Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Research on violence tends to incorporate women in limited views. Women are often portrayed as victims—as sacrificial objects, casualties in conflict, captives, battered partners, or easy prey for criminals. Women are often relegated to passive recipients of violent means. The only acceptable caveats to this perceived tendency is in the protection of offspring, or in rare instances of heroism. The title, Women of Violence, is more likely to evoke an image of female victims than female warriors. This pervasive perception can have negative impacts on the content and quality of present and future research. Archaeological evidence has been presented indicating that women have indeed been recipients of violence, but has it been considered that they may also have been the aggressors? Ethnographic and historical accounts have documented women as standing armies, as ruling classes, and cultural forces wielding violence on a daily basis. Rather than surrendering to the more simplistic portrayals of women, these presentations re-conceptualize the roles of females in the past as warriors, instigators, and perpetrators of violence. They take into consideration the nuance, complexity, and wide range of human behavior—beneficial and harmful—to fully understand the women of the past.

Other Keywords
Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis • Warfare, Violence, and Conflict • Gender • Bronze Age • Mortuary Analysis • Warfare • Historic • Ancestral Pueblo • Ethnohistory/History • Hunter-Gatherers/Foragers

Geographic Keywords
Arizona (State / Territory) • United States of America (Country) • Utah (State / Territory) • Nevada (State / Territory) • California (State / Territory) • North America (Continent) • Republic of Lithuania (Country) • Republic of Latvia (Country) • Republic of Estonia (Country) • Republic of Finland (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)

  • Documents (7)
Documents
  • Do Women Rule Differently? Lessons from the Ancient Egyptian Patriarchy (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathlyn Cooney.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historians often make blanket assumptions that female kings of Egypt ruled differently from men. Hatshepsut is often said to have been a pacifist, not leading her country into invasions abroad. Cleopatra’s rule has been characterized as drama-seeking, manipulative, not to mention hormonally imbalanced in the writings...

  • Female Warriors of the Viking Age (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonio Redon.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In my presentation I will explore how women in the Viking age contributed to acts of violence by looking into three different cases of burials containing women with weapons and armaments. I will draw these studies from my original Master’s thesis published in 2017 and focus solely on the archaeological evidence,...

  • Gendered Trouble: Reconsidering the Role of Females in the Masculinized Spaces of Violence in an Early Bronze Age Population (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Toussaint.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an...

  • The Invisibility of Violent Women (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maryann Calleja.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We are all capable of violence. Violence utilized by men is rarely—if ever—questioned, but for women it is presumed a tool employed only by exception. Individuals and groups of both sexes have used violence to many ends. Though sex may influence the context and mode of employment, the capacity for violence is...

  • Often the Victims, Occasionally the Aggressors: The Role of Women in Warfare and Raiding in the Ancestral Pueblo World (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod. Debra Martin. Pamela Stone.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions about warfare in the pre-contact Southwest tend to focus on lethal interactions between male combatants or the capture of women during raids; much of our own research has focused on the latter. What is overlooked most of the time, however, is the roles that women played in hostile encounters in the region,...

  • Warrior-Women: Strategic use of violence by women moving towards a broader understanding of the poetics of violence (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Stone.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Engaging social theory with bioarchaeological analyses offers provocative ways of re-examining (pre) historic populations. With regards to violence and conflict, the research continues to be driven by androcentric notions that this is a man’s arena, and that females, when associated with violence, are only victims....

  • Women Warriors among Central California Hunter-Gatherers: Egalitarians to the Last Arrow (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Al Schwitalla. Marin Pilloud. Terry Jones.

    This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Participation of females in inter-group combat is well-attested in the historic and ethnographic record of central California, but is often overlooked and/or trivialized in contemporary archaeological research. Drawing from the Central California Bioarchaeological Database (CCBD) that includes information on more than...