gender | Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives

Browsing All posts tagged under »gender«

Grand Challenges for Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality

January 31, 2016

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Men, Women, and Inequality in the Neolithic

June 3, 2012

The rich dude gets the hot chick even in prehistory. Thus a perceptive reader commenting on Wired Science’s coverage of newly published research on the roots of inequality in Neolithic Europe sums up the whole story. More soberly, the BBC News emphasizes the contingency of the new findings in its story, titled Cardiff uni claims […]

“So I could be easeful”: Celebrate and Support New Scholars

May 4, 2012

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a tabloid that few outside the academy will have heard of, and fewer insider the academy actually read than might be indicated by its ubiquity in campus administrative offices. It becomes relevant to many new or nearing completion PhDs because it contains employment ads. While the image conjured up […]

Consider buying a book– new, and now

March 22, 2012

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 […]