Is Androcentric Archaeology Really About Men?

The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.     

Questioning Theory: Is There a Gender of Theory in Archaeology?

This paper raises questions about the practice of theory in anthropological archaeology. Particular attention is given to questions surrounding the gender of theory: what genders are more heralded in the theoretical spotlights and how the subject position of doing theory is gendered. An analysis of the contents of four Readers of Archaeological Theory shows the problematic selection and thus representation of women’s theoretical contributions, including their effective ghettoization in gender and feminist archaeology. Insights from how feminists have been grappling with theory are considered, and archaeologists are urged to confront the ways in which “doing theory” is/is not valued and how it is differentially valued, and to discuss the place and uses of theory more explicitly and critically.     

Doing Archaeology as a Feminist: Introduction

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long running “feminist method debate” in the social sciences.     

Much More than Gender

Numerous publications on gender archaeology present case studies that incorporate gender in their analyses, but make little use of feminist theory and critique, and are ambivalent or negative to feminism. Aspects of Norwegian, British and American gender archaeology are discussed in relation to a desire for the ‘mainstream.’ The reasons for, and consequences of, a lack of feminist theorizing and engagement are related to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges.

How to Queer the Past Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms and the Archaeology of Identity

A queer archaeology is often equated to looking for ancient homosexuality. As a challenge to heteronormative practice, queer theory, instead, provides a framework for engaging with all aspects of identity formation and the processes and behaviors that mediate it. This article examines two primary points: (1) queer theory’s relationship to feminist practice and archaeology and (2) its application to the construction and production of difference among ancient Maya commoners. Through this analysis, I explore how investigations of identity and status can and should be part of a queer analysis. Work at the Northeast Group, part of the site of Chan, Belize illustrates how focus on internal class composition, specifically change through time, “queers” traditional models of ancient Maya class formation.     

Gender-informed archaeology: The priority of definition, the use of analogy, and the multivariate approach

Despite recent efforts to construct gender theory in archaeology, I assert that no methodological or theoretical breakthroughs have occurred. This lack of progress is due to several factors. First, fundamental terms such as “theory,” “gender,” and “sex” have been used inconsistently; I suggest some working definitions for these terms. Second, researchers have resorted to the use of analogical arguments that implicitly deny the role of gender in the organization of human relations. Third, feminist political agendas have been conflated with research questions. In order to address some of these issues, I suggest that the application of a multivariate approach to the study of gender can avoid the problems inherent in any one line of evidence. Finally, I argue that a consideration of the scale of gender questions is essential to the application of existing theoretical frameworks to gender archaeologically.     

Introduction to the Historical Archaeology of Powered Cultural Landscapes

This article starts by defining the term “powered cultural landscapes” and then provides a brief history of research on this topic in historical archaeology, starting with the settlement pattern paradigm that did not use the word “landscape,” and progressing to the landscape paradigm and the subsequent increasing use of the word “power” in cultural landscape research. Topics of research initially addressed landscape power dynamics between classes, followed by racial, ethnic, and finally gender power dynamics. Frameworks for analyzing power dynamics have progressed from the Marxian domination and resistance framework for class and racial power dynamics, followed by feminist analyses of male domination, to the recent development of a feminist inclusive heterarchical model of power dynamics.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: DOING ARCHAEOLOGY AS A FEMINIST

I propose that a feminist approach will enrich archaeology in the Southeast and Midsouth. Feminist archaeology starts by taking the lives of women seriously in thinking about past human societies. This standpoint has implications for all topics of interest for Southeastern archaeologists: subsistence patterns, craft production, exchange, development of political systems, warfare, ritual, and so forth. Feminist archaeologists are also self-reflexive about and alert to conditions of work in the profession of archaeology. They pay attention to the importance of the intersection of gender, age, status, and other aspects of personal identity and to the need to accept ambiguity in interpretation. I review how a feminist archaeology might be applied to the archaeology of the South and what risks a feminist archaeology might raise.     

Who's “That Girl”: British, South African, and American Women as Africanist Archaeologists in Colonial Africa (1860s–1960s)

This paper reviews the accomplishments of British, South African, and American women Africanist archaeologists who worked between the 1860s and the 1960s. Despite their many significant contributions to African archaeological method and theory, especially those exposing the importance of indigenous populations to their own cultural development, the work of these women tends to be either appropriated or ignored by their contemporaries and by present day archaeologists. A postcolonial feminist analysis draws on the colonial context in which African archaeology developed and the continued Western domination of the discipline to provide a background for understanding how and why these women are omitted from historiographies of African archaeology.Cette étude revise les accomplissements des femmes archéologues Africanistes anglaises, sudafricaines et Americaines, qui travaillaient entre les années 1860 et les années 1960. Malgré leurs plusieurs contributions d'importance à la méthode et la théorie de l'archéologie Africaine, en particulier celles qui exposaient l'importance à leur propre développement culturel des populations indigènes, leurs travaux tendent à être ou appropriés ou ignorés par leurs contemporains ou par les archaéologues d'aujourd'hui. Une analyse féministe post-coloniale utilise le contexte colonial dans lequel l'archéologie Africaine s'est développée, et la domination occidentale soutenue de cette discipline, à fournir une base pour comprendre comment et pourquoi ces femmes ont éeté omises des historiographies de l'archéologie Africaine.     

Honoring Ambiguity/Problematizing Certitude

In this paper I argue that the practice of archaeology over-emphasizes and over-rewards unambiguous certainty in our interpretations, even though our conclusions are usually drawn from necessarily partial, underdetermined and complex evidence. I argue that full or partial erasure of ambiguity from our data and from our interpretive assertions does not serve the long-term interests of the discipline; that a feminist practice aimed at more nuanced understandings of the past and open to more subtle, multivalenced notions of reality, must accept ambiguity as a central feature of archaeological interpretation. After I review familiar strategies that are used to obscure troubling areas of uncertainty in archaeology, I urge feminist practice to resist employing these “mechanisms of closure” in our work. It is only by openly recognizing and preserving the ambiguity that resides in messy data arrangements today that we stand any hope of fuller and richer understandings in the future.

Sarah and the Puritans: Feminist Contributions to New England Historical Archaeology

This article analyzes a seventeenth-century adultery case from southern Massachusetts to examine the effects of Puritan colonization on Native American women. As a feminist analysis the article focuses on gendered access to power and considers Puritan strategies for transforming Native American gendered relations. This reading highlights Puritan use of physical punishment and public humiliation to shape gendered behavior. It exposes Puritan efforts to transform Native American men into Puritan patriarchs and to transform Native American women into submissive consorts. It concludes with a series of characteristics that will define archaeological sites that date to the period immediately after New England’s colonization. Arguably, Sarah and the Puritans contributes to history more than it contributes to archaeology because the primary evidence is documentary, rather than archaeological. Nonetheless, this analysis informs archaeological interpretation by revealing the consequences of cultural change on the archaeological record. By demonstrating colonization’s transformative power on southern New England Native American culture, Sarah and the Puritans identifies the context in which many historical period Native American sites were created. Ultimately, this affords an opportunity to gender New England colonization and to examine the archaeological record of that process.     

Historical Archaeology as Modern-World Archaeology in Argentina

Historical archaeology has grown at a remarkable pace in the last decade. South America has seen a major growth in historical archaeology, with archaeologists in Argentina playing a large role in the maturation of the discipline on the continent. Much of this archaeology can be characterized as “modern-world archaeology” because of the archaeologists’ interest in issues relevant to post-Columbian cultural history.     

Feminist Adventures in Hypertext

Through a discussion of the intentions behind two hypertext works, Ruth Tringham’s Chimera Web and Rosemary Joyce’s Sister Stories, we present an argument that the new digital media offer unique opportunities for feminist archaeology to realize some of its deepest values. Through the medium of hypermedia and hypertext (multilinear) narratives the complexities of the feminist practice of archaeology (including its multivocal interpretive process) can be grasped, enjoyed, and participated in by a non-archaeological audience more fluidly than in traditional linear texts. We draw attention to the way in which recent developments in digital technology, especially through the Internet, have transformed our ability to share freely the fruits of our creative thought with an ever-expanding audience.

Introduction: Feminist Theories and Archaeology

This journal issue developed out of a desire to increase the use of feminist theory in archaeology, leading me to ask Laurajane Smith of York University to co-organize a symposium on the topic for the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin in July 2008. The impacts of major feminist theories on constructions of the past and archaeological thinking are discussed, emphasizing how they implicitly or explicitly influenced other articles in this journal issue.     

Status and Role of Formation Theory in Contemporary Archaeological Practice

Since Binford appropriated the term “middle-range theory,” it has signified the process of reasoning from the extant material record to the cultural past. Merton's sociological concept of middle-range theory is relevant to archaeology, but does not mean what Binford denoted by it. More accurately, Binford's domain should be called “formation theory.” By whatever name used, archaeologists differ greatly in our views of its role and status. Somehow, formation theory has come to be viewed as method but not theory, and as intrinsic to materialism, but irrelevant if not antithetical to other ontologies. Yet it is as critical to the contextual understanding of the past sought by many archaeologists today—a role that, among others, belies formation theory's marginal status in academic practice.     

“The Age of Innocence”: Personal Histories of the 1960s “Digging Circuit” in Britain

There is a substantial literature on the use of oral history in archaeology, but there has been little consideration of the kinds of oral history and memory produced by the practice of archaeology. Through the personal narratives of a range of people involved in excavation during the 1960s in Britain, this paper explores understandings of what has been described as an archaeological “sub-culture”. It examines the ideas and interests that motivated peoples’ engagement in the “digging circuit” at this time, and looks at how these were implicated in the archaeology that was produced. We argue that such accounts do not simply expose the “subjective” context in which archaeological knowledge of these sites emerged but constitute an explicit and vital challenge to established accounts of archaeology in Britain at this time.     

Archaeologies of Cultural Interaction: Wybalenna Settlement and Killalpaninna Mission

This paper compares two contrasting Australian case studies in the archaeology of Indigenous-European interaction: one mission-like in its intent, the Aboriginal Settlement for Tasmanian Aborigines at Wybalenna on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait (1833–47), the other the Lutheran mission at Lake Killalpaninna (1867–1928) investigated by the Central Australia Archaeology Project (CAAP). Each of the two case studies adopted different strategies of investigation. Wybalenna was a small excavation while Killalpaninna was an extensive surface survey. Both studies reveal diversity in the range of responses to a missionizing program, providing evidence of agency in the formation of the archaeological record. They demonstrate the value of the material evidence and the significance of archaeology in contributing to a more sensitive understanding of the interaction process by providing an alternative to textual sources.     

Archaeologist as anthropologist: Much ado about something after all?

It has been said that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” And so archaeologists have become conversant in and contributors to cultural theory. Other archaeologists have undertaken ethnoarchaeological studies on material culture when ethnographers have not supplied the data needed. Yet archaeologists might undertake more traditional participant-observation fieldwork to help nuance the cultural questions we ask and to render our tales of the past more convincing, in particular, when we purport to speak of the sensuous and meaningful experience of the “prehistoric other.” This article discusses the venturing of one archaeologist in Madagascar tracking aspects of the classic problem of state origins across archaeology, oral history, ethnoarchaeology, and ethnography. This process of joining objective analysis to lived experience is perhaps the most proper task of anthropology, the one that distinguishes it from other social science…     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.     

Activism Leads to Excavation: The Power of Place and the Power of the People at the President��s House in Philadelphia

For seven-eighths of George Washington’s presidency a large Georgian townhouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, served as both the President’s executive offices and residence. In the early years of this century the former location of this house became the focus of intense public interest. The compelling story of the President’s House and its occupants, most particularly, nine enslaved Africans who Washington brought with him to Philadelphia, provoked intense public dialogue and protest by a diverse coalition of citizens. Public activism led to an archeological excavation where the power of an engaged citizenry transformed an ‘orchestrated’ public archaeology project into a demonstration of public ownership of the past.