Gender, Households and Society: Unravelling the Threads of the Past

This volume demonstrates how archaeological data viewed through the lens of gender studies can lead researchers to question and reformulate current models of household organization, subsistence and craft production, ritual performance, and the structure of ancient states. Our central argument is that existing models of many aspects of prehistoric societies often assume the existence of rigidly binary gender systems. After three decades of feminist anthropology, few archaeologists claim that sex/gender roles and identities are fixed by the constants of human biology. And yet, a residue of assumptions from earlier views of male and female roles continues to color archaeologists’ understandings of their data.