Future Directions

Archaeology is immeasurably enriched by work that replaces unexamined generalized people with populations of diverse, changing persons. It is thus important that research on gender does not become a form of separate analysis that is seen as easy to ignore because it is assumed to have no consequences for broader analyses. The solution does not lie in banishing explicit critical theoretical perspectives from archaeology of gender. Gender needs to be mainstream, but not at the cost of abandoning critical lessons that archaeologies of gender have shown about archaeological naivete about models that presume all people are interchangeable, or that genetically female persons in the past ‘naturally’ did housework and were tethered to homesites by childbirth and childrearing.

We need to follow the examples of pioneers who use their analyses of gender to critique commonly accepted models. For example, Elizabeth Brumfiel insists on the consequences of taking gender into account for the study of the Aztec state. The consequences are not solely the recognition of political status of some women, the identification of the exceptional queens of antiquity, now amply documented for a wide range of societies. They go to the heart of the way domestic economies and political economies are interconnected. They should transform our notions of what counts as socially significant craftwork. The broader scope of sex/gender positions archaeologists of gender have examined, including celibate men and women, third sexes, hypermasculine men and their less aggressive counterparts, and males and females pursuing same-sex desire must become part of mainstream models of ancient societies or we risk perpetuating unreal, unidimensional views of other times and places.

Archaeologists studying gender also need to bring their work to the attention of specialists in other fields, historians, ethnographers, and researchers on cultural studies, who still rarely use the more sophisticated work of contemporary archaeologists in their studies, referring instead to the speculative history of an earlier generation. The human past is a source of far more varied examples of ways people lived their lives as differently sexed persons than any society recorded in ethnography or documentary history. Some of the past human experiences did not survive into the historical period, notably the ways of life of hunter-gatherers of the deep past. Other human experiences may be more evident in the material traces of everyday life than in the selective record of politically motivated textual records. For all periods, even the well-documented recent past of the capitalist world, archaeology provides alternative lines of evidence that often demonstrate practices at odds with ideologies, whether those of populations underrepresented in texts or those of people whose actions departed from the expressed norms. It is incumbent on archaeologists to make our understandings of the complex ways that spatial features and portable objects helped shape human sex/gender systems more accessible to other scholars, and to the wider public.

To accomplish all of these goals, archaeologists interested in gender can no longer assume a simple dichotomous model of sex, nor a correspondence of sex with gender. In each individual social setting, we need to consider how physical variability, including sex, was subject to shaping, evaluation, and representation. We need to consider the political dimensions of differential experiences of people in the past grounded in sex and simultaneously in other aspects of personhood. We need to take seriously the idea that sexual being was always related to experiences of desire and pleasure that were not inconsequential parts of human experience. At the same time, we need to treat the multiple actors in our past settings as agents of economic and social action that might have shaped the understandings of sex and gender as much as they were shaped by them. We need to do all this in the clear realization that archaeologies of personhood are always politically charged in the present, in the expectation of conservative backlash and resistance, and with the clear understanding that what we say will matter in the lives of people in the present, if only because the past is so often used to justify contemporary social relations. This may seem daunting, but it should seem exciting: asking questions that matter with data that no other field can provide is what will continue to infuse archaeologies of gender with energy.

See also: Asia, West: Archaeology of the Near East: The Levant; Bioarchaeology; Craft Specialization; Enslavement, Archaeology of; Ethnicity; Europe: Neolithic; Europe, Northern and Western: Early Neolithic Cultures; Evolutionary Archaeology; Food and Feasting, Social and Political Aspects; Household Archaeology; Identity and Power; Individual, Archaeology of in Prehistory; Interpretive Art and Archaeology; Philosophy of Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Politics of Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Rock Art.