sexuality | Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives

Browsing All posts tagged under »sexuality«

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, […]

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 […]

Ain’t I a Woman?

March 19, 2013

Well, no, actually– not even 30% of one. But you sure are making history. That’s my gut reaction after being asked by BBC Radio to participate in a broadcast reacting to a news story published on the BBC website today. Tagline: Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien thinks of himself as 70% male and 30% […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]