Expanding the Niche: Gender and Bioarchaeology among Prehistoric Farming Groups

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the early 1990s when I began my explorations of changing divisions of labor associated with agricultural transitions in the Levant, archaeology was grappling with the tip of the biocultural iceberg that was “gender” (sensu Fausto-Sterling 2000). During the intervening three decades, discussions of gender in archaeology have broadened. Studies have spread across many time periods and regions, and research is less often confined to edited volumes and special issues focused specifically on gender. In a real sense, gender studies have become a bigger part of mainstream archaeological literatures. This paper specifically examines the progress that archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have made leveraging datasets across disciplinary boundaries to enhance our understanding of gender in the past. While this crossover between material culture and biological data has been slow, its momentum seems to be building. Increased interest in gender is discussed using case studies from early agricultural contexts. The results are heartening because they describe a range of gender-inflected activity and kinship pattern variation that has often been masked by unilineal, developmental models that are coming under increasing theoretical scrutiny.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38201.0