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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 »history«
What’s the News in News about Roles of Maya Women?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Bone deep: sex and the skeleton
August 27, 2011
I have been waiting to see how long it would take the mainstream press to make the obvious joke about news the New York Times recently reported, that a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable […]
Dead babies still are bad evidence for a Roman brothel
August 9, 2011
Last year I asked the rhetorical question “Are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?” My post rehearsed a number of reasons to be skeptical of the widely reported story about a Roman British site being described as a brothel. Centrally, I objected to the claim that Roman women had “little or no access […]
Body Histories: “Expressive muscles” and women’s fatigue
July 8, 2011
“Any doctor who saw how even experienced female athletes collapsed and were lying on the ground after the race could not support this kind of athletic competition for women.” Norwegian historian Kerstin Bornholdt cites this statement, by a German doctor, H. Franzmeyer, reacting to what he saw as the unsuitable participation by women in the […]
Making a Mark: From Graffiti by Coptic Nuns to Blogging
April 23, 2011
Every scholar knows that professional conferences are where new research is first reported. By the time most research makes it into print, it is old news to us. Stories in the media can sometimes cut the time lag, either because a project circulates a press release, or there is a press center for the organization […]
March 2, 2012
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