Culture Contact and Gender Dynamics in Early Iron Age Southern Italy

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While both gender archaeology and culture contact studies have well-developed bodies of theory, the intersection between these is undertheorized, especially outside more recent and better-documented historical archaeology. This is problematic, since any process of interaction potentially implicates divergent gendered expectations and norms, and can upset previous balances by altering resources and demography in a community. In this paper, I propose a theoretical framework for studying gender in situations of culture contact by exploring the gendered entanglements between local southern Italian communities and Aegean newcomers in the 9th-6th centuries BC. This was a period of intense social change in southern Italic prehistory, eventually leading to the creation of Greek colonies along its shores. This process entailed the close and direct involvement of local communities, both as trading partners and, later, as co-habitants within the same settlements. However, the impact of this trajectory of interaction on the gender organization of local and (later) mixed communities has yet to be fully understood. Here, I draw from feminist perspectives and culture contact theory to reconstruct how these encounters unspooled several parallel processes of interaction across genders, class, and geographical origin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40112.0