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

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.