Written by a distinguished group of feminist archaeologists, In Pursuit of Gender examines the role of gender in archaeology, an area that has long been neglected. The chapters in this volume represent sites and cultures that have been interpreted or reinterpreted from the perspective of gender, exploding old assumptions about women and the roles they held. Greatly illuminating the subject of gender from the perspective of their own regional traditions, the authors take the reader through an authoritative and comprehensive discussion of gender archaeology in Asia, Africa, North and South...

Burials are places where archaeologists reasonably expect gendered ideologies and practices to play out in the archaeological record. Yet only modest progress has been made in teasing out gender from these mortuary contexts. In this volume, methods for doing so are presented, cases of successful gender theorizing from mortuary data presented, and comparisons made between European and Americanist traditions in this kind of work. Cases are broad in temporal and geographic scope--from Inuit burials in Alaska and Oneota mortuary rituals to Viking Scandinavia, Neolithic China and Iron Age Britain....

The change from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to one dependent upon farming constitutes a truly 'revolutionary' event in the human career. Most archaeologists agree that how ancient people organized their work and family groups was crucial to the success of early attempts at farming. Yet little serious attention has been paid to the social organization of labor in the prehistoric past. This book addresses that lacuna by investigating sexual divisions of labor. As a case study, Peterson chose the southern Levant of West Asia, where the world's first farming societies emerged some 10,000 years...

Archaeology is one of our most powerful sources of new information about the past, about the lives of our ancient and not-so-ancient ancestors. The contributors to Women in Antiquity consider the theoretical problems involved in discerning what the archaeological evidence tells us about gender roles in antiquity. The book includes chapters on the history of gender research, historical texts, mortuary analysis, household remains, hierarchy, and ethnoarchaeology, with each chapter teasing out the inherent difficulty in interpreting ancient evidence as well as the promise of new understanding....

Throughout human history, gender has served as one of the ways in which human beings form their identities and then make their way in the world. But it is not the only way: We also discover ourselves through race, age, class, and other categories. Increasingly, archaeologists are recovering evidence of the ways in which gender has been important in identity-formation in the past, especially in its interaction with other social factors. In Identity and Subsistence, a number of scholars look at how the idea of gender has worked with respect to the formation of the self, masculinity and...