Women, Reproduction, and Fertility: How "Common-Sense" Assumptions of the Present Filter into the Mesoamerican Past

Summary

This paper queries models of Mesoamerican fertility that define women’s social roles in terms of dependency, and interrogates narratives that link gender relations to nature where they are beyond critique. The problem with the category women is that it is often thought of as an ahistorical and eternal facet of biology hidden within an implicit model of human nature. Biology becomes a metaphor for social relations and wifehood or motherhood is then characterized as a relation of dependency effectively excluding women from any other cultural contributions to society. The portrayal of women in Mesoamerican archaeological discussions of fertility rituals and goddess cults has reproduced sexist understandings of the past. Using research on the Nepean Collection, the largest collection of artifacts from the Postclassic (A.D. 900-1519) pilgrimage site of Isla de Sacrificios in ancient Mexico, this paper highlight’s women’s important economic, political, and religious contributions to Mesoamerican society. This paper also reclaims and refashions the Mesoamerican fertility narrative by demonstrating that ancient women controlled their reproduction rights within the context of Postclassic religious practices.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Common Sense   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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