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How can we use material traces of past lives to understand sex and gender in the past?
Browsing All Posts filed under »embodiment«
“Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology”: Some comments
Just back from the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, where I had the pleasure of being a discussant on a session organized by Sabrina Agarwal and Julie Wesp. Since my comments run to 2200 words, no way to post them and no point either– who would read them? But here are some […]
More Penis Spines!! (or maybe that should be penis bumps)
March 12, 2011
OK. I will admit that when I wrote the previous post– and the other one about the Nature report over at What Makes Us Human on Psychology Today, where I was perhaps a little more restrained– I did not think it would become a continuing series. But thanks to a wonderful reader over at PT, […]
Penis spines! (oh, and something about brains too…)
March 10, 2011
Nature‘s editors and authors tried, they really tried, titling the report published yesterday “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits”. But from the earliest news report I can find (yesterday on Science 2.0, titled “Why Your Penis Has no Spine”) through to the raft of articles today, reporters have had their […]
British, Roman, or African? On race, ethnicity, and nationality
January 26, 2011
The past was not full of homogeneous towns. People in the past were not uniform in their cultures, their sexualities, or their subjective experiences. If I have one goal in my teaching– one goal in my writing– it would be to get that point across, so that finding difference in past populations would be expected, […]
Classical junk
November 20, 2010
(with apologies to the popular revolt against the TSA…) 348 articles, and counting. And that’s just the English language press… Google News reports at least 74 articles in Italian and another 50 in French. That’s how much news coverage Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has received for his decision to have a statue of Mars […]
Ötzi and his kin
August 28, 2010
Science News and Discovery both have publicized a new theory about Ötzi, the famous “iceman” found in the Alps, published in Antiquity. Instead of dying alone after fleeing the person who shot an arrow in his shoulder, researchers now suggest that the body was found downhill from its original burial site, on a formal stone […]
Steroid-fueled Neanderthals?
July 7, 2010
Prehistoric man apparently boasted a rock-hard body, including an overdeveloped right arm that would make Popeye jealous. Olive Oyl,your hero is waiting… The best line in this New York Daily News story is this: Simply put, the Neanderthal body was brimming with natural steroids. Really? add a gratuitous reference to “girlie-men”, and the story itself […]
Written in the bones: woman gladiator or upwardly mobile peasant?
July 4, 2010
Or maybe not. The BBC headline blares Female ‘gladiator’ remains found in Herefordshire and the alarm in my head goes off. Are there weapons, are there any of the things specific to gladiators? well, no. So what’s the real story here? The lead: the archaeologists “have found the grave of a massive, muscular woman”. And […]
Egypt’s chief archaeologist: Tutankhamun “was actually well-developed”
July 1, 2010
You have to think that Zahi Hawass will not want to be remembered for this quote, out of everything he has to say about Egyptian antiquities. But when the intersection between archaeology and sex becomes literally the intersection of archaeology and… sex, I am willing to bet that this is one thing Hawass says that […]
April 2, 2011
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