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Gender and Archaeology
This important collection represents current thinking in feminist studies in archaeology. Its contributors are primarily anthropologists but the book also includes essays by a bioanthropologist and an historian of technology. All are leading scholars who, using a range of methodologies and theoretical frameworks, integrate gender into the central questions with which archaeologists have traditionally been concerned.
The book challenges archaeologists to draw on wider feminist discourses in their interpretations of past societies and feminist scholars in other disciplines to consider the new engendered approaches to archaeology presented in the volume.
Contributors Gillian Bentley, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Margaret Conkey, Cathy Lynne Costin, Joan Gero, Rosemary Joyce, Judith McGaw, Janet Romanowicz, Ruth Tringham, and the editor.
The book challenges archaeologists to draw on wider feminist discourses in their interpretations of past societies and feminist scholars in other disciplines to consider the new engendered approaches to archaeology presented in the volume.
Contributors Gillian Bentley, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Margaret Conkey, Cathy Lynne Costin, Joan Gero, Rosemary Joyce, Judith McGaw, Janet Romanowicz, Ruth Tringham, and the editor.
- GenresArchaeology
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1996
13 people want to read
About the author
Rita P. Wright
4 books3 followersDr. Rita P. Wright is an anthropological archaeologist whose research engages early states and urbanism in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and India. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University and is Assistant Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project and Director of the Beas Landscape and Settlement Survey near Harappa. Her specialties include ceramics, gender issues, urbanism and state level societies.
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December 17, 2017
Begins from the postprocessual critique that processual studies have in some cases used modern categories of division of labor (gendered divisions of work, current understandings of sex/gender categories) and projected them retroactively into the past; and at the same time that scholars have often ignored the tasks that today are associated with "feminine technology" (weaving, pottery, etc.) and either assigned these to men or ignored them as "uninteresting" (2).
Rita Wright's chapter on "Technology, Gender, and Class: Worlds of Difference in Ur III Mesopotamia" argues that "weaving and cloth were positioned at he center of gender, class, and ethnic differences. These differences were most pronounced, but not limited to, women producers of textiles and those who wore and used high quality cloth. [Uses] imagery principally on seals to highlight the symbolic power of cloth in early Mesopotamia, especially when worn by women in occupations associated with temple and palace functions. Their status and role are contrasted to the women producers of cloth who, in spite of (perhaps because of) the importance of cloth in Mesopotamian society, were a relatively impoverished group . . . [focuses] on technology as a means of teasing out how labor was organized in the weaver's workshops in which they worked, the production methods used in making cloth and the technical knowledge possessed by women producers, and the various state policies that effectively controlled textile production and women who produced cloth . . . while cloth became a visible carrier of culture, its producers received little recognition and were themselves 'invisible'" (9)
The essays move toward more fine-grained, multivariate analyses of the way that gender and power differentials play out -- they explore "the plasticity of gender constructs in different domains, especially as developed out of elite administrative needs and those of nonelites . . . Brumfiel demonstrates that gender parallelism prevailed outside of administrative strucgtures, even though Aztec state ideology disparaged female gender. Joyce, Costin, and I similarly emphasize the internal differentiation of gender (and class) and the establishment of gender hierarchy either through the direct control of women producers (Costin and Wright), elite women in ritual display ( Joyce and Wright) and women in high ranking kinship groups (Joyce)" (15).
"Reconstructing Fertility" makes some interesting points about factors impacting fertility: fertility levels differ significantly between agricultural and nonagricultural groups, which may be due to desire among agriculturalists for larger families to undertake field labor, "the availability of suitable weaning foods that could shorten postpartum . . . . lactation, a higher nutritional intake due to the ability to store foods, or a reduction in energy expenditure by women whose work laods altered with agricultural technology . . . . higher fertility rates may not have been responsible for population increase." Could have been result of ag groups access to good weaning foods and nutritional improvement led to higher fertility. But if that led to shorter birth intervals, that might have increased infant/child morbidity/mortality, potentially lowering population levels. "Pennington has recently demonstrated that decreases in childhood mortality alone could have produced significant population increase in prehistory" (29).
Many studies demonstrate nutritional stress with the advent of agriculture. Loss of dietary diversity may have led to iron deficiency anemias, at least in NA with introduction of maize, which would have impacted pregnant & lactating women. Osteological analysis cross-culturally indicates that "early agriculture entailed significant physiological hardships for many human societies" (36) OTOH surplus plus storage might have allowed for denser populations and activity levels also significantly impact fertility/ovarian function.
"work requirements for women changed and, in most cases, probably became more arduous with the beginnings of garden cultivation or horticulture. Robert Pickering (1984) has interpreted changes in the cervical vertebrae of the Mississippian and Late Woodland females as evidence for their greater participation in subsistence-related chores such as food processing. Similarly, Patricia Bridges has shown that Mississippian women from northern Alabama were characterized by greater long bone size and strength compared to Archaic foraging females. She relates these significant skeletal changes to the activities required of Mississippian horticulturalist women, including their garden labor, food preparation and cooking, hauling of firewood and water, ceramic and leather manufacture . . . the pounding of corn using pestles and mortars was a particularly onerous task" On the other hand evidence from the south coast of Georgia indicates a decrease in energy output for both males and females with the advent of agriculture (37).
Some evidence suggests botanical contraceptives may have been more efficacious than previously thought (38). Greeks used silphion, now extinct, as a contraceptive, and such remains may be recoverable in archaeobotanical record.
In "Reconceiving Technology," Judith McGraw looks at brassieres, closets, the white collar, and the bathroom for what they can tell us about gender, technology, power, and our unexamined assumptions about each of these. Some of my favorite lines: "Anyone who has kept house knows how much time is spent in picking things up and putting them away. . . . anyone who has performed housework also knows how hard it is to delegatetasks, such as cooking, to someone who does not know hwere to find the tools and ingredients, or tasks; such as laundry, to someone who does not know where to put things away . . . the extensiveness and social invisibility of these household filing skills helps explainwhy housework has remained so resistant to the division of labor . . . by the late nineteenth century virtually all middle-class girls must have received domestic training in this sort of filing. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, once government and corporate bureaucracies came to require extensive filing systems, they could find an abundant supply of female employees to perform the labor skillfully, yet at low pay, just as manufacturers had experienced little trouble finding cheap female labor to perform supposedly unskilled sewing tasks" (63).
"Technology, Gender, and Class" looks at the production of cloth in Mesopotamia "throughout history cloth and textiles have served as major carriers of culture, whether as valued goods in the marketplace, items of exchange among groups wishing to establish alliances, or as emblems of status and role in secular and nonsecular rituals . . . . cloth and textiles were central to the Mesopotamian economy and social relations and served as a medium of exchange and an important signifier of status" (80).
"In spite of their poor working conditions, women in cloth production possessed significant technical skills, as is attested by the variation in the lists of cloth and clothing items. This variation indicates that many different types of weaving techniques were employed to produce them. Although there is no direct evidence, since there are few archaeological textiles, the techniques employed no doubt were drawn from the producers' different regional and ethnic groups captured in battles or purchased as slaves and local women serving indentured or other servie from urban and rural settlements who worked together in the workshops . . . the knowledge, tools, and skills they brought with them constitute the technical options at the society's disposal. Therefore, whatever innovations or technical expertise developed within the workshops most likely came through the experimentation of the women themselves. I don't think we should imagine that textile engineers who were not weavers devised new techniques. There is no suggestion that the individuals who recorded workshop output were very knowledgeable about weaving. The categories used in recording cloth are decidedly nontechnical; words like sumptuous or ordinary or even third grade are social categories. We do not read about records of thread counts per unit of measure, for example, a technical means of assessing the value of cloth" (94) [for more on the importance of knowledge in textile production, see _Learning by Doing_]
Textile workers at Ur appear to have been employed full-time to meet needs of large quantities of cloth for the temple and palace for "allotments to workers, for social and ritual display and for local consumption, trade, and exchange . . . Unlike other craft producers who were employed part-time and were free to distribute the products of their labor, women weavers appear not to have been free to produce, distribute, or consume their products" (94).
Women and weaving were strongly linked at Ur; "Another name for Uttu is Sig, "Wool," and in the royal love song "My 'Wool' being Lettuce' is a provocative association of wool with female pubic hair and sexual reproduction. In another royal love song, 'The First child' the king refers to his queen's fertility as the warp on the loom and the mother of a large family as 'the clothbeam with its finished cloth' . . . references to dowries include items used in textile production such as wool, wool combs, loom woods, spindles, and cloth" (99)
"The particular circumstances of female weavers was conditioned by the vested interests of the state and other powerful institutions to control both the production _and_ distribution of cloth for economic and social reasons. Textiles were central to the economy as a major export product and for distribution to workers. In addition, the social use of cloth as adornment and as a signifier of status and affiliation in important ceremonies and rituals was a compelling reason to control its production and distribution . . . . control of both production and distribution by large institutions promoted efficiency but, more importantly, it insured that particular grades and styles were produced and distributed for the 'right' people." (101-102)
association of women with weaving seems to have been deeply embedded . . . policies must have explicitly limited the number of males in the workshops . . . there were still class differences among women: "The active participation of high-ranking women in the temple and palacein complementary roles in the elaboration of ceremonial and administrative apparatus enhanced the status of some women." Women may have been minimally involved in conscripted service outside weaving . . . Zagarell has argued that the appropriation of female labor in the Mesopotamian textile workshops was instrumental in replacing the kin-corporate system of property ownership with a centralized, state-ordered mode of production . . . control of the allocation of women's labor and their production was a 'metaphor for the appropriation of kin group community' and the control of the dual potential of reproduction and production.
Gendered encounters with field data looks at scientific practices and the ways in which archaeologists 'put forth more heavily constructed "facts" than other scientists . . . if replicability is in all science a powerfully conflated fiction," it is more so in archaeology, where data cannot be reviewed or reinspected once it is collected. "Archaeologists have no second chance and competing researchers no independent review process of fundamental evidential matters: what is to count as 'association'? or superimposition? or a semantically grouped entity like 'postmold'? . . . principal investigators not only direct data collection but also take charge of knowledge assessments and truth claims . . . chains of evidential inference are ultimately constructed by a single unchecked, and uncheckable, authority (252) new knowledge is summarized in a form that suggests that results followed rationally and directly out of tightly controlled and entirely impersonal procedures: names of technicians or workers are most notably omitted, and the use of a passive tense further removes human agency. Temporal sequences are ignored or inverted; formal and generalized methodological routines are reported as though anyone would have come to the same conclusions, without reference to the local, heterogenous, individualized, and contextualized 'technical know-how' used to make knowledge visible, to negotiate what counts as an adequate record of what was observed, or what counts as 'the same thing' or what counts as 'agreement' Good science achieves a generalized and impersonal context that never exists in practice (257)
"I want to insist that the embedded, implicit, shared background assumptions, language use, technical know-how, and practical skills that underpin the social, interactive activity of archaeology are themselves a distorting or at least a constituting context" (258).
Archaeological practices in Brazil: "the use of red 'twist 'ems' to mark the location of small flakes or bone fragments in situ so they would stand out during mapping; unique and clever ways of folding the identifying labels into flaps of plastic bags containing wet flotation samples to protect the labels from moisture; the hanging of flotation bags from associated excavation unit stakes to dry out before being packed away" (259) [see photo of "clean" and "human-inflected" excavation sites] Interesting example of how "God's eye" view in final excavation photo was first attempted by two female crew members lifting a male crew member, and ultimately by switching to a lighter crew member on the shoulders of the largest crew member, known on the site as "Rambo." "The objectifying 'god's eye' aerial perspective is achieved finally not by ignoring or discounting the social circumstances that produced the object of study but by directly affirming, incorporating, and building upon the established social identities of available personnel" (262).
Rita Wright's chapter on "Technology, Gender, and Class: Worlds of Difference in Ur III Mesopotamia" argues that "weaving and cloth were positioned at he center of gender, class, and ethnic differences. These differences were most pronounced, but not limited to, women producers of textiles and those who wore and used high quality cloth. [Uses] imagery principally on seals to highlight the symbolic power of cloth in early Mesopotamia, especially when worn by women in occupations associated with temple and palace functions. Their status and role are contrasted to the women producers of cloth who, in spite of (perhaps because of) the importance of cloth in Mesopotamian society, were a relatively impoverished group . . . [focuses] on technology as a means of teasing out how labor was organized in the weaver's workshops in which they worked, the production methods used in making cloth and the technical knowledge possessed by women producers, and the various state policies that effectively controlled textile production and women who produced cloth . . . while cloth became a visible carrier of culture, its producers received little recognition and were themselves 'invisible'" (9)
The essays move toward more fine-grained, multivariate analyses of the way that gender and power differentials play out -- they explore "the plasticity of gender constructs in different domains, especially as developed out of elite administrative needs and those of nonelites . . . Brumfiel demonstrates that gender parallelism prevailed outside of administrative strucgtures, even though Aztec state ideology disparaged female gender. Joyce, Costin, and I similarly emphasize the internal differentiation of gender (and class) and the establishment of gender hierarchy either through the direct control of women producers (Costin and Wright), elite women in ritual display ( Joyce and Wright) and women in high ranking kinship groups (Joyce)" (15).
"Reconstructing Fertility" makes some interesting points about factors impacting fertility: fertility levels differ significantly between agricultural and nonagricultural groups, which may be due to desire among agriculturalists for larger families to undertake field labor, "the availability of suitable weaning foods that could shorten postpartum . . . . lactation, a higher nutritional intake due to the ability to store foods, or a reduction in energy expenditure by women whose work laods altered with agricultural technology . . . . higher fertility rates may not have been responsible for population increase." Could have been result of ag groups access to good weaning foods and nutritional improvement led to higher fertility. But if that led to shorter birth intervals, that might have increased infant/child morbidity/mortality, potentially lowering population levels. "Pennington has recently demonstrated that decreases in childhood mortality alone could have produced significant population increase in prehistory" (29).
Many studies demonstrate nutritional stress with the advent of agriculture. Loss of dietary diversity may have led to iron deficiency anemias, at least in NA with introduction of maize, which would have impacted pregnant & lactating women. Osteological analysis cross-culturally indicates that "early agriculture entailed significant physiological hardships for many human societies" (36) OTOH surplus plus storage might have allowed for denser populations and activity levels also significantly impact fertility/ovarian function.
"work requirements for women changed and, in most cases, probably became more arduous with the beginnings of garden cultivation or horticulture. Robert Pickering (1984) has interpreted changes in the cervical vertebrae of the Mississippian and Late Woodland females as evidence for their greater participation in subsistence-related chores such as food processing. Similarly, Patricia Bridges has shown that Mississippian women from northern Alabama were characterized by greater long bone size and strength compared to Archaic foraging females. She relates these significant skeletal changes to the activities required of Mississippian horticulturalist women, including their garden labor, food preparation and cooking, hauling of firewood and water, ceramic and leather manufacture . . . the pounding of corn using pestles and mortars was a particularly onerous task" On the other hand evidence from the south coast of Georgia indicates a decrease in energy output for both males and females with the advent of agriculture (37).
Some evidence suggests botanical contraceptives may have been more efficacious than previously thought (38). Greeks used silphion, now extinct, as a contraceptive, and such remains may be recoverable in archaeobotanical record.
In "Reconceiving Technology," Judith McGraw looks at brassieres, closets, the white collar, and the bathroom for what they can tell us about gender, technology, power, and our unexamined assumptions about each of these. Some of my favorite lines: "Anyone who has kept house knows how much time is spent in picking things up and putting them away. . . . anyone who has performed housework also knows how hard it is to delegatetasks, such as cooking, to someone who does not know hwere to find the tools and ingredients, or tasks; such as laundry, to someone who does not know where to put things away . . . the extensiveness and social invisibility of these household filing skills helps explainwhy housework has remained so resistant to the division of labor . . . by the late nineteenth century virtually all middle-class girls must have received domestic training in this sort of filing. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, once government and corporate bureaucracies came to require extensive filing systems, they could find an abundant supply of female employees to perform the labor skillfully, yet at low pay, just as manufacturers had experienced little trouble finding cheap female labor to perform supposedly unskilled sewing tasks" (63).
"Technology, Gender, and Class" looks at the production of cloth in Mesopotamia "throughout history cloth and textiles have served as major carriers of culture, whether as valued goods in the marketplace, items of exchange among groups wishing to establish alliances, or as emblems of status and role in secular and nonsecular rituals . . . . cloth and textiles were central to the Mesopotamian economy and social relations and served as a medium of exchange and an important signifier of status" (80).
"In spite of their poor working conditions, women in cloth production possessed significant technical skills, as is attested by the variation in the lists of cloth and clothing items. This variation indicates that many different types of weaving techniques were employed to produce them. Although there is no direct evidence, since there are few archaeological textiles, the techniques employed no doubt were drawn from the producers' different regional and ethnic groups captured in battles or purchased as slaves and local women serving indentured or other servie from urban and rural settlements who worked together in the workshops . . . the knowledge, tools, and skills they brought with them constitute the technical options at the society's disposal. Therefore, whatever innovations or technical expertise developed within the workshops most likely came through the experimentation of the women themselves. I don't think we should imagine that textile engineers who were not weavers devised new techniques. There is no suggestion that the individuals who recorded workshop output were very knowledgeable about weaving. The categories used in recording cloth are decidedly nontechnical; words like sumptuous or ordinary or even third grade are social categories. We do not read about records of thread counts per unit of measure, for example, a technical means of assessing the value of cloth" (94) [for more on the importance of knowledge in textile production, see _Learning by Doing_]
Textile workers at Ur appear to have been employed full-time to meet needs of large quantities of cloth for the temple and palace for "allotments to workers, for social and ritual display and for local consumption, trade, and exchange . . . Unlike other craft producers who were employed part-time and were free to distribute the products of their labor, women weavers appear not to have been free to produce, distribute, or consume their products" (94).
Women and weaving were strongly linked at Ur; "Another name for Uttu is Sig, "Wool," and in the royal love song "My 'Wool' being Lettuce' is a provocative association of wool with female pubic hair and sexual reproduction. In another royal love song, 'The First child' the king refers to his queen's fertility as the warp on the loom and the mother of a large family as 'the clothbeam with its finished cloth' . . . references to dowries include items used in textile production such as wool, wool combs, loom woods, spindles, and cloth" (99)
"The particular circumstances of female weavers was conditioned by the vested interests of the state and other powerful institutions to control both the production _and_ distribution of cloth for economic and social reasons. Textiles were central to the economy as a major export product and for distribution to workers. In addition, the social use of cloth as adornment and as a signifier of status and affiliation in important ceremonies and rituals was a compelling reason to control its production and distribution . . . . control of both production and distribution by large institutions promoted efficiency but, more importantly, it insured that particular grades and styles were produced and distributed for the 'right' people." (101-102)
association of women with weaving seems to have been deeply embedded . . . policies must have explicitly limited the number of males in the workshops . . . there were still class differences among women: "The active participation of high-ranking women in the temple and palacein complementary roles in the elaboration of ceremonial and administrative apparatus enhanced the status of some women." Women may have been minimally involved in conscripted service outside weaving . . . Zagarell has argued that the appropriation of female labor in the Mesopotamian textile workshops was instrumental in replacing the kin-corporate system of property ownership with a centralized, state-ordered mode of production . . . control of the allocation of women's labor and their production was a 'metaphor for the appropriation of kin group community' and the control of the dual potential of reproduction and production.
Gendered encounters with field data looks at scientific practices and the ways in which archaeologists 'put forth more heavily constructed "facts" than other scientists . . . if replicability is in all science a powerfully conflated fiction," it is more so in archaeology, where data cannot be reviewed or reinspected once it is collected. "Archaeologists have no second chance and competing researchers no independent review process of fundamental evidential matters: what is to count as 'association'? or superimposition? or a semantically grouped entity like 'postmold'? . . . principal investigators not only direct data collection but also take charge of knowledge assessments and truth claims . . . chains of evidential inference are ultimately constructed by a single unchecked, and uncheckable, authority (252) new knowledge is summarized in a form that suggests that results followed rationally and directly out of tightly controlled and entirely impersonal procedures: names of technicians or workers are most notably omitted, and the use of a passive tense further removes human agency. Temporal sequences are ignored or inverted; formal and generalized methodological routines are reported as though anyone would have come to the same conclusions, without reference to the local, heterogenous, individualized, and contextualized 'technical know-how' used to make knowledge visible, to negotiate what counts as an adequate record of what was observed, or what counts as 'the same thing' or what counts as 'agreement' Good science achieves a generalized and impersonal context that never exists in practice (257)
"I want to insist that the embedded, implicit, shared background assumptions, language use, technical know-how, and practical skills that underpin the social, interactive activity of archaeology are themselves a distorting or at least a constituting context" (258).
Archaeological practices in Brazil: "the use of red 'twist 'ems' to mark the location of small flakes or bone fragments in situ so they would stand out during mapping; unique and clever ways of folding the identifying labels into flaps of plastic bags containing wet flotation samples to protect the labels from moisture; the hanging of flotation bags from associated excavation unit stakes to dry out before being packed away" (259) [see photo of "clean" and "human-inflected" excavation sites] Interesting example of how "God's eye" view in final excavation photo was first attempted by two female crew members lifting a male crew member, and ultimately by switching to a lighter crew member on the shoulders of the largest crew member, known on the site as "Rambo." "The objectifying 'god's eye' aerial perspective is achieved finally not by ignoring or discounting the social circumstances that produced the object of study but by directly affirming, incorporating, and building upon the established social identities of available personnel" (262).
December 8, 2024
This collection of essays was truly formative for my own research. Rosemary Joyce's chapter is a must-read for any Mayanists out there!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews