The Queerly Departed

This chapter explores four remarkable burials in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, looking beyond the static scene uncovered at the point of excavation to the funerary processes that created the sites. The majority of the graves discussed here have been associated with the magico-religious practice of seiðr; the chapter therefore also explores the evidence for connecting this practice with transgressive gender performances, taking into account the problematic literary evidence as well as the difficulty in interpreting the archaeological material. Based on an analysis of these burials, the chapter argues that an approach to gender archaeology which moves beyond assumptions of a fixed binary inherent to the physical body can only enrich our understanding of the past.

Feminist archaeologies and gender studies

This chapter discusses the influence of feminist theories on theory construction, self-conception, and the public perception of archaeology and its various sub-disciplines. The theoretical foundations of gender archaeology are also considered. As there are many feminist theories as well as archaeologies, the chapter also summarizes what can be described as broad sets of overlaps, and to an extent simplifies the variety of different points of view. Feminist criticism as well as new questions, models, and methods based on it reached archaeology in the 1980s, later than the other humanities. Initial efforts could be classified as women’s studies that mostly aimed to balance a male-biased view of the past by adding a female view to it. Since the 1990s, the term ‘gender’ with its various aspects is the focus of discussion. The number, convertibility, and history of genders are also important topics. In addition, feminist archaeology focuses on archaeology’s own institutions, their social rules, their language, and their image, which are also linked to the gender expectations of the surrounding society. These aspects are also connected to the way images of the past are presented to the public, and which effects they have on gender discourses.

10. Expoloring Age - Transition Analysis as a Tool for Detecting the Elderly

The growth of gender archaeology has improved the inclusion of female and juvenile narratives in archaeological discourse, enabling us to better understand interactions between groups defined by both social and physiological differences. There has been a notable absence of elderly in research, however, that is not simply a question of attitudes but of methodological limitations. The emergence of biostatistics has offered novel ways to combat common issues such as age mimicry and avoid the problematic nature of culturally loaded descriptive terminology. A test performed on Transition Analysis by Boldsen et al. (2002), generates individual age estimates, which allow for better differentiation between individuals and age groups, such as the ‘45+ older adults’. Further research into biostatistical methods will not only improve objectivity but bring much-needed attention to the elderly, including their narrative into the investigation of family dynamics and adult-juvenile interactions.

Gender Inequalities in Neolithic Iberia: A Multi-Proxy Approach

Gender archaeology approaches to Iberian late prehistory have experienced a significant growth in the last two decades. However, much of the work undertaken has focused on specific aspects of the archaeological record (rock art, burial practices), particularly from the Bronze Age and Iron Age periods for which the evidence is more readily available. In addition, it has tended to be regional or local in scope. Here, we attempt an empirically robust multi-proxy approach to the development of early gender inequalities in Neolithic Iberia. Inspired by Gerda Lerner's ideas on the origins of patriarchy and based on a systematic collection of data analysed by means of significance testing, we present the first comprehensive study of gender dissymmetries in Iberian prehistory. Our conclusions suggest that, first, the multi-proxy method used has potential for the systematic study of gender inequalities on the basis of archaeological data and, second, that the Neolithic witnessed emerging gender inequalities that set the basis for male domination in later periods.

Archaeological Demography as a Tool for the Study of Women and Gender in the Past

In the last 20 years, demography has re-emerged as a key research area within archaeology. This research has refined archaeological demographic methods and examined the relationships between demographic, cultural and environmental change. Here, I discuss how the results of the growing corpus of archaeological demographic studies can contribute to gender archaeology, aiding the incorporation of women into narratives of the past. By considering the important role of women in the demographic regimes of small-scale societies, I explain how archaeological demography can provide insights into the behaviour and lives of women, without relying on the often problematic identification of gendered artefacts, activities and/or places. Archaeological demography as a tool for gender archaeology also permits a move away from the female empiricism of simply adding women into archaeological narratives, to provide an alternative framework for the analysis of gender roles and practices. I demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach using an example from the Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern France.

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

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.