Cuts to the Bone: Using Scalping Evidence to Examine the Relationship Between Warfare and Gender in Pre- and Proto-Historic North America

Summary

Stories of brutal cranial de-fleshing terrorized European settlers throughout colonial North America for centuries. Scalping was simultaneously dreaded by common settlers and promoted by European military leaders. In this context, scalping has often been viewed from a western, etic perspective. However, recent bioarchaeological studies of prehistoric scalping provide an opportunity to examine the cultural contexts of scalping and trophy-taking within American Indian culture, both before and after European contact. In this paper, I use multiple lines of evidence, including bioarchaeological sex and age data from scalping victims, to examine the dynamic relationship between gender and warfare as it changed over time in North America.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage