Engendering children, engendering archaeology

Abstract

Since the inception of gender archaeology in the 1970s, archaeologists have succeeded in highlighting a variety of methodological problems and prejudices within the discipline. Importantly they revealed the extent of androcentric bias in archaeological interpretation and in doing so pushed for recognition of the value of women’s contributions to ancient and modern societies (Gero 1988). An initial emphasis on the ‘finding of women’ gradually translated into greater awareness of their socio-economic contributions, manifest in the growing number of studies of the gendered division of labour (Spector 1982, 1991; Conkey and Spector 1984; Gero 1991; Hollimon 1992; Joyce 1992). However, the range of activities attributed to women has often been influenced by assumptions of logistical or biological constraints derived from controversial crosscultural anthropological models (Peacock 1991). Women’s activities were defined as those compatible with childcare, confined to limited areas in and around settlement sites. These interpretations proved unacceptable to feminist scholars who opposed sociobiological perceptions of sex and gender as interchangeable concepts, arguing that gender differences and male/female power relations were not the natural and inevitable product of biological difference (Fausto-Sterling 1985; Lorber 1994).

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