women (Other Keyword)
1-25 (34 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Maritime Archeology of the Slave Trade: Past and Present Work, and Future Prospects", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The relationships cultivated by African enslaved women resulted in dissemination of new ethnic identities and social structures, which can be traced in the maritime archaeological record. Sources including artwork and ethno-historical accounts of enslaved women and their children demonstrate...
All The Single Ladies: Queering Race In The 19th Century Through The Materiality of African-American Female-Headed Households (2015)
Unspoken in discussions of heteronormativity is not only the assumption that couples are straight, but also that they are white and middle class. Thus, by definition. as non-heteronormative households, black families can be considered queer. In this paper, we explore the ways that queer theory offers new intellectual opportunities and frameworks to explore archaeologies of race and racialization. Using case studies from 19th century Louisiana and Illinois, we will examine the households and...
Archaic Women in the High Country: an Ethnoarchaeological Framework (2015)
All-male hunting parties of the Middle Holocene are an important concept in the archaeology of America’s western mountains. The dichotomy of later high mountain family villages (repeat occupations of high density and diversity) versus specialized hunting sites and ‘man caves’ (sensu Thomas) are cited to argue that Archaic women never saw, or ventured into, remote high mountain landscapes. Yet the ethnographic literature of mobile foragers contains interesting evidence of women, usually young...
Army Wives and Kids: Civilian Lives in Military Context at the Augusta Arsenal (2018)
Between 1826 and 1955, the Augusta Arsenal operated on the land currently occupied by the Summerville Campus of Augusta University. As a military site, it is easy to conceptualize the Arsenal as a male gendered place and associate it almost exclusively with war-related manufacturing activities. However, most of the artifacts recovered from the Arsenal directly address the domestic lives of the people who lived there. Additionally, many artifacts from the Arsenal speak to presence of the often...
'Beggars, Miserable, Destitute and Poor'. The Archaeology of Urban Poverty in Early Modern Denmark (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Poverty And Plenty In The North", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 16th and 17th century saw a growth in the urban poor, many of whom were parts of a mass migration from countryside to cities. Many of the newcomers were poor trying to escape a poverty induced by epidemics, wars, climate change or political unrest. Some managed to settle in the cities for life, while others faced a life in constant...
The Colors of the Coya's Robes (2016)
Of the many surviving pre-Columbian Inka textiles, especially those made in tapestry and featuring tukapu (rectangular design blocks), only a few full-size garments are associated with females. There are, however, many miniature female garments. Inka textiles also tend to follow a limited number of color combinations, although some textiles show a more diverse, even exuberant mixture. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, in his section on the coyas (queens), attributes a specific set of colors to each...
Dueñas de la memoria, guardianas de la historia: Mujeres Mayas, ritualidad y arqueología en el altiplano del territorio guatemalteco (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En el contexto de pueblos invadidos y luego brutalmente colonizados en los territorios que conforman la actual República de Guatemala, las mujeres mayas juegan un papel fundamental en la preservación, transmisión y radicalismo de la cultura. Las mujeres mayas son las constructoras y guardianas del pensamiento, idiomas, valores, filosofías y...
Engaging the Public Through Women's Emergence in Archaeology (2015)
As we live in a world in which the social sciences continually undergo negative publicity in the public sphere, spreading our knowledge is more important than ever. Since archaeology depends on the support of non-academic communities, we must combat negative portrayals of social science through outreach events and public portrayals of our work. We explore the impact of doing archaeology through women’s life experiences. Through this lens, we discuss the passive and active manners in which...
Engendering the Archaeological Record of the Southern Plateau, Northwestern North America (2016)
Within the last 30 years, researchers have made considerable advances in the effort to engender the archaeological record in areas of northwestern North America. Despite these developments, archaeological considerations of gender in the southern Plateau remain markedly sparse; rather, studies in the region tend to focus on human-environmental interactions and subsistence, settlement, and technological systems. This study aims to address the relative scarcity of explicit and systematic approaches...
Female mobility in the Viking Worlds (2015)
Recent reassessments of the gender balance among Viking Age Scandinavian populations in the British Isles have suggested a greater presence of immigrant women than previously thought. At the same time, increasing support for a view of the Viking world as a diaspora, with a sustained network between the original and the acquired homelands, has necessitated a better understanding of the mechanics of the migration process. This paper evaluates interdisciplinary evidence for the level of mobility...
A Feminist Intersectional Perspective On Symbolic Meanings Of Statues Of Women (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Monuments and Statues to Women: Arrival of an Historical Reckoning of Memory and Commemoration", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. A feminist intersectional theoretical perspective reveals that Western patriarchy's intersecting androcentrism and racism have been ideologically legitimated, promoted and sanctified by the great predominance of statues commemorating real, powerful white men, often on horses to...
Finding and ‘heritaging’ women in the landlord villages of Iran (2016)
The landlord villages of Iran were owned by a powerful, usually absentee landlord, who had near-total control over the political, economic and social lives of all those living within them. A range of sources describe the male occupants of the villages, and when reading historical and anthropological studies of landlord villages, it would be easy to think they were occupied by an amorphous mass of (male) peasants living in extreme poverty, who were subject entirely to the will of the (male)...
Finding Women in their Lost Possessions: Personal Artifacts at the Luna Settlement (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Tristan de Luna 1559-1561 Spanish expedition carried around 1,500 total people in hopes to settle La Florida. While extensive documentary and archaeological research has been conducted on this expedition, there has been no study to date on the material culture evidence of the women and children that would have accompanied this...
Foxy Ladies: investigating human-animal interactions at Agvik, Banks Island (2017)
Outstanding organic preservation at many Arctic sites gives archaeologists access to large artifactual and faunal assemblages through which to examine human-animal interactions. However, much of the research focused on these interactions conceives them not only in ecological/economic terms, but also examines them at the level of entire communities (e.g. zooarchaeological studies of subsistence) or focuses on the predominantly male realm of hunting. The Arctic ethnographic record reflects a...
Framing Unequal Boundaries: Women, Queens, and Gender (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the landmark 1986 “Blood of Kings,” kingship has been a central theme in the archaeology, iconography, and epigraphy of the ancient Americas. Despite recent discoveries, the topic of women rulers remains ancillary to the larger view of male-dominated social and political power. During the past 30 years, roles of women have been...
From Perfume to Poison: A Reflection of Women in the Archaeological Assemblage of Philadelphia (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Although material used by women and girls is undoubtedly part of almost all archaeological assemblages, specific interpretations of their daily lives can be difficult to parse out. However, archaeologists can turn to material culture that specifically speaks to the lives of women to better understand their experiences. During excavations of the I-95/Girard Avenue Interchange Project...
From Rags to Riches: The Class, Status, and Power of Clothing Among Ancient Maya Women (2015)
Analysis of Maya female imagery has generally centered on the role of women as depicted on monumental architecture. While we understand these depictions to be tools of propaganda, they are often used to make assertions about the lived experience of ancient Maya women. In contrast to the analysis of highly politicized and highly public imagery depicted on monumental architecture, this paper examines depictions of feminine performance on a personalized medium: Maya painted vases. More...
Gimballed Beds and Gamming Chairs: Seafaring Wives aboard Nineteenth-Century Sailing Ships (2015)
Women lived on sailing ships with their families during the 19th century, and chronicled their experiences in journals and letters now found in historical archives. Their stories remain on the periphery, as their signature is difficult to find in the maritime archaeological record. Primary documents make mention of several items built or brought on board specifically for their comfort or entertainment. Five captain’s wives sailed on the 19th-century whaleship Charles W. Morgan, still afloat...
Informal Economic Strategies During Alcohol Prohibition In Anaconda, MontanaAlcohol Prohibition (2015)
One of the many unintended consequences of the Prohibition Era was an unorganized but collective social resistance movement across the nation. Research in the town of Anaconda, Montana, focused on the years of 1923 through 1926, granted a unique opportunity to capture a snapshot of collective social resistance in a company...
Interpreting the Archaeology of Pregnancy Loss (2017)
The status of pregnancy loss as taboo in Western culture, as well as the poor preservation of fetal remains, contributes to the absence of pregnancy loss from the anthropological study of funerary practices. Furthermore, pregnancy loss is rarely viewed by society as a legitimate cause for bereavement and perhaps consequently, has been overlooked in the archaeological record. Additionally, grief associated with a miscarriage or stillbirth is often described as a novel phenomenon, while parental...
Invisibility and Intersectionality: Seeking Free Black Women in Antebellum Kentucky (2018)
Investigation into the lifeways of freedman George White suggest a successful businessman with the means to purchase and keep approximately 300 acres, to purchase and emancipate his family, and to build a safe community for his family and other freed slaves in eastern Kentucky. However, documentary research revealed only small fragments about the female members of his family. The women are, for the most part, invisible. This paper uses intersectionality as a theoretical lens to explore the...
Markets, Churches, Piers, & Foundries: Some of the Patterns of Everyday Life in Late-19th-Century San Francisco. (2016)
The everyday paths and patterns of late-19th-century San Franciscans brought them to a variety of businesses, workplaces, and institutions. This paper will use the archaeological and historical data from a series of domestic sites located in the South of Market Neighborhood in San Francisco to trace these paths throughout the city. Using an analysis of the local products, the schools, institutions, and workplaces, this paper seeks to shed light on the lives of working-class San Franciscans. In...
Moonshining Women and the Informal Economy in Two Prohibition Era Montana Towns (2016)
One unintended consequence of the Prohibition Era in the U.S. was an unorganized but national collective social resistance movement based in individual civil disobedience. Recent research into the town of Anaconda, Montana during alcohol prohibition has revealed that men and women participated in moonshining activities. Comparison of male and female offenders in Anaconda indicated that the informal economy in which alcohol resided, was formalized by city officials as a legitimate economic...
Parasols, Picnics, and Pavillions: Feminization of the Florida Frontier (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster analyzes how the Federal army and its camp followers imposed a white American identity, specifically a feminine identity, on the Florida frontier in the early 19th century. To answer this question, I used archival and archaeological data from Fort Brooke, Tampa to better understand the ways that women contributed to the drive to civilize the borders of the new United States....
The Polly Bemis Ranch Archaeological Project: Revisiting Idaho’s Most Famous Chinese American Pioneer (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Chinese American woman who would become known as Polly Bemis arrived in Idaho Territory in 1872. Eventually settling on the remote Salmon River with her European American husband, Charlie, Polly’s life has been the subject of literary works and even a Hollywood movie. Despite this attention, many aspects of...