BECOMING GENDERED IN EUROPEAN PREHISTORY: WAS NEOLITHIC GENDER FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT?

John Robb,Oliver J. T. Harris

doi:10.1017/aaq.2017.54

Abstract

It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naïveté. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 cal BC onwards; the latter still form the norm in European and American contexts today, and our standard theories and methodologies are designed to uncover this specific form of gender. In Bronze Age gender systems, gender was mostly binary, associated with stable, lifelong identities expressed in recurrent complexes of gendered symbolism. In contrast, Neolithic gender appears to have been less firmly associated with personal identity and more contextually relevant; it slips easily through our methodological nets. In proposing this “contextual gender” model for Neolithic gender, we both open up new understandings of gender in the past and present and pose significant questions for our models of gender more widely.

Highlights

It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age
We begin with an intentionally provocative question: Compared with other periods, why is there so little gender archaeology for the European Neolithic? A recent encyclopaedic, 1,166-page overview of the Neolithic (Fowler et al 2015) involving 88 authors from 45 countries mentions gender on only 6 pages! Other recent reviews of gender in European archaeology (Whitehouse 2006) underline the meager harvest from this period. Why should this be so? It cannot be due to theoretical innocence: Neolithic archaeologists have been at the forefront of theoretical explorations, and feminist critiques of “goddess” metanarratives (e.g., Goodison and Morris 2013) underline Neolithic theorists’ acuity and awareness of gender
Through an overview of the evidence for Neolithic gender, we argue that the reason there is very little Neolithic gender archaeology is because we are not recognizing Neolithic gender for what it was, a form of identity qualitatively different than gender throughout later prehistory, and through the last 5,000 years up to the present

Summary

The State of Mainstream Gender Archaeology

Gender archaeology has made profound contributions to the discipline. Gender archaeologists opened our eyes to the possibilities of writing different kinds of narratives about the past; they paved the way for nowmainstream discussions of identity and personhood. In Bronze Age gender archaeology, as elsewhere in the world, the key data anchoring a plausible, coherent system of widespread binary gender symbolism are sexable skeletons buried with grave goods, and iconographic representations of bodies with sexual anatomies. Once we locate such gender identities, we find that they were relevant across many contexts through life and death, creating redundant, readily interpreted archaeological signaling. We automatically seek redundant symbols anchored in “sexable” data that define major patterns of stable, lifelong identities across contexts, without reflecting about whether this picture may fit all configurations of human gender

Gender in the European Neolithic

Neolithic Contextual