Contemporary studies commonly stress the belief that, even if sex is biologically determined, gender by contrast is a social and cultural construct (Sofaer and Sørensen, 2012). Even biological sex entails varying degrees of male and female attributes in terms of chromosomes and DNA if not in terms of reproductive organs, so that, contrary to the bipolar model of sex, contemporary studies of gender tend to think in terms of a spectrum that includes composite gender or a third gender that is neither male nor female in what Arnold (2006: 155) described as ‘a suprabinary gender system’. In the case of the Byzantine eunuchs or the Indian hijra cited by Croucher (2012: 174–5), these could be regarded as socially constructed, and it is not here suggested that such categories existed in Iron Age Britain or Europe. It is important, however, to be clear that conventional western sexual stereotypes and conceptions of gender roles in child-rearing, food production, and warfare, for example, need not have pertained in non-classical societies in antiquity. Gender issues in the study of funerary archaeology have gained a prominence in the last twenty years not simply as a result of theoretical considerations but also because of more intensive interest in osteological research, as a result of which there has been a greater recognition of the fact that identifying sex may involve evaluation of a spectrum of criteria rather than simple bipolar options. Though pelvic bones remain crucial to assessing sex, the skull and other major bones can also be indicative, and not infrequently the evidence remains equivocal, even where the skeleton is reasonably well preserved. Accordingly, some of the skeletons from the eastern Yorkshire cemeteries were deemed to show ‘contra’ indications, that is male and female characteristics in equal measure, in a gradation of assessment that also included ‘definite’, ‘probable’, and ‘possible’ identifications (Stead, 1991). Furthermore, though sex is biologically determined, osteology may be affected by cultural factors such as the degree of physical exercise that the individual habitually engages in, so that the criteria observed by the osteologist may suggest a physique normally associated with the opposite sex.
Genetic homozygosity as a marker of smoking dependency
