Gendered Trouble: Reconsidering the Role of Females in the Masculinized Spaces of Violence in an Early Bronze Age Population

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an idealized presentation of an individual of esteem and influence or a reflection of a role in socially sanctioned violence—is highly masculinized and is usually associated with males. Examples of females buried with weapons, or females buried in the masculine orientation, have typically been regarded as exceptions to the rule. However, the fact that such "exceptions" are presented in a context as idealized and symbolic as the grave and that they have such nuance in the diversity of their forms, begs for the reconsideration of these cases not as exceptions, but as intentional and particular forms of "the rule." This presentation includes new bioarchaeological data and revisits assumptions of the role of females in the socially sanctioned exercise of power—whether violent or political.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26257