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How can we use material traces of past lives to understand sex and gender in the past?
Grand Challenges for Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality
A few years back there was a survey of archaeologists to determine the 25 Grand Challenges that archaeology could help solve…That survey was pretty specific about what they considered ‘Grand Challenges’: ‘The Web survey defined grand challenges to be fundamental problems in science and explicitly excluded “disciplinary challenges with respect to the practice of archaeology, […]
Cosmopolitan Women of the European Bronze Age
May 31, 2015
“Bronze Age Woman Had Surprisingly Modern Life” Ok, I think: what are we talking about here? what would be both modern and surprising? The subtitle of the article clarifies things: The stunningly well-preserved remains of the Egtved Girl from 3,500 years ago reveal her travels as a high-status woman of her day. Ahah! the “surprise” […]
Women as Leaders in Early Christianity: Fairy Tales?
November 21, 2013
When I find myself approving of the Daily Mail, I have to pause and ask what in the world is going on. But that is precisely where I find myself: feeling like the Daily Mail, for once, is not sensationalizing a story with its headlines on the reopening of Rome’s Catacombs of Priscilla: Do these […]
Bonampak Sex Change: From Heir to Heiress
October 28, 2013
An article in the Mexican newspaper La Cronica de Hoy reported last Thursday on a new book being presented in Mexico this week, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak. Written by art historians Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Brittenham, the book builds on a long-term project by Miller […]
Ancient Women Are Confusing
September 16, 2013
At least, they are when they show up in positions of power. On Wednesday September 11, Fox News published a report, originally by the AFP, about the discovery of the tomb of Shangguan Wan’er, a Tang dynasty imperial bureaucrat in the Chinese court of Empress Wu Zetian. AFP is the credited source for Fox. But […]
Powerful Women Existed in Moche Society: Now Move On
August 9, 2013
How long does it take for us to not be surprised that powerful women exist? I wonder about that question a lot: every time the tomb or portrait of a woman of the noble class in Classic Maya society is found, we hear about how surprising it is that there were powerful women. Usually, this […]
Sacrificial Virgins: Sex, Violence, and Imagination
August 7, 2013
What is it with men who see sacrificed women and immediately begin to fantasize about their beauty and virginity? This was the story told about the Maya “Sacred Well”, the Cenote at Chichen Itza, as popularized by an interview Alma Reed conducted with Edward Thompson, in 1923 in the New York Times, where Reed wrote […]
Amazing Grace: Deep Histories of Black Freedom in the US
July 26, 2013
“She’s amazing, to be quite frank”. With that opinion, expressed by an archaeologist working on a site in Maryland’s Talbot County, I can only agree. Grace Brooks is amazing, and we should know more about her– and her family, friends and neighbors. Now, thanks to new archaeological work, we will. When she died in 1810, […]
“I am the Walrus”?
July 23, 2013
I am he as you are he as you are me And we are all together… I can’t help it; that was my reaction when I read the story in England’s Daily Telegraph; the headline is intriguing (Walrus remains found buried under St Pancras station in London; A Pacific walrus has been discovered among a […]
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives 
January 31, 2016
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