Excavating Women: Towards an Engendered History of Archaeology (1998)

Abstract

Gender archaeology has by now become a relatively well-established research topic within archaeology. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of edited volumes, a rapidly expanding number of papers, and even a few journals and newsletters dedicated to this subject. It is, therefore, very surprising that in this literature the historiographic analysis of women archaeologists has played only a minor part. Likewise they are hardly acknowledged in the ‘folk’ histories of the discipline (Lucy and Hill 1994: 2). The need to understand the disciplinary integration of women, to appreciate the varying socio-political contexts of their work, to reveal the unique tension between their roles as women and their academic lives, has become obvious and is strongly felt in many areas of the discipline. The insights yielded by such analysis will have significance at many levels and will be of paramount importance for the intellectual history of archaeology. In particular, such insights will necessitate a much-needed revision of disciplinary history by revealing its mechanisms of selecting and forgetting, and will play an important role in the analysis of archaeology’s knowledge claims. Histories of archaeology have broadly accepted, and spread, a perception of archaeology as being male-centred, both intellectually and in practice. These accounts, written by male archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel (1975), Alain Schnapp (1993), and Bruce Trigger (1989), are inevitably androcentric in their conceptualization and reconstruction of the disciplinary past. Their versions have, however, recently begun to be contested, as concern with critical historiography has grown, and a few explicit historiographical accounts of women archaeologists have appeared. So far, with regard to the role of women, the most extensive contributions are the edited volumes by Claassen (1994) and du Cros and Smith (1993). While providing an important beginning, these publications show that there is still a long way to go. In particular they demonstrate a gap in research coverage, as no investigation of the contribution of women outside the USA and Australia exists.