Gender Contradictions, Moral Coalitions, and Inequality in Prehistoric Italy

Abstract

This attempts, as an experiment, to reconstruct gender ideology and social inequality in prehistoric Italy through an analysis of symbols, particularly depictions of People (e.g. figures distinguished as male or female by representations of daggers or breasts), using theoretical notions of inequality and coalition. After a theoretical introduction the paper traces the evolution of an ideology of male potency from peripheral middle-Neolithic hunting cults (with a balanced male/female gender ideology and formal ritualism) through an Eneolithic and Bronze-Age system of gender stratification (with male prestige competition), and finally into the Iron-Age ideology of military aristocracy (with a gender ideology of male hierarchy that encompassed a female hierarchy, functioning to exclude unequal classes).