Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest: Labor, Power, and Prestige

by Patricia L. Crown (Editor)

Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest takes a groundbreaking look at gendered activities in prehistory and the differential access that women and men had to sources and symbols of power and prestige. The authors-including some of the most prominent archaeologists working in the Southwest today-present invaluable methodological and theoretical case studies that take a great step forward in researchers' ability to "read" gender in the evidence left behind by ancient societies. Archaeological interpretation is enhanced and critiqued in a summary discussion by a prominent Southwestern ethnologist and feminist anthropologist. The authors' probe the time period during which Southwestern populations shifted from migratory gatherer-hunters to sedentary agriculturalists and from living in small bands to settling in large aggregated communities. The chapters address the organization of space; ritual activities; mortuary goods and burial facilities; food gathering and agricultural production; hunting and domesticated animals; food processing and preparation; health, nutrition, disease, and violence; craft production; and exchange and interaction.

520 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Patricia L. Crown received her A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1981. She held teaching positions at Southern Methodist University and Arizona State University, and has been on the faculty at the University of New Mexico since 1993, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Dr. Crown has conducted field investigations in the Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam areas of the American Southwest; she recently directed the analysis of artifacts from the trash mounds at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. One result of this research was the recent identification of the first prehispanic cacao (chocolate) north of the Mexican border in ceramics from Chaco Canyon. The Society for American Archaeology awarded her the Excellence in Ceramic Research Award in 1994, and the American Anthropological Association gave her (jointly with Suzanne K. Fish) the Gordon Willey Award in 1998. Her books have included three co-edited volumes, Chaco and Hohokam (SAR Press), Social Violence in the Prehispanic Southwest (University of Arizona Press) and Ceramic Production in the American Southwest (University of Arizona Press), the single-authored, Ceramics and Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery (University of New Mexico Press), and an edited volume Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest: Labor, Power, and Prestige (School of American Research Press).