Gender Archaeology

05-05-2006

GENDER ARCHAEOLOGY
Gender difference can be claimed as the origin of the binary oppositions that have been occupying the Western thought for a long time, creating many other binaries that are in one way or another related or attributed to gender, such as body and soul, or matter and essence. Especially philosophy and literary theory are the fields that are more concerned about these categories. Discussions of the subject, not necessarily by feminist thinkers and theorists, have been around since the ancient times as we can see in Plato’s writings on the difference of body and soul, and have entered into almost all kinds of theories as we can see in Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of psychoanalysis or the concept of logocentricism of Derrida’s structuralist theories.
This difference is perhaps the most ancient, most universal and most powerful origin of our current moral codes, and of how we understand and analyze the world around us. Throughout history, societies have developed moral conceptualizations, and organized the overall social activity in terms of gender differences. Even in today’s postmodern, antiauthoritarian and allegedly scientific atmosphere of social life, we continue to use gender as the main tenet of categorization, thus fueling its power of shaping the civilization. After all, even the effort to erase the difference adds to it, as the newly flourishing concept of positive discrimination inadvertently emphasizes the presence of discrimination. Yet, on the other hand, trying to project these ideas to the archaeological record is not so easy. Is it right to look for “our” mode of thinking in the past cultures or is it a prolific endeavor to try to apply the data to our understanding of gender? In any case, we can’t know the situation of gender difference in many periods of history. Actually, this is what the gender archaeologists mainly criticized: the androcentric bias in archaeological interpretation (Conkey&Spector 1984, Conkey&Gero , Gero ). Women were absent in the archaeological record, or they were attributed “tasks” according to the present day’s understanding of gender difference and sexual division of labor. Therefore the goal of the studies on gender archaeology is to discover the “absent” woman of the past, to study her daily life and social status not in today’s, but in her own time’s standards. In this way, making “woman” its main subject, gender archaeology is chiefly a feminist critique.
With this perspective, this paper intends to trace the different trends in gender archaeology, and to present it in an outline. First, after a short introduction to feminism in general and also in science, it will focus on the feminist approach to the archaeological epistemology, using the ideas from different perspectives. Then, with these perspectives in mind, it will look at the history and evolution of the gender archaeology theory. Finally it will assess how the theory has been applied to practice and how it was criticized or accepted by the archaeologists and anthropologists.
Feminism is a movement against patriarchal society and male-dominated values. Its main concern has always been to assign a voice and visibility to women even if its ways of accomplishing this differed in many different phases, or waves, of feminism.
The beginning of the first feminist movement, which is called “First Wave Feminism”, started with Mary Wollstonecraft and her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), after Enlightenment around the second half of the nineteenth century and lasted until 1960s. First wave underlined equality; it regarded women as equal to men, sought for an egalitarian society and wanted to include women into the society. First wave feminists wanted the same rights as men and they tried to make their voices heard within a male-dominated society.
The reaction against the egalitarian society and the elimination of differences emerged during 1960s, which paved the way for “Second Wave Feminism”. “Second Wave Feminism” points out that when women choose to eliminate their differences, then they will start to function within the patriarchal society and male values. If “First Wave Feminism” could be summed up with the word “equality”, then “difference” would be the key word for “Second Wave Feminism”. Second Wave feminists emphasize difference and differentiate between sex and gender. They are also politically charged as we can see in one of their mottos: the personal is political.
The third wave or as it is mostly called, the postfeminism, appeared as a result of the postmodernism and also as a reaction against the Second Wave. It welcomed all kinds of differences, rather than accepting the binary opposition of man and woman. It is the current state of feminism, embracing colored women, lesbians and transgenders, however, in the last decades, a new approach in feminism has been flourishing, namely the cyberfeminism. It mostly focuses on science and how the discourse adopted by it has been affecting the situation of women. In her highly significant essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” (buraya tarihi eklicem), Donna Haraway accuses scientific discourses for bringing forth gender and gender differences and argues that gender is constructed by these scientific discourses. Her analyses of present scientific and political material reality reveal gender as a constant taken for granted. The narratives of culture and science, especially cultural representations and labor divisions as she cites in her discussion of the Marxism, are constantly gendered. Yet, she advocates that in reality there is no such thing as being male or female and that we shouldn’t be in search of gender categories.
Therefore, the introduction of feminism in both natural and social sciences is a recent phenomenon. Feminists, like ecologists, anti-racists, anti-colonialists, are one of the several groups which point at the uses and abuses of modern science. The two main critiques that the feminists pursue are the male bias in science-making, and the discrimination against female scientists.
According to Harding the critiques feminism directed to science are resulting from two specific factors that are linked with each other: one is the male bias in the Western mind: In the Western culture, “male” symbolizes the scientific, and the rational, especially after the Enlightenment, and it is related to intellect and mind. On the other, the “female” is seen as emotional and irrational. That’s why science is generally attributed the male gender which creates a gender based bias in assessing the credibility and objectivity of the results of scientific endeavors. The other factor is the problem of legitimating. During the twentieth century, social sciences have shifted to social, economic and political projects which lead to a problem of legitimating: the scientific research needs to be socially applicable rather than being merely an impracticable theory without examples and usefulness. If it cannot contribute to the interests of social progress of the current society, then it cannot be legitimized at all. Feminism emerged as a political movement for social change, with a claim for social progress. But when feminism is introduced into science, there is a need for solid grounds in order to justify these feminist claims and legitimize the theory.


Harding offers comments of three main feminist epistemologies. The “Feminist Empiricism” argues that sexism and androcentrism are social biases that are correctable by stricter application of the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry. According to this epistemology, only the science manipulated by men is a problem, not science as a whole. But there is a controversy here: it disregards most of the scientific inquiry according to the gender of the inquirer. The science is bad, because it is made by men. On the other hand, feminist empiricism claims that, women are more likely than men to produce more objective results. Therefore what the feminist empiricism offers is the female bias instead of the male bias and it doesn’t bring any solution except than doing what it exactly criticizes.
The “Feminist Standpoint” states that men’s dominating position in the social life results of the perverse understandings while women’s subjugated position provides more complete and less perverse understandings. Again, there are logical incoherencies in this approach stemming especially from the narrow perspective that categorizes understandings and again itself brings forth the duality of men and women in social life instead of curing it. Social identity of the observer influences the objectivity, and the privileged group in grasping the objectivity is again shown as women.
The third epistemology that Harding mentions is the Feminist Postmodernism, which challenges the assumptions of the two previous approaches. The post-modernist approach in feminism asserts that it is not possible to increase objectivity through authoritarian and elitist practices. Yes, there must be a unified science, but with participatory values of anti-racism, anti-elitism and anti-classism (Harding 1986: 24-29).
There are still other problematic issues with the feminist critique. For instance, is there a pure and value-free scientific research, and if there is any, how will a politicized research like feminist science increase the property and objectivity of the inquiry? What are the proper uses of science versus improper uses? According to whom? We will return to these questions in the discussion of the different archaeological approaches and the feminist perspectives about them after a brief look at the history of gender studies in archaeology.
After these insights on feminism and the feminist critique of scientific inquiry, the question of when archaeology started to become “engendered” arises. The feminist movement of 1960’s is given by authors such as Nelson, Sorensen, and Wylie as a starting point. The main concern of this first stage was the statistical absence of women in the theory and practice of archaeology, and the fact that the women have been ignored in evolutionary and prehistoric representations and interpretations. The aim was to include women in the science as archaeologists on the one hand, and to show that women actually existed and had an active role in shaping the history on the other. So basically it was an effort to gain visibility as Sorensen claims (Sorensen 2000: 17). In 1980’s however, gender archaeology moved towards rewriting and reinterpreting prehistory in order to include gender into archaeology as a social construct. Here Sorensen states that this was first done through empiricist arguments along with traditional practices, especially with positivism, rather than being based on political arguments (Sorensen 2000:18-19). On the other hand, Alison Wylie emphasizes that gender archaeology emerged quite contemporarily with the post-processualist challenges to positivism (which, in fact, caused the beginnings of an interest on gender among other ethnographic dimensions) (Wylie 1992). Both Sorensen and Wylie agree that feminism was introduced into archaeological field comparatively later than it was in the other social sciences, but the causes they give for this are based on different factors. According to Wylie the reason is the theoretical inappropriateness of the archaeological environment for the feminist theory, whereas according to Sorensen, there were sporadic studies on gender archaeology indeed, however these were deliberately ignored and undermined by the androcentric archaeological scene (Sorensen 2000:21, Wylie 1992:17-18).
Before assessing the feminist concerns of the different theoretical archaeological approaches, it might be better to have a look at how feminist theory finds a place in the archaeological epistemology.
Because archaeology cannot directly observe the societies it studies, the question of how knowledge is produced is quite a problematic one. From the point of the feminist-inspired epistemology within archaeology, the knowledge is constructed and multimodal. Therefore, the purpose of feminist archaeology has been to re-write and reinterpret prehistory in order to erase the previous biases and stereotypes from the records (Sorensen 2000). However, of course, it is doubtful if a feminist version of the prehistory will be less biased than the current, androcentric prehistory.
It is not unexpected that gender studies in archaeology did not adopt a positivist/processualist approach, since processualism sought for regularities and generalizations in societies and this was what the gender studies have been trying to change, at least in terms of gender. Postprocessualism was a more holistic archaeology, and contextualism and structuralism especially helped feminist archaeology to build valuable claims on symbolism and ideology (Gilchrist 1999 : 27). But the feminists had to remain aloof to extreme epistemological relativism because of their political stance.
Wylie, in her article “The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests” ,
gives an extensive explanation of gender archaeology epistemology. Since she is not sympathetic to partisan standpoint feminists, she states that if political interests are allowed to produce knowledge, this inquiry cannot produce scientific and objective results. It is important for her that the researchers can aim at producing objective knowledge only if they exclude all factors that could cause bias from their study. Nonetheless, as even the most radical objectivist would confess, such a scientific inquiry is impossible. It is almost never that a single conclusion is drawn from the archaeological evidence. Wylie states that the archaeologists, because of the very nature of their discipline, actively constructed the past and what we need to know, according to her, is not to what stage of objectivity our constructs can reach, but how data are interpretively laden such that, they can stand as evidence for or against a given knowledge claim. This, as Wylie calls it, is “Mitigated Objectivity” (1992: 25).
It is true that archaeologists use a number of evidence, objective or not, but here Wylie means that we need to know the process of the interpretation of the archaeologist - the given assumptions in evaluating evidence- so that we can assess and use this interpretation in a healthy way.
Wylie also states that there is no set of standards to which all models and hypotheses can be referred, yet there are a number of evidential reference points. The archaeologist should choose the epistemic stance which is appropriate for his or her study in light of what he or she knows about the nature of specific subject matters. So a general epistemic stance cannot be appropriate for and applied to all knowledge claims (1992: 30).
In the end of her article, Wylie states that considering these general points, feminist research in archaeology is not “political” in any troublesome sense, because politically engaged science is often “more rigorous, self critical and responsive” to the facts than the neutral sciences “for which nothing much is at stake” (1992:30).
However, there are also many critiques written on Wylie’s theories that argue that a feminist perspective can lead to a better, more rigorous scene of archaeology, thus enhancing objectivity. Barbara J. Little states that there is a great diversity inside the feminist theory, ranging from the liberals who aim to achieve equality between men and women to the radicals who reverse the current, “androcentric” understandings of science with a gynocentric discourse, and to the socialists who link patriarchy in the sciences with class and racial oppression, and seek its abolishment through a complete transformation of the system. Little inquires which one of these very different viewpoints gender archaeology would use. The main criticism of Little directs on Wylie’s defense of feminist research on archaeology is that Wylie is radical, and conservative in the same time (1994: 543). Like the feminist politics, feminist archaeology needs to defend and explain its rationality and acceptance in science, in a way legitimizing its existence, and in order to justify itself and support its own political values, feminist archaeology will need to “rehabilitate” the current structure of science. On the other hand, its conservativity comes from its postmodern rejection of the meta-narrative and at the same time, from its faith in the possibility of knowledge, “even if that knowledge is never finalized” (1994: 543).
Michael Fotiadis, in his article “What is Archaeology’s ‘Mitigated Objectivism’ Mitigated by? Comments on Wylie” (1994) , comments on the same article of Wylie, and finds the relationship between truth and politics as offered by her as confusing, and criticizes the disjunction of the two notions. The main critiques are addressed to Wylie’s “mitigated objectivism” as a remedy to relativism. Fotiadis thinks that there is an inconsistency on Wylie’s thoughts, when she on the one hand claims that politics both generate the questions we ask about the past, and also shape the answers, and on the other hand, all of a sudden makes politics disappear from archaeology with the mitigated objectivism she suggests (1994: 548). According to Fotiadis what Wylie does is the “reification” of gender; she transforms it from a political field into a “docile” object of scientific knowledge. Conversely, Fotiadis himself sticks on Foucault’s view on power and truth instead, because power always has the capacity to form and regulate and even manipulate and tint the objects of knowledge. And feminism is one of the diverse political practices leading up to new objects of knowledge (like gender) on which it is possible to make true or false propositions (Foucault, after Fotiadis 1994: 548).
Wylie, in a later article titled “On ‘Capturing Facts Alive in the Past’ (Or Present): Response to Fotiadis and to Little” , responds these criticisms by clarifying what she means by politics. In Wylie’s point of view, a feminist standpoint in archaeology is some sort of oppositional thinking. Such political and opposing analysis of archaeology will help to destabilize taken for granted concepts and constructs in the discipline. She even suggests that there must be further, more systematic political examinations of archaeology in order to attain “better” and untainted archaeology (Wylie 1994: 558-559).
However, while saying that by its oppositional standpoint feminist archaeology and its political claims will create a “better” science, Wylie does not mention in which ways this correction will take place. It is as doubtful as the solution that the feminist archaeology brings forth after all these criticisms and claims to objectivity. It seems that, at least from the articles this paper assesses, with its undefined borders, rather than eliminating biases, the gender studies introduce even new biases themselves to the field.
Gender Archaeology and Main Theoretical Approaches:
Processualism and Ecosystem Approach:
Processual archaeology, based on positivism, was the dominant approach in Anglo-American archaeology during 1960’s and 1970’s. It was operating under the assumptions of the Ecosystem approach. It was a long-lived and productive approach which enabled archaeologists to observe the interconnection between social and ecological variables. However, for the gender archaeologist it has been the less promising approach.
According to the feminist perspective, most significant of the shortcomings of processualism was the units of analysis. Processual archaeology was operating through whole populations and whole behavioral systems and was prone to generalizations. It disregarded certain factors such as gender, class and faction (Brumfiel 1992: 551) . Although, due to the importance given to the positivism applied, it was recognized that age and sex were important factors in determining status of people and division of labor in the societies under study, little attention was given to those factors. In line with the male bias of the sciences, if gender roles were not defined in a certain area, they were implicitly assumed according to current values and generally men were represented as working and creating civilizations while women stayed at “home” and made babies (Brumfiel 1992). Brumfiel also states that, the processual approach was not satisfying in understanding that a cultural system is not adaptive, but contingent, and that the agents of cultural change are not systems but human actors (1992: 559). Since women are actors, too, in a society, this approach prone to generalizations was not suitable for the feminist trying to make women visible in history and science.
Another problematic issue that may be touched upon about processualism would be the notion that science must be value-free (Nelson 1997:50) . According to the approach, gender studies and feminism would be considered as value-laden, therefore, not positivist enough. Nonetheless, processualists were applying the idealized values of science into archaeology and this held back the analysis of gender, agent and social structure.

Marxist Theory:
Marxist theory seems to be the perfect approach for the gender studies because of the fact that it, too, was interested in social inequality and class conflict. However, apparently Marxist archaeology has either ignored gender or considered it as another class (Nelson 1997: 52). Yet, after all, some tenets of Marxist theory found appreciation in gender archaeology and gender anthropology (di Leonardo 1991: 11).
The model developed by Engels in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) was adopted by feminist anthropologists as a mode of analyzing male domination in an evolutionary framework. The model associates social levels to particular modes of production and traces an evolutionary line from a simple matriarchal society to the more complex, patriarchal society with the emergence of private property and institutionalized social stratification. However, the Marxist approach accepted this theory as a given, never discussing the applicability and truth of Engels’ 19th century work and the evolutionary framework, and this was the main drawback of the approach (Nelson 1997: 52).


Evolutionary Theory:
Evolutionary models in archaeology classify sociocultural systems in an order beginning with the simple towards complex, and these models could be useful in studying the regular changes in the evolution of gender systems as in many other systems (Conkey&Gero 1997: 418). The evolutionary models in gender follow more or less Engels’ model of an early matriarchic period later turning into a patriarchal society through property owning and social stratification in which women were not as lucky as men to find a place for themselves. Therefore the approach seems to be fit for the feminist claims. However, being a contemporary of Darwin, Engels believed that the human society was developing by evolutionary laws and according to him the activities and duties of men and women were determined by biology. So, as a whole, Engels’s general theory of female degradation was based on both the perceived cultures of the Western world, like classical Greece and modern Europe, and his own biological bias which made the approach an extremely dubious one for the gender studies (Silverblatt 1991: 145).

Agency Theory:
Agency and the “practice theory” is a very promising theoretical ground for gender studies. Recent discussions in social theory, especially Giddens’s Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and of Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) opened the ground for discussions about the relationship between the individual and society (Sorensen 2000:65) . In these discussions, some scholars considered gender as one of the “acts” played within the society as a social identity, regarding it as a construct to be adopted. This assumption led to the reassessments of gender role in every aspect of the ancient society (Conkey&Gero 1997: 420). Sorensen stresses that the agency concept influenced gender studies in two ways: One was the importance given to the analysis of women in variable conditions and cultures. This way it was easier to erase the picture the more conservative perception of the woman as a stable, conservative gender character. If gender was a goal-oriented act played by the individuals, the position of the individual within the structures of power and dominance should also be studied whether the individual is a woman or a man (2000: 65). This way, the individual, instead of woman or man as a gender category enters in the study of gender and it becomes harder to project biases or at least allow biases to function in the outcome of the research. However, with the current archaeological knowledge of the prehistory, it might also be difficult to identify the individual woman in the archaeological context, altogether with a clear understanding of the particular society in which she lives.

Postmodernism:
It is hard to trace the borders of postmodernism as a philosophical or political movement. However, we can see the reasons why post modernism was attractive to many feminist archaeologists if we have a brief look at it. The postmodernism rejects the classical Enlightenment paradigms of “reason” and the products of this reason, “meta-narratives” as François Lyotard puts it in his very important book on the postmodern theory. Instead, it adopts the marginal and the decentered, this way being closer to the more voiceless and invisible rather than to the constructed powerful, this “powerful” being the “male”, of course, through the feminist perspective of the theory. Rather than drawing the whole picture, mainly focused on gaining knowledge to portray this picture, disregarding all the remaining details, or finds in the archaeological site, this postmodern approach was looking at the fragments around the main picture, thus it was suitable to be applied to gender studies. Besides, the climate of the time when post-modernism emerged was also a good time for feminists to adopt this theory because at the time many feminist archaeologists had already rejected processual methodology as “androcentric” (Wylie 1992, Conkey&Gero 1997, Brumfiel 1992 and many others). Structuralism especially had a great influence on anthropology, in terms of the study of symbolic systems (di Leonardo 1991: 19). Anthropologists began to be interested in less scientistic and universalizing human constructs, like marriage, etc.
However, there is also a very important contradiction between the feminist claims and the main tenets of postmodernism. While post-modernists are putting reason and universalizing /totalizing claims to truth aside, feminists consider gender and everything concerned with gender as the subject of the universal reason. The need for the feminist theory to legitimize itself, on the other hand, has led to an authoritarianism which dictates politically correct ways of theorizing identity, history and culture, and which, in its very foundation, oppose the postmodern anti-authoritarianism ( Knapp1996: 134) .
Moreover, the postmodern principle of the plurality of interpretations and the deferment of cultural meaning is actually undermining the feminist standing that employs a postmodernist discourse. Also the relativist deconstructions made by feminists are mostly gynocentric and they abate the feminist discourse instead of strengthening it (Knapp 1996).

Post Processualism:
Hyperrelativism and anti-objectivism, seen essential to post processual archaeology were also essential to the feminist archaeology, but it is evident that none of the chief defenders of the post processual archaeology were interested in a feminist analysis of archaeology (Nelson 1997: 52). Ericka Engelstad studies the attitude of post processual archaeology in a detailed analysis and criticizes Shanks&Tilley and Hodder. She states that the post processual view’s understanding of archaeology reduces the discipline to some form of literary criticism, “a western European male concept”, where the archaeologist values the importance of the “archaeological text” the most. According to Engelstad this problematic of post processual archaeology is related to power relations. Only those who have the power in the present will have the right to decide about the meaning of the past, which the author finds “frightening” (Engelstad 1991: 509) .
The post processualists avoided a critique of their own work, with the results remaining androcentric. A similar statement to Engelstad’s is made by Alison Wylie (1992). The feminist researchers state that scientific knowledge is theory and interest laden, contextual and constructed, and this way they place the feminist research at the postmodern side. But Wylie also finds that strongly relativist positions strengthen the ideology of the powerful: “only the most powerful in achieving control over their world, could imagine that the world can be constructed as they choose” (Wylie 1992:21). This reality makes Wylie with other feminists skeptical about extreme relativism as well as with objectivism.

Gender Archaeology and Practice
The woman’s movement in evolutionary issues had an important impact on reconsidering key issues like foraging, evolution of the physical attributes, male/female dimorphism and social life. In past studies, women were either absent in the Paleolithic scene, or they were given trivial and stereotypical roles like “sitting” at the campsite waiting for the men to bring food, and looking after the children of the camp. The role of the females in the evolution was almost entirely focused on their reproductive abilities (for example, only the size of the pelvic bone was considered) (Hager1997: 4-12) . The anthropologists who assembled in 1966 for a conference on “Man the Hunter” showed that gathering, too, was an important part of foraging activities (Dahlberg 1981) . The “Food Sharing” hypothesis forwarded by Glynn Isaac (after Hager 1997:7) suggested that there in fact was a sexual division of labor, such that while men were hunting, women were gathering and all the two sexes brought back to the site was shared.
Gender studies of the Paleolithic are concerned mostly on human evolution, division of labor by sex, and symbolic and ritual representations of women. On the other hand, the absence of women in the current scientific record is another issue that received criticism.
While observing the role of women in evolution, the behavioral aspects of primates in food sharing, use of tools, social structure and sex have also been studied in order to find possible parallels and implications for human evolution (McGrew 1981). W. C. McGrew found many similarities between chimpanzees and early hominids in issues such as division of labor, hierarchy and tool use. In fact there are interesting comments on males, that they could afford time and energy on hunting only if there was the food collected by females available at the campsite. Therefore, contrary to the previous assumptions, this means that male hunting depended on female gathering, and not the vice versa. McGrew attributes also other skills to women such as the accumulation of food in skin or other perishable containers of which the archaeologists can not find the traces, and the use of tools (which is observed more on female chimps than males), claiming that in the Pliocene, the first tools used by hominids were likely to belong to gathering females (1981: 61-62).
Adrienne L. Zihlman (1981) also emphasizes the role of women in reproduction and food gathering and states that hominid mothers who carry their children on their bodies must be moving actively, and gathering food rather than the more conventional picture of “sitting” and waiting at the campsite. Gathering is claimed to be the initial food supplying behavior that distinguished ape from human in the article. Therefore, from the beginning of human adaptation, a woman’s role included reproductive, economic and social components quite actively (1981: 90-93).
To further her comments on labor division, Zihlman states that sexual dimorphism casts the role of the big and strong men as hunters and protectors, but the absence of canine teeth dimorphism, unlike with apes; show a friendly social interaction between males and females. She concludes that there are no distinct dimorphism between males and females which shows that men hunt and women gather (1981:110).
Supporting the claim that women can hunt as well, Griffin & Griffin (1993: 206-214) give an example of hunting women through the study of the Agta living in Philippines. On the other hand, Nelson (1997: 99-101), stating that the importance of woman the gatherer is an accepted fact in anthropology and archaeology, offers a number of cases where women were gathering plant, shellfish or nuts.
Hurcombe (1995) looks at the debate from a different perspective and criticizes the illustrations about early hominids, emphasizing the fact that women were never shown in most of the site activities, and that current gender roles were reflected on the interpretation of the Paleolithic. She also correctly points at a mistake done by certain feminist critics- that women can hunt, that seeing women as gatherers is sexist-. According to her, this critique is based upon the presupposition that hunting was more important for the ancient humans than gathering, or perhaps upon our current appreciation of the big woman struggling in a masculine world, this way including some part of the patriarchal bias that they reject and try to erase(1995: 96). It may be true that it is practically difficult for woman to run behind big animals to hunt them while they are carrying children or they are pregnant. Gathering, on the other hand, is more productive since it promises more returns especially if the woman can detect the food source. Besides, the woman can teach her children how to gather food and include them into the food-gathering work.
I would suggest that the practical difficulties that prevent woman from hunting (like the larger pelvis, pregnancy and childrearing) are only at instances where there is no tool to use. It is, on the other hand, always possible for the Paleolithic women to have used some tools like sticks, stones or to set traps. Gero’s article titled “Genderlithics: Women’s roles on Stone Tool Production” (1991) gives a hint about stone tool production in Huaricoto, Peru, stating that women, as a labor force may have produced stone tools, and used them in several household activities.
Besides the subject of evolution, there are also a plethora of gender archaeology studies, which focus on the contextual aspects of space, food, symbolism, as well as others like clothing, social order etc. Space is where life is spent and tasks are done, therefore it is a gendered dimension. The meaning of the space should be perceived contextually because it assists in establishing and reproducing social order (Gilchrist 1999:100). On the other hand, food production and consumption are also important indicators of gender activities, especially in showing the division of labor among sexes, as food preparation and serving is universally attributed to women. Here are a couple of examples of the studies on these concepts that are from Engendering Archaeology (Gero&Conkey, 1991) .
Brumfiel’s research on Aztec women who work on grinding maize and weaving would be a good example on the issue (1991: 224-254). The author shows that the Mexican women of the era were active participants in the labor force and social life of the Aztec culture with both ethnohistorical data (Sahagun’s writings) and archaeological evidence. However, this article was criticized by Erica Hill (Hill 1998) on the grounds that the ethnohistorical data it used was biased. In fact Brumfiel seems to be aware of this weakness in her study because she writes that the data is “oversimplified, with no time depth” (1991: 224). I think this data shows only that the Mexican women were using the tools and the methods that we see in the pictorial evidence, not that these women using these tools and techniques had the equal or at least a high status in the society. Therefore the study can make claims only on the use of tools by women, not the status of women or their place in the public/private domains. What is more, the tools we see are mainly spindle whorls, ceramic disks, or cooking pots, which are not mostly considered as “male” tools. So, in accordance with the data, it is more convenient to deduce that the Aztec women were more actively participating in the domestic area rather than Brumfiel’s conclusion that they held an important status in the labor force.
Another study is made by Christine Hastorf, on the Pre-Hispanic Sausa culture of Peru, about the gender effects on food production and consumption. In this well inquired and objective study made strictly upon scientific evidences, in line with the focus of the research, she studies the spatial distribution of certain food and tool remains within domestic settings like the patio, and the hearth (1991: 140) and she concludes that women were involved with cooking and storage of the food according to the data from the hearths. The Patio areas don’t have any traces of cooking, yet the author claims that they were, too, used by women for chores such as crop processing (1991: 144).
Another important point in this study is in the analyses of skeletons of both male and female members of the Wanka II and Wanka III phases. The data gained from this analyses show that on the first phase, men and women were consuming quite the food, even the maize. The reason that I emphasize maize is that it was consumed in ritual and political gatherings. This possibly shows us that female subjects along with the males were participating in these activities, therefore hinting at the high status of women in Wanka II. On the other hand, Wanka III period, brings along a decline in the participation, therefore a decline in the status in the women’s side, in line with the rise of Inka government (1991: 148-152).
The last example this paper is citing is the studies of Gimbutas on Neolithic female figurines. Not as half objective or scientific as the previous examples, her work has always been attacked, mostly correctly in my opinion. There has always been an interest to a “Mother Goddess” whose worship symbolized a cultural continuity from the Paleolithic to modern times all over Europe. Marija Gimbutas was the principle advocate of this theory and her works after a career of field archaeology, focused on this Neolithic Goddess . As can be easily deduced, this area was of great interest to many feminists, especially those who believed that the culture had been matriarchal once. Through the studies of this Mother Goddess, theories of the transformation from the matriarchal to patriarchal systems were supposed to be realized.
According to Gimbutas the Old Europe was matriarchal, peaceful, liberal, culturally homogenous, egalitarian, free of human or animal sacrifice, but it was ultimately destroyed by some warlike Kurgan culture (Gimbutas 1999, 2000 also in Gimbutas, Winn, Shimabuku 1989). There are several weaknesses in her works the most important one being her subjective interpretations besides the fact that her books are full of pictures and out-of-context typologies. A good example to the subjective interpretations can be about the female figurines. She claimed in her works that the fact that we can find these figurines in many contexts shows how a strong and ever-present cult the Mother Goddess was. However, other archaeologists claimed that this frequency of the figurines can also be about the fact that they are neither sacred nor as important as Gimbutas claims them to be (Meskell 1994: 82) . Also there were other interpretations for the figurines such as the one by Talalay (1987, 1991) who thinks that they were tokens. Beside these misleading interpretations, she also ignored other facts that might weaken her claim. She disregarded the male, sexless, or animal figurines and included only the female ones into her study. She also included Minoan, Greek, Etruscan, Basque, Celtic, Germanic and Baltic mythologies, which may be supporting evidence for theories of cultural studies or literary studies but not for the scientific based archaeological studies. Therefore, many critics rightfully assert that Gimbutas is being sexist in her interpretations and studies such as Fagan and Meskell.


Nevertheless, however unanswered its questions are, the feminist critique to science makes us recognize a bias that is chronic in science. Besides, its implications to archaeological studies also led at least some archaeologists to develop a more woman-friendly archaeology.

Gender studies have been on the rise for the last decades in many branches of the humanities. Some of these studies focus on the concept of “gender”, which is more than the sex of the individuals. It includes the social code that determines many of our behaviors and many theorists claim that gender is learnt through the unwritten social instructions . In fact, recent feminist theorists, such as Luce Irigaray, accuse culture and the story it has been telling to each new generation of being the reason of the unequal status of man and woman. Irigaray writes in her very important essay “The Question of Other” that “We are children of the flesh, but also of the word, nature but also culture”. “The Word” is the male bias in every written and unwritten material we have of humans; history, science, moral codes and even behaviors. Even though we know that there wasn’t the Word in the beginning; all we have of the beginning is the Word. Therefore what the feminist critic is supposed to do is to clear this “Word” of its constructed values and biases and to reach what was in the beginning. As in the other sciences, the gender archaeology theorists try to do the same thing. However, as we can see even from the last couple of examples, there are both scientific theories supported by evidence and other theories bordering on fiction and manipulating evidence, all inspired by the feminist theory. So it is suitable neither to applaud nor to reject the studies done by gender archaeologists. Instead they should be judge on how much they rely on the political premises of feminism and on archaeological data. Because, as we see in the work of Gimbutas, when the study begins in an idealized hypothesis of the feminist politics, it ends in idealized results due to shaping the evidence into the desired direction. Feminist politics come to limit gender studies, both its credibility and its scientific approach. Hence, rather than beginning with feminist assumptions, the gender archaeologist should only be hoping to get them in the end of the research, or even let down the pure “feministic” claims and focus on both men and women, and the status of both throughout the history. This should also include more research done by male archaeologists (almost all the citations of this paper come from female archaeologists), and more chance given to the female archaeologists in both the field and the university. In Women in Archaeology edited by Claassen, we can see how the situation of female archaeologist (employment, salary, publications and citations) may affect the results of many studies because of their marginalization. All these show that besides struggling for making women in the past “visible”, archaeologists should also try to bring the status of both gender studies and female archaeologists to a better level.