultaneously, at the conclusion that it was time to talk about men and women in archaeological analyses. Notable contributions to this conference went further, and began to trouble simple assumptions of a male/female dichotomy. Many of the papers argued that the projection of genders in representational media, such as figurines or stone sculpture, was a source of understanding gender ideologies, something that had been a secondary theme of many participants at the Wedge Conference as well. Several papers at the Chacmool conference attempted to explicitly theorize how genders might have been formed in the past through people’s use of materials that would leave archaeological traces, taking gender formation, not the work and lives of women and men, as their explicit focus. Even more notable, at a time when most work on gender conflated gender with women, some of the participants at the Chacmool conference were concerned with identifying masculine images, roles, and ideologies.
Cheryl Claassen, a participant in the Wedge Conference, organized a third pathbreaking conference in 1991 that nurtured archaeologies of gender in North America. Claassen was inspired to promote wider engagement in discussions of archaeology of gender, bringing together individuals who she knew had presented papers on related themes at national and regional meetings. The three conferences that Claassen organized served as incubators for cross-regional connections that sustained a large number of researchers interested in pursuing questions that were not central in their individual regions. Notably, the first conference included discussion of teaching courses on gender, or with content about gender. Roundtable discussions explored the question of how archaeologists were actually operationalizing their terms, defining gender and using it. After its first few iterations, successor conferences moved to different regions of the US, providing a unique context for archaeologists, including large numbers of students, to meet with others of like mind and develop their analyses in collaborative settings. These conferences promoted a form of feminist practice through which new generations of scholars were able to gain a foothold, exploring every possible material and all the ways that they could imagine accessing gender in the past. Subsequent regional conferences dealing with the US Southwest, the pre-Columbian Americas, and archaeology worldwide included many scholars who first tried out their ideas about gender in the context of one of the ‘gender in archaeology’ conferences.
The importance of such conferences as settings that allowed practitioners to gain support for their ideas was not limited to North America. In 1991, the first of a series of Australian conferences on Women in Archaeology was held. In addition to papers on aspects of the place of women in past societies, this conference included discussions of equity in careers of women in archaeology. The Australian conferences appear also to have had a more explicit commitment to feminist analysis than was typical of the open North American conferences. Several participants in the Wedge Conference participated in the first Australian conference. In Great Britain, questions of gender were incorporated in a number of conferences around the same time, although typically in Britain, these conferences were not limited to discussions of gender. An exception was the 1994 Gender and Material Culture Conference at the University of Exeter, which explicitly brought to the foreground methodological concerns, asking how archaeologists could use the material record to talk about gender in the past. Like the other conferences taking place in the early and mid-1990s, some of the participants in the Exeter conference, which resulted in three edited volumes, had previously participated in other conferences dedicated to exploring gender in archaeology.
It is arguable that without the extremely lively conference scene of the time, gender would never have taken off as a strong topic of research in archaeology, since at the same time as these conferences, considerable resistance to work in this area was expressed by mainstream archaeologists. Some archaeologists were concerned that the diversity of participation would lead to an incoherent field of study. In a 1997 review article in Annual Reviews in Archaeology, Margaret Conkey and Joan Gero expressed concerns about what they characterized as a ‘cottage industry’ of gender archaeology. For archaeologists like this, the price of the openness of participation in gender conferences was bracketing the fundamental definitional questions Claassen raised at the first conference she organized. The gain was a vast number of studies that proposed ways to assess the roles of women, and less often men, in past societies around the world, often relying on distributions of specific artifacts used as signatures of men and women. Critical participants in archaeologies of gender worried that premature attempts to create simple methods to ‘see’ men and women would reinforce modern ideas of clearly divided separate spheres that actually are products of relatively recent histories in the industrial world. Some archaeologists, drawing on theoretical work in contemporary gender studies, were concerned that archaeologists too quickly adopted definitions of sex (as precultural, biological given) and gender (as the cultural interpretation of sex) that were already critiqued by scholars in other fields. A very few archaeologists of gender, informed by these external theoretical sources, were trying to grapple with how one would recognize a sex/gender system in which biology was conceived as something other than a simple dichotomy. Other participants in the early development of archaeologies of gender noted that treating sex/gen-der systems as separable from other aspects of identity, such as age, class, ethnicity, or race, was artificial, and that it was especially problematic to assume that gender was the most fundamental division in all societies.
These concerns still exist, and not all work on archaeology of gender meets contemporary standards of analysis in feminist and gender scholarship more widely. Nonetheless, the advances fostered by the wide participation in archaeologies of gender are clear. It has now become common to find sessions dedicated to gender at annual meetings of archaeological professional societies, and to find papers on gender included in sessions on other topics. Archaeologies of gender have made important contributions to how archaeologists think about the past and to what we think we know about it.
World History
