Warrior-Women: Strategic use of violence by women moving towards a broader understanding of the poetics of violence

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.

Engaging social theory with bioarchaeological analyses offers provocative ways of re-examining (pre) historic populations. With regards to violence and conflict, the research continues to be driven by androcentric notions that this is a man’s arena, and that females, when associated with violence, are only victims. Just as relegating women to rigid positions in domestic spheres in archaeological analyses was criticized to be shortsighted and a culturally constructed idea, the inability to see females as violence perpetrators results in the loss of data that could expand our understanding of females in the past and their relationships with one another and with males. This paper discusses the ways in which anthropologists have defined violence, examines myths of the female warrior alongside archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence of "warrior -women" from a number of cultures, and explores how assumptions of male violence direct research models and consequently miss the impact females may have had in conflict situations. Rendering females less invisible in violence research leads to new interpretations of the poetics and meaning of violence, more nuanced ways of interpreting bioarchaeological evidence, and expands our understanding of the agency, resistance, and the role of women in violent encounters.

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24918