Engendering the Archaeological Record of the Southern Plateau, Northwestern North America

Summary

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 to archaeological inquiries into gender in the pre-contact period of the southern Plateau and, specifically, approaches which center on women. Studies addressing gender and sex in the archaeological record of the Plateau, Great Basin, and Northwest Coast are reviewed in order to assess current theoretical and methodological frameworks that have been published in peer-reviewed and gray literature. Ethnographic records are reviewed in order to identify female-based activities and the material objects, features, and spatial organizations that are associated with these behaviors. For example, digging sticks/digging stick handles, basketry/matting/woven textiles, needles, ground stone tools, menstrual hut features and camas ovens, and macro-and micro-botanical remains offer potential avenues for exploring issues of gender identity and divisions of labor in the southern Plateau.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage