ENGENDERED ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

‘Engendered archaeology’ includes a theoretically diverse body of work created over a period of almost 30years in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Unifying this work are concerns with the way that social frameworks of sex and gender in the past were related to the classic questions addressed by archaeologists, and concerns with explicitly addressing how such concerns change our understandings of the past. While archaeologists had always included ideas about men's and women's roles, explicitly or implicitly, in their studies, starting in the 1980s explicit concern with methodologies to ‘see’ gender in archaeological sites pushed forward a more explicit archaeology of gender. Initially framed in terms of the tracing of patterns derived from the activities of two dichotomous sexes, archaeology of gender more recently has critically examined its own adoption of a two-sex/two-gender model. Direct analyses of gender formation through material culture have been one of the products of archaeology of gender that go beyond the initial interest in exploring the roles of women, and to a lesser extent, men, in the past. Much of the research in this specialty has produced empirical studies of women's roles as active agents in specific world areas. Gender archaeology has not identified specific methods. In practice, the most common methods employed may be mortuary analysis and analyses of artistic representations, including figurines. Contemporary engendered archaeology transforms questions that extend far beyond the simple concern with what men and women did, challenging assumptions about the relations of sex and gender, the stability of gender, and the ways that sex was incorporated in the lives of people in the past, most of whom are known today only through archaeology.