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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«
Loose women of the Amazon
You really have to watch those metaphors: “Johnny has two daddies” may have been common in Amazonian cultures blares World Science, inadvertently implying that researchers are suggesting traditional Amazonian society was unusually gay-friendly. Sify News manages at least to keep the story heterosexual: Extramarital sexual affairs were common in Amazonian cultures is its take. Still, […]
Putting a Finger on Sexy Neanderthals
November 4, 2010
Digit ratios sounds like something students in primary school have to learn. But according to research published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences), the proportions of the fingers of the hominin hand are tell tale signs of relative promiscuity, at least for Ardipithecus, early modern humans, and Neanderthals. “The fingers […]
Archaeology of masculinity
September 22, 2010
When I began teaching archaeology of sex and gender as an interdisciplinary course, I had two expectations about who would take the course that simply have not held up over time. The first was that I expected to see a lot of women’s and gender studies students take the course. In fact, students from these […]
Back to school: Teaching archaeology of sex and gender
September 21, 2010
I started this blog for one reason: to create a space in support of people like me who have been teaching the archaeology of sex and gender. My book, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives, was written as a tangible product of the rewarding experience of teaching the course I developed at Berkeley, Letters & Sciences 180A: […]
Older women, older men
August 25, 2010
The article on naturenews online is headlined ‘Grandmother Hypothesis’ Takes a Hit. The punchline? researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology constructed computer simulations intended to test University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes’ decades-old proposal that human longevity is an evolutionary consequence of the adaptive advantage conferred by having older women– “grandmothers”– available […]
Summer kitchens, wives, and the “domestic sphere”
August 2, 2010
Summer in the world of US archaeology means field schools: and so the news about archaeology is dominated by stories from local papers in which broader project goals take a back seat to stereotypes of discovery and treasures. Although one of my purposes in this blog is to critique news coverage of archaeology, taking on […]
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 […]
“Lady Di of the 10th century?”: Poor Eadgyth!
June 17, 2010
“She was a beautiful English princess who married one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs and dazzled subjects with her charity and charm.” Thus did AP reporter Raphael G. Satter start a widely-reproduced story in January that the LA Daily News headline writer reduced to “Lady Di of the 10th Century“. (The Huffington Post more soberly […]
Orkney Venus or Westray Wifie: The power of sexual archetypes
June 16, 2010
The daily Scotsman reported on June 15 that “The Orkney Venus has been named in a shortlist of three for the Best Archaeological Discovery category in the 2010 biannual British Archaeological Awards”. The find is truly important: the object under consideration is almost unprecedented in Neolithic archaeology of Great Britain, and is visually striking, as […]
November 14, 2010
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