A Study of Methods and Demographics in National Science Foundation Archaeology Grants, 2013–2020

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since Gero’s (1985) germinal article on gender inequities in archaeology, feminist archaeologists have theorized that different research processes in the discipline are gendered: fieldwork is masculine-coded and lab and museum work is feminine-coded. Based on research conducted by the SAA Task Force on Gender Disparities in Archeological Grant Submission, Goldstein and colleagues (2018) revealed that while more men submit grant applications to the National Science Foundation (NSF) overall, both men and women submit more post-PhD proposals for field-based than for lab-based projects. They conclude that the disparity between project types (field-based vs. lab-based) likely results from many factors, which could include the long-held (mis)perception that archaeology (especially that funded by the NSF) is predominantly a masculine-coded field-based pursuit. This, in turn, might lead fewer women to apply to this funding source. This paper seeks to expand on these data by presenting an analysis of NSF-funded project abstracts (2013–2020) that focuses on (1) the types of methods employed, (2) the primary regions where research is conducted, and (3) the genders and organizational affiliations of principal investigators. These data will then be used to determine whether correlations can be drawn between these metrics and gender.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32067