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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 »gender«
Consider buying a book– new, and now
The Society for American Archaeology annual meeting is coming next month. Like thousands of others, I will make the pilgrimage (to Memphis this year) and present a paper (in a session on history of collecting) and discuss a session (on household archaeology, one where Liz Brumfiel was supposed to be the other discussant). I will […]
Nuns and Princesses (Middle Saxon Edition)
March 18, 2012
Catching up with reading recent archaeology news, I am coming late to the Cambridge Archaeological Unit’s report that they titled Mystery of Anglo-Saxon teen buried in bed with gold cross. Great website from Cambridge University, lots of good long contextual quotes, and a sympathetic subject: a teenage girl buried with a piece of craftwork comparable […]
What’s the News in News about Roles of Maya Women?
March 2, 2012
I am waiting (impatiently) for yesterday’s UC Riverside press release to get picked up by the mainstream media. The press release tells us that Contrary to popular belief, women played a central role in Maya society before the arrival of Spanish explorers in the early 16th century, a University of California, Riverside graduate student has […]
Debatable terms: “marriage”
February 5, 2012
This one is going to be very meta: the focus of my discussion is my own writing in another blog. In response to a provocation from a politician with a loose hold on historical facts, yesterday I posted (on What Makes Us Human) a deconstruction of his claim that “marriage” had been a relationship between […]
Nuns with Dirty Dishes
January 29, 2012
Archaeologists seem to have a love/hate relationship with sexuality. We are wary of the easy projection of modern sexual identification onto objects made in very different contexts in the past. On the other hand, while sexualization is a form of exoticization, so, of course, is de-sexualization. What got me started thinking about the balancing act […]
Liz Brumfiel will always be remembered
January 3, 2012
I had a hard time teaching our graduate introduction to theory in archaeology this fall. One of those things that just happens sometimes: the students and I were on different wave-lengths, and one student in particular deeply resented being asked to think theoretically: “why can’t we just let things speak for themselves”, she said at […]
Honoring Janus, looking backward and forward
January 2, 2012
Happy New Year! Ever wonder why January 1 is observed as New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar? I went on a journey to find a rationale for this unusual choice; biased by years of studying ancient Mesoamerica, I found it odd that with the winter solstice so close, the year began at an apparently […]
“Witch Cottage”? No. Cat Burial? Maybe.
December 11, 2011
She was a very old woman, about the age of four-score years, and had been a witch for fifty years. She dwelt in the Forest of Pendle, a vast place, fit for her profession: What she committed in her time, no man knows. She was a general agent for the Devil in all these parts: […]
Where the Girls Are, Roman Edition
November 12, 2011
Once upon a time, the kinds of things we could know about ancient populations were highly generalized. Now, through the work of people like Kristina Killgrove, that is changing– and you can be part of making it happen. I couldn’t be more happy. A while ago (a loong while ago) I started writing a blog […]
Separated at Birth
October 19, 2011
The story in ArtDaily caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, there was the headline: Researchers at SMU-led Etruscan dig in Italy discover ancient depiction of childbirth – first of its kind ever found. Yet another “first of its kind ever found”, I thought, sighing about the media (again). But then I took […]
March 22, 2012
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