In and "Out" of the Cave: Queerness on the Upper Paleolithic Funerary Landscape

Summary

Amongst many other facets of human life, the practice of burying the dead demarcates and changes a space, it becomes imbued and entwined with the identity of the deceased. The physical act of placing a body into the ground is a place-making practice, a performative act, and, in the process, the place becomes gendered. This has been true since the origins of burial practices in the human lineage, dating to at least the early Upper Paleolithic, and perhaps earlier. This paper is a preliminary attempt to look back at the European Upper Paleolithic burial record to examine these burials as queer spaces, and as a place for queer identity construction, reconstruction, and negotiation. The Upper Paleolithic has a severely limited number of burials, and thus these burial places – both cave or rockshelter and open-air contexts - and the individuals contained within them, can be considered queer, different, and non-normative. The queer nature of the embodied identities of these burials and their location has been hereto unexplored. Through an analysis of the intersection of bodies, grave goods, landscapes, and queer theory, the fluidity and contextuality of Upper Paleolithic gendered and sexual spaces and identities will emerge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20100