Queer Eye for the Dead Guy: The Influence of Debra Martin on a Bioarchaeological Investigation of Gender beyond the Binary

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Any aspect of human social life worth studying, whether in the past or present, is a complex product of history, biology, culture, and agency. Gender is a prime and important example of just such a topic. It requires a high degree of nuance to understand and describe gender constructs in a contemporary society, and studies of gender in prehistory are even more fraught. This presentation will focus on what can be learned of gender in Early Bronze Age (EBA; ~2300–1600 BCE) communities of Central Europe through theoretically informed bioarchaeological studies. The unmistakable influence of Dr. Debra Martin will be readily apparent in the biocultural and contextual approach to this research, which draws heavily from embodiment theory and from paleoepidemiological models of the recursive relationships between stressors (environmental and cultural), buffering mechanisms, and health outcomes. This holistic and multiscalar orientation toward bioarchaeological research, championed by Dr. Martin, has enabled the current study to find evidence of a complex, plastic, and perhaps nonbinary system of gender in EBA Mierzanowice Culture communities of southern Poland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33228