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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 »sex/gender«
“I want a caveman, I want a brave man”
Oh. My. God. Wild Men? The First Fred Flintstones Were Left Holding the Baby yells the Daily Express. Not much better, when you discount the popular culture reference, is the US News & World Report: Even Ancient Men Seemed to Like their Man Caves. Urk. I cannot believe I just typed the words “man cave”. […]
Evolution as Fight Club
May 21, 2011
This just in: ancestral humans adopted bipedal posture so that males could fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making their punches more dangerous. OK. I actually thought I knew the range of arguments for bipedalism. I guess I appreciate having something novel to think about? The research described in news reports I read was […]
“Gay Caveman”: Wrecking a perfectly good story
April 7, 2011
So, I get up this morning in Paris and do my news search, and immediately I see articles all over the world headlined “Gay Caveman”. As I write, the most recent being served up is from The West Australian. Not sure but I suspect that is the Austalian equivalent of a really small town newspaper, […]
“Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology”: Some comments
April 2, 2011
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 […]
Burying the dead (at Tlatilco and elsewhere)
March 19, 2011
I read a wide swath of archaeological news every day, and this past week the news I am reading has been resonating– or really, has presented a counterpoint to– the writing I have been doing myself. Because, as is typical, many of the news stories I am reading are about finds of human remains, which […]
Sex work and archaeology
March 5, 2011
Why are brothels such a common focus of archaeologies of gender? This question was spurred by reading the most recent news coverage about research directed by Mary Beaudry of Boston University on artifacts recovered at the Mill Pond site during the “Big Dig”, massive excavations that were required to place freeways underground. Back in October […]
Roman Sex, Online and Broadcast
January 18, 2011
“We end with pepper, and we’re going to begin with porn.” Now, that’s an eye-catching sentence. Or really, since this is a broadcast made available by BBC Radio, an ear-catching sentence. In 2010, the BBC collaborated with the British Museum to produce a history of humanity– through descriptions of 100 objects. The series is fabulous […]
Donna Reed with brow ridges?
January 3, 2011
For those of us raised on the first generation of mass TV, The Donna Reed Show became the epitome of idealized (and thus unreal) suburban family life. I couldn’t help thinking of Donna Reed in the face of the barrage of recent coverage of news about Neanderthals. Neanderthal girls, we are now told, “wept bitterly” […]
Anthropology is a science…and more
December 30, 2010
A little off-topic but in my view worth reposting here from the original location. Notice that if Nicholas Wade’s view of anthropology were valid, this blog could not exist: science and research on sex and gender seem to be incompatible to him. “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science […]
The aggressive bully or the charming Statesman?
December 15, 2010
“Who has higher fertility and more surviving offspring – the aggressive bully or the charming Statesman?” So Christopher von Rueden, described as a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, summarized the point of his research, publicized by UCSB, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Von Rueden admits […]
June 2, 2011
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