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'Gender' Artifacts - Episode 29
137 Plays7 years ago
On this episodes, the hosts discuss why we view some artifacts as being intrinsically gendered. Specifically looking at why weapons are male and sewing implements are female and how our modern biases affect our views of the past.
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Transcript
Introduction and Support
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. This network is supported by our listeners. You can become a supporting member by going to arcpodnet.com slash members and signing up. As a supporting member, you have access to high quality downloads of each show and a discount at our future online store and access to show hosts on a members only Slack team. For professional members, we'll have training shows and other special content offered throughout the year.
00:00:27
Speaker
Once again, go to arcpodnet.com slash members to support the network and get some great extras and swag in the process. That's arcpodnet.com slash members.
Meet the Hosts and Podcast Introduction
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Women in Archaeology podcast. My name is Chelsea Slotten, and today I am joined by Emily Long, Jessica Irwin, Carson Lopez, and Deidre Black. Ladies, it is so lovely to have you on. As always, thank you so much for being here. Happy to be here. Excellent. Yeah, I'm excited.
Problems with Gendering Artifacts
00:01:02
Speaker
So on today's episode, we are going to be discussing the topic of gendered artifacts.
00:01:09
Speaker
why we gender artifacts, what genders we tend to assign to different types of artifacts, why that's really problematic, maybe some things we can do about making it better. And we'll take it from there. But before we get started, Jessica, I know this is your first time on the show. So I'm hoping that you can just give us, you know, a quick 30 seconds to a minute about who you are and where you're coming from, from like an archaeological perspective.
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I am an underwater archeologist in the state of South Carolina, and my specialties have been plantation archeology and slave ships. And so I've done a lot of work on figuring out how to give more agency to actual slave traders and slave ship construction, more agency to different enslaved individuals and plantations. And so for this episode, particularly,
00:02:04
Speaker
you know, the implied gender bias exists across the maritime landscape really, really heavily. So I'm excited to contribute. Spectacular. Well, we really appreciate how you come on. We're always super excited to have new voices come on and join the show.
Binary Gender Assumptions in Archaeology
00:02:20
Speaker
So when we are talking about gender, we are talking about the socio-cultural constructs that people
00:02:29
Speaker
past, present, and all around the world have generally relate to what can be found between someone's legs. Although, as I'm sure we will get into a little bit later in the episode, the idea that there is a binary gender system and there are only two options is a little bit false. It is also false that there are only two options for the chromosomes that determine what's between your legs, whether that's XX or XY. You can also have XXY.
00:03:00
Speaker
all sorts of other things. So it's a little bit of a fallacy. But gender is the socio-cultural constructs around that and how we treat people differently depending on what we perceive them to be.
Questioning Gendered Object Assumptions
00:03:16
Speaker
And when we are talking about gendering artifacts, what we're really talking about is the tendency
00:03:23
Speaker
in archaeology that really goes back to the foundations of archaeology to see certain artifacts as being inherently either male or female. So a common place where we often see this is looking at weapons, which people often assume are male, that the men, you know, know how to use them. And if weapons are found with female human remains, for example, they are often seem to be more symbolic than practical.
00:03:54
Speaker
Some other examples are oftentimes sewing and weaving. Objects are associated with women. Jewelry is often associated with women. Sometimes certain types of pots can be associated with women. So kind of where do these come from? Why are they problematic? And even those major concepts, man, the hunter, woman, gather, that are so pervasive.
Revisiting Historical Gender Roles
00:04:25
Speaker
I know there was a major episode done with the Women in Archaeology podcast specifically about feminist theory, gender theory, and definitely we can point our listeners to that, but do you want to give a quick synopsis of then the idea of giving things and an artifact, a gender, why that came out?
00:04:56
Speaker
Sure. So, so one of the big pieces that kind of pointed out that we were doing this, um, we, you know, the Royal, we as, as archeologists and that it was such a problem was the piece, um, entitled man, the hunter woman, the gatherer. And it was looking at particularly, um, going back into paleo early hominin time periods.
00:05:24
Speaker
how our assumptions about the fact that men were making these tools to hunt and that they were hunting and providing most of the food and that there would have been nuclear families is incredibly biased towards kind of the ideas that we had of what a ideal in quotation marks family should look like from the Victorian era through the 1950s and that it is
00:05:54
Speaker
much more likely that more calories were being provided via gathered food sources than hunted food sources. And in fact, women may have been hunting a small game and that the family units that existed were probably more likely to have originally been between mothers and children's and it wasn't centered around this kind of patriarchal figure.
Viking Burials and Gender Re-Evaluation
00:06:25
Speaker
And that was in the 70s. And that wasn't really a baton that archeology really started to pick up until the 1980s and 1990s. And dealing with some of the issues around that. So I now feel like I have spoken for several minutes. And I don't know if people have
00:06:49
Speaker
kind of their favorite stories that exemplify some of the issues with this or particularly egregious cases of trying to force a gender on an artifact or a website or anything, but I'd love to hear them. Well, some for me and I think a lot of other people, because they're well known in popular culture too, are the Vikings.
00:07:19
Speaker
There are so, so many cases of there was, you know, human skeletal remains, there was a sword, they were a ha, sword, dick, man, boom, no problem. That's exactly how it's written in the books too. Pretty much. And now that people are going back and going through the collections of what was collected before,
00:07:48
Speaker
to make sure you listen to our Women in Archaeology podcast about using older collections. For more on that, we're doing more research and finding that physically, some of these people were women, or what we in our society would define as women. You know, they probably had XY chromosome, they probably looked what we might consider a woman, sorry, XX, the chromosomes were the
00:08:15
Speaker
were hips, and yet they were still called women. They weren't called women, they were called men because there was a sword. Even there's a couple of burials where there are other artifacts in Viking archaeology are more commonly found with women, especially some personal decorative artifacts, jewelry, and whatnot. And Victorian men
00:08:38
Speaker
the 1950s men, all these men archeologists went so far as to go, Oh, this must have been a single man and they needed to give him some women, uh, artifacts to bury with him. So he could have this representative wife, blah, blah, blah. I was like, or it could be a woman with a sword. No.
Misinterpretations Due to Gender Bias
00:09:05
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So one of my,
00:09:09
Speaker
favorite cases of that. And it's actually also from the Viking period, because as you all should know by now, I'm a Viking archaeologist. And Vikings are awesome. Yes. And, you know, the broader media loves to hear about them and everyone has an idea in their head of what a Viking is. But there was a burial in England, I believe it was Santem Downing. They found some some male artifacts and there's
00:09:37
Speaker
artifacts that they considered to be male and artifacts that they considered to be female. And this perplexed them so much. And it was originally excavated in the 1800s. But this was so absolutely mind boggling to them that they just decided that it was clearly a double burial and that one of the skeletons had completely decayed and the other one hadn't.
00:10:05
Speaker
or that the excavating crew just decided not to excavate the second skeleton or it teleported. I don't really know, but the concept of there being male and female are objects that are traditionally assumed to be male or female in the same grave with only one skeleton was so mind-boggling that they would rather say that poor archaeology was done
00:10:37
Speaker
There's a portal. See, my favorite example is a little different from that because in San Francisco, you know, it was a gold rush boom city. So any site that has an excessive amount of quote unquote female artifacts obviously must have been a house of prostitution.
00:11:01
Speaker
You know, females could not have been out there for any other reason or living together separately from men for any other reason, it must have been a house of prostitution. And don't get me wrong, there are really amazing red light district sites and interesting things, but to just out the gate, oh, more than three females must be prostitution. So let's just go with that. And it's not great.
00:11:26
Speaker
You know, it's a, it's a really hard assumption to say, to say that. So that's my favorite kind of site. One of my favorites is also the Etruscan warrior princess. Um, where there's, there's a burial found and what was interpreted to be the primary interment, you know, the, the big person it's interpreted as the big man. Cause they had lots of decorations and a big giant sword and some more gracile skeletons next to this person.
00:11:56
Speaker
But then we go back into and we examine skeleton and it's not necessarily a dude. It's probably a woman. We don't know how she may have identified.
00:12:09
Speaker
but probably a woman, and all of a sudden the interpretations go from, this was a war, they were very important, they were, you know, prince and conquering all this thing to, it must be a representative sword to represent her place under her father's power. We don't know who this servant is next to her. What? Yeah. Why? And this also goes the other way. There's several prehistoric burials off the coast of Belize.
00:12:39
Speaker
that are barrels of higher ranking priests and priestess. And there's one area where there's certain artifacts that we almost always see with what's interpreted as a high priestess and some that are a high priest and that many of the rituals that these two people were involved with were of a binary gender nature. And so whenever there's
Challenging Gender Assumptions in Archaeology
00:13:04
Speaker
some we would find these two bodies
00:13:07
Speaker
And this one had these artifacts and this one had that artifacts. But we've gone back in and on one of these pairs of burials, genetically they're both dudes. And so that's going to cause so much in the question, which we're going to get into a little bit later about projecting our own cultural gender identities and biases on things.
00:13:35
Speaker
But I think it's just doing such a huge disservice. It does do a huge disservice. And one of the common threads, I guess, in the stories that I've heard so far, which are great, and I hadn't heard a lot of them. I'm always amazed by how much I learn every time we get together and talk. But a lot of what we're talking about are sites where
00:14:01
Speaker
we might be looking at a site that has human remains in it that we can go back and re-examine. And the presence of skeletons that we would estimate to be either biologically male or biologically female doesn't always exist. Sometimes we get graves that just have grave goods in them, or sometimes we have areas of the house
00:14:29
Speaker
of a house that may have a particular type of objects found in them that could indicate that a room or a space was used in a particular manner. And it's great when we have these human remains that we can look at that can force us to question our beliefs and our biases. There are plenty of sites where that's not an option. Yeah, you're right. We have really only been talking about one
00:14:58
Speaker
really one type site, which is the human remains site. And otherwise, which is a major percentage. Yeah, and we need to reinvestigate this in all in all of our it's different iterations, I guess. And that's a comment on art in general. So talking about like, on that, let's let's move away from the burial sites and gendering of artifacts and sites and
00:15:28
Speaker
activity areas that have no actual human remains, the body part, not the things they did. And you're right, it can become incredibly problematic because you're just then
00:15:43
Speaker
basing specifically on the artifact and then assuming what it was used for and by whom. I feel like then you're getting into using either historical documentation or ethnographies or ethno-archaeology and that has issues within itself.
00:16:02
Speaker
I guess while doing CRM, doing a survey and you're recording a site and you just say, it's a habitation over there. They're making pottery over there. They were doing this. Honestly, you don't always get into such a deep interpretation of, well, women were over here making the pottery and then men were over here making the tools. But I do think there is that underlying assumption. It's just really not necessarily
00:16:27
Speaker
Especially for especially for sites that get into a deeper interpretation, especially things that get moved on to artistic representations of workspaces and dioramas. It's always going to be that the woman is sitting passively like the woman is almost always presented passively doing her activities and the man is out actively doing their activities when they're both active.
00:16:58
Speaker
They're both doing things. Their activities are overlapping. And we have minuscule, if any evidence that we're assigning to either of them was actually happening that way. Or even if they interpreted their own genders the way we are.
Beyond Binary Genders in Archaeology
00:17:13
Speaker
Well, I think you can also interpret or you can give an action, a gender that has no basis for that gender, especially when you go to interpret a site to the public.
00:17:25
Speaker
I know there is a site where the kitchen of this plantation was burned down probably by an enslaved person there. And the reason that they know that is because an important religious artifact, which is this bead, was found there.
00:17:41
Speaker
So in all of the public interpretation, they're saying a female slave came and burned down the kitchen and she must have been angry. So you're taking this one tiny artifact and yes, beads can be traditionally a female gender object, but it also has religious significance and assuming that, oh, it must have been a woman who did this out of anger or spite when really there's no basis for that kind of interpretation other than a bead equals a female.
00:18:09
Speaker
And that interpretation even doubles down with the angry woman of color trope that we get into. Just problematic. Heavily. I will say one thing that I try to do personally is when I'm talking about people that were here doing stuff, I do try and use the non-gendered they. It's been grammatically correct since at least Chaucer.
00:18:38
Speaker
And yeah, there's a precedent. His name is Chaucer and Shakespeare. And it's, and it's also now correct grammar for AP articles. So there's no reason not to use the non gendered singular they Yeah, and that's a that's a great point.
00:19:03
Speaker
from having conversations with some people that, and I think that this is actually a really good thing to use the term they and to force some introspection, but I do know that there are people that, you know, they hear the term they and they're like, well, but why can't it be male or female? Why don't you know? I want to know. Like, what are you trying to suggest? Why do they have to know so bad?
00:19:33
Speaker
I mean, what is it? I mean, I don't think that there's a reason that they need to other than that they are, as much of our modern society is very preoccupied with gender and gender couples. And it just points out an interesting. Well, and I think one important thing to kind of put in here is the necessity for examples in that it could be either.
00:20:02
Speaker
because without addressing gender, there is an automatic projection that is often termed the androcentric bias to where you have a male persona that is from the reader standpoint projected on to any, most
Addressing Androcentric Bias in Archaeology
00:20:24
Speaker
any artifact. And that kind of goes back to, you know, our current assumptions of male, say for jewelry and men for
00:20:32
Speaker
weapons. You get things like stone tools are associated with men. Basketry is associated with women.
00:20:41
Speaker
The soft things are women and the hard things are men. Yes. If you are to say even, you know, we may not know in the past, but we could even just look at our modern record or the ethnographic and historic ethnographic records, we know that that does not hold true all of the time. There's much more fluidity than we'd ever assume.
00:21:03
Speaker
Exactly. And so I think it's important to point out like, yeah, this could be, you know, what you're assuming. However, there's a strong suggestion that it could be something else as well. It's known in this, you know, society or that society and society see that it works differently. So I think pointing out those differences and discussing and naming those genders and those third and fourth genders that are out there, bringing them into the conversation
00:21:34
Speaker
is important although I do know that the tendency is to just like we can't say anything so we're not going to and that's the thing I see a lot and that's the danger of that is encouraging a self-projection of the androcentric bias.
00:21:53
Speaker
So I actually think that's a really good place to end for this segment. We're about 20 minutes in. But when we come back, we will continue to discuss these modern biases and assumptions. All these things we make no apology for the study of archaeology.
00:22:18
Speaker
Did aliens build Stonehenge? Did the Easter Island statues walk? Did the Vikings colonize Midwest America? What does mainstream archaeology have to say about all of this? Listen to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast and learn about popular archaeological mysteries, hoax or fact. Learn to tell the difference with Dr. Kenneth Fader and co-host Sarah of the Archaei Fantasies blog.
00:22:40
Speaker
Check out the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash our key fantasies and get ready to think critically. Let's get back to the show. Hello and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. So far tonight we have been talking about the gendering of
00:23:09
Speaker
artifacts in the archaeological record and some of the problems with that. And when we left, we were talking about some of the problems with the assumptions that are often made around what artifacts belong to what gender and, you know,
00:23:33
Speaker
My mother may have always said, remember, assumptions make an ass out of you and me. And this is certainly one of those times where that is. Definitely possible. So I think we're going to keep talking a little bit more about those assumptions. And Deidre, I think that you were about to say something as we went to break. Yes, I was. And so as we're moving into this, we also need to think of, you know,
00:24:02
Speaker
There's more than one gender or gender expression. And we also don't want to get into the idea of no genders because that's doing a disservice to everyone. And when our people in our society here, no gender, they assume male masculine man. And if we keep this, you know, Andrew centric view of the past moving into the future, you know, half or more of your population
00:24:32
Speaker
is, is passive is not doing anything is coming along for the ride. You know, the man's at the head, he's bringing the boat around, he's conquering, he's making discoveries, he's, there's a light bulb, there's a sword, there's a spear, and everyone else is just sort of bringing up the women and the children, bringing up the rear. And so you're leaving out all these people.
00:24:56
Speaker
And we're also leaving out that there are more than two genders. There's more than two sexes. And everyone's going to see themselves through their own society and interpret this through their own views of gender. And so now I think it's time that we trolled this along into gender essentialism and the gender binary as we experience in our culture.
Educational Gaps in Gender Theory
00:25:26
Speaker
The hard thing with that is just even looking at some of the reports and articles that come out, even now, I feel like gender is a concept that's deeply held on to, that it's going to be taking, it's going to take a lot more time and research and effort, especially on the part of everyone to try to get different interpretations out there and concepts
00:25:55
Speaker
more fluid concepts of gender. I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean, I feel like there are so many stories that I've heard where people will have a burial and they'll automatically say, well, this can't be a grave good with a male skeleton. We hear we have a mono, so it's not a grave good. And that this means we don't need to repatriate this one grave good because it can't be because it's a female object.
00:26:24
Speaker
that gets into the problems where you have some deeply, deeply held assumptions that can harm the record, that it changes the record altogether because you're taking away something from what was intact. Well, and further than just making an assumption, I think another problem is that for a lot of people, archaeology and how archaeology works in general is kind of abstract.
00:26:51
Speaker
in terms of here you have these clues and this is the interpretation that you come from and it's a lot easier to put it into you know black and white male and female. Exactly. Master servant categories and it causes you know interpretation problems across every archaeological site not just you know a grave good or prehistoric or you know a plantation site just every site in general.
00:27:17
Speaker
Um, because it is our responsibility at some point to disseminate this information, you know, across the board. So, yeah, it does seem to really get keep coming back to the powerful and the passive. Yeah. And it's a lot more complicated than that. Which that also gets into the political repercussions of what we do and say and what we present to the public. Yes.
00:27:50
Speaker
It is an interesting thing that I've noticed in my work on gender and gender bioarchaeology and some of the stuff that you saw that was coming out in the late 90s and early 2000s was really trying to dig down and fairly substantially.
00:28:15
Speaker
into the question of sex versus gender. And it wasn't just in monographs that we're trying to discuss sex and gender, but it was in journal articles and it was really great. And there's certainly good work that's still being done. I mean, like, Pam Geller is amazing and I love her work and I'm happy to talk about it during night, anytime you want. Call me up. But I have seen
00:28:46
Speaker
a trend in journal articles, particularly in bioarchaeology, they'll go, oh yeah, sex and gender, not the same thing. Biological sex, chromosomal gender, cultural constructions around. Oh look, I dealt with sex and gender. And then they kind of move on. And it has become a paragraph that people put into their work because they know that they should. But they don't actually understand what they're saying. Right, and it's not dealt with really
00:29:16
Speaker
deeply or intrinsically and it's that understanding doesn't necessarily make itself known throughout the rest of their reporting of results and discussion, conclusion, analysis, all of that. So I think it's an important thing to continue to forefront, not just in work that is particularly dealing with sex and gender, but women are 50% of the population, 51% actually.
00:29:47
Speaker
Historically, I feel like more than 51% in a lot of cases. Yes, I'm talking about demographic data from today. I think it's 51%. But this isn't something that should just be talked about in sex and gender volumes. This is something that should be talked about everywhere because it affects all aspects of archaeology. And as we were talking about before, go ahead. You know, a lot of this, especially archaeology, with the past, we still approach it
00:30:16
Speaker
in a very abstract way. And it's going to remain abstract if we keep it in the gender and sex focused study groups and journals and whatnot. Like we have to pick a way and get it, shove it into everything else because it is everywhere else and they need to understand it and they need to get over themselves and at least try to include it in everything else.
Learning Experiences in Gender and Archaeology
00:30:44
Speaker
So one quick thing before Emily takes us to the next step. I wanted to mention as far as reporting and other studies that are not dealing directly with gender and including the ability to include gender is very important, like you're saying. However, I think a lot of people will find it very intimidating. And I think it needs to be
00:31:12
Speaker
discussed as part of the technique for methodology as something in the context of the study that is discussed as deep and often as the environmental context as possible. I mean, there are limitations, of course, but, you know, if you have, what, a whole section in any archeological report or study at all that has
00:31:42
Speaker
environmental setting and the history and prehistory and the time context within the environment. You can, I think, in a similar fashion, insert a discussion on the gender of these artifacts as you are discussing the artifacts generally throughout the paper. Like it's still part of it cannot be separated out as something distinct.
00:32:12
Speaker
It needs to kind of continue to flow through the rest of the the report because as I mentioned a little bit earlier that stone tools are to be male and so like in the Great Basin and Desert West that's almost all you find. So the only thing that you're seeing is man the hunter and it's assumed that all
00:32:35
Speaker
stone tools or mail. And on top of that, the only thing that's often recorded in detail are points, which gives the most priority to
00:32:49
Speaker
what many consider to be the male record because they're hunting objects, quote unquote, which often they are, you know, arrowheads and spear points tend to be hunting objects, but there's evidence that they were used for other things as well. But then you get things like drills, which are fabulous. And I've been really fascinated with these really interestingly shaped
00:33:13
Speaker
and other bizarre looking lithics that have been used with plant materials or with fabric or with leathers that just, if they're recorded, they're usually not photographed as intensively on a regular cultural resource management project as the points themselves. Are you saying we should challenge our biases of what these artifacts are used for?
00:33:43
Speaker
Oh, I wouldn't say something like that. You mean if we did useware, they could have multiple uses? Yes. Over the years on projects, it is one of my small obsessions has been accumulating, although at this point mostly lost because phone pictures don't last very long.
00:34:08
Speaker
accumulating photos of sort of interesting looking like tools that are not your regular just cutting, not your typical utilized flake. It's something that's a little bit different or odd looking. And I'm like, I bet. Because in this region that I work in, there's no ceramics. So 90% of everything made is perishable, which
00:34:35
Speaker
is often considered women's work and we, you know, we've discussed the issue a little bit with that because if the only thing men are making are stone tools and then even that's kind of, you know, they're not doing much. If we're going to project what's normally assumed on a hundred gathering society, you're going to have in that, you know, area, women together is doing everything.
00:35:02
Speaker
you know, the men are making their spare points and being gone and coming back. And it's very problematic in if you sit back and really kind of think about what the assumptions are, and where that takes you if you follow through the concept. But again,
00:35:21
Speaker
in the west here we have in many cases a fabulous ethnographic record that and even modern tribes that you know there are men weavers some of the best known weavers in basketry weavers in the west are men and some of that has to do with you know the schools and our more recent history with the tribes but it's you know we can if we open our eyes to
00:35:50
Speaker
can see what our assumptions are to hold up. One part of the whole issue too, with assumptions and whatnot, I think really has to do with education and how archaeologists are educated in terms of different kinds of theories, different kinds of interpretations.
00:36:09
Speaker
and that will guide them how we write and how we present information. And I was wondering for all of you whether or not you were exposed, at least in undergrad, much too
00:36:27
Speaker
alternate interpretations beyond just, you know, your archaeological theory class and you're told, yeah, there's this thing called, you know, feminist archaeology moving on, you know, it's all part of post-percessualism moving on. Because I honestly I wasn't exposed too much until graduate school about
00:36:46
Speaker
bigger concepts. And I remember questioning an undergrad like, well, why do you say this was only men or why only this? Because it seems more in your traditional scientific approach, you can't tell gender and you can't go into these deeper interpretations and so on. It's just not question. So I didn't know about your experience and education. Did you experience that as well or did you get a broader education in terms of
00:37:15
Speaker
gender and interpreting gender? Well, for me, I did my undergraduate in the late 1990s. And we didn't do a lot of theory in the archaeology specific classes. The theory was more for the anthropology. And my anthropology professors, I will say several of them had
00:37:44
Speaker
a lot of of basis their their academic genealogy went back to you know Benedict and uh Krober and those folks and so they did you know get into this some and but also at the time as far as what you were having your undergrads read it wasn't really a big and
00:38:11
Speaker
super big into the undergrads, at least in the South Central United States public university in the 90s. Getting into graduate school, which I did in the mid-oughties, we did a whole lot more. Not just for the graduate class, but almost all of the people I was in graduate school also TA'd the undergraduate classes, including the theory class. And the theory class,
00:38:42
Speaker
did get into a little bit of the feminist anthropological theory.
Changing Gender Portrayals in Media
00:38:49
Speaker
The main two teachers of the undergraduate theory class were both dudes and one of them loves Marxist anthropological theory.
00:39:07
Speaker
which I had been a little bit exposed to an undergrad, but this guy, like it was his favorite thing to talk about. So I got that into there, but they, they seemed a little skittish to actually go, boom, feminism, feminist archeology, feminist anthropological theory. What are we talking about? What's challenge? Like the challenge the class
00:39:34
Speaker
binary, but not the gender binary necessary. So there doesn't seem much exposure. In your case, too, where it's just like, it just really, it wasn't even on the radar. It's not like we're not even we don't talk about that. It's just it's not on the radar. Why would you even it's a specialty class. It's not part of your general education. It's a specialty class.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a big problem. A little differently. I went to undergrad in the Bay Area of California, so it's a whole different kind of demographic of the people who end up there. Yes. In anthropology courses and the theory courses, I had some wonderful, very, very feminist teachers or professors specifically who were working on kind of the feminist side of
00:40:25
Speaker
anthropological questions in a cultural sense, whereas that archaeology teachers. It just wasn't a subject to be broached. It wasn't brought up in method theory, and that includes which looking back in retrospect after going to graduate school and working professionally, a professor who specialized in, you know, Polynesia, Oceania, Samoa,
00:40:54
Speaker
So the fact that we never spoke about, you know, gender past being binary kind of blows my mind at this point. Um, but you know, it's a different kind of environment. So, especially how, how, uh, gender is expressed throughout Oceania. Yeah. That's unfortunate that he didn't get that exposure.
00:41:17
Speaker
I think that there also though it kind of goes back is some fear of using archeological context to make gender assumptions. So again, it's just easier to fall into the binary stance, but the anthropologists were amazing. And apparently I'm very lucky. I didn't really realize it wasn't the norm. So I don't have my one grad school prof who taught
00:41:47
Speaker
other grads that she came out of the San Diego area. And sometimes things would get brought up in her undergraduate class and she'd be like, why? Why? Why? She was the sort of professor that would be reading something out of the book and she'd be like, oh, no, that's stupid. This is, don't do that. That's a bad interpretation. Their data are bad and they should feel bad.
00:42:13
Speaker
So it's like some good areas, good push towards having a broader knowledge base and trying to expose young minds to many different interpretations or the complete opposite end of the spectrum. So I guess the big push should be is for archaeologists like us and for professors and whatnot. Like I know I did this for my class when teaching theory was just like, all right, guys,
00:42:39
Speaker
Keep in mind, this is a construct. Keep in mind, we have to challenge these views. So I guess it's just something we got to push more and more and more. So as an undergrad, I had a very different experience, actually, I had a professor, Madonna, who at the University of Oregon, and she I took a class, actually, it was gender and archaeology.
00:43:10
Speaker
specifically as an undergrad student. So jealous. It was amazing. I mean, I was like, this is great. It just seemed very natural. And yeah, now being in grad school and like, wait, no one had this. Was this movie as honest? It sounds. So I'm kind of surprised that it's not more common
00:43:34
Speaker
And I mean, there was a lot of discussion on indigenous archaeology, which is becoming more and more of a hot topic in recent years as well. But the, I mean, one of the best exercises to be had was a little project with flipping through old Nat Geos and picking apart that man, the hunter, woman, the gatherer, and using who,
00:44:02
Speaker
article was that I don't know if it was Giro or Conkey, but one of them had an early article in the early 80s that discussed, I believe it was, I could be totally off basics and I couldn't find the article before we started.
00:44:20
Speaker
But it was basically that, it was a whole article on picking apart national geographic for the illustrations like you were talking about earlier. And it's something that I know after that article was released, I want to say it may have been even later between that and the other buildup from other angles of cultural anthropology.
00:44:49
Speaker
they eventually, this was of course before the more recent bio, had attempted to correct a lot of that. And so they would try and get photography of men holding children in their, the cultural or ethnographic photo projects. When it came to archaeology, they tried to diversify the way,
00:45:17
Speaker
At one point, it was really neat because National Geographic had decided to start diversifying the way that gender was portrayed. So using male photographs or photographs of men holding children in cultural contexts, if you have more illustrations.
Strategies for Gender Inclusivity in Narratives
00:45:37
Speaker
I want to say the the with some time in the next or in the last
00:45:45
Speaker
five years or so. There was a magazine edition that focused on Cahokia and there was the illustrations and the depictions were a lot more diversified in the way that Cinder was at least in regard
00:46:04
Speaker
to the artifacts and how they were used is not as strongly, you know, you didn't have the men carrying the deer in the foreground and then the women's backs to the illustrator because they were grinding corn or hay or whatever. So there's, there's a lot of interesting that article had gone over like body language and illustrations and kind of the pulling apart the meetings and the
00:46:29
Speaker
The projections of cultural norms and cultural ideologies, mostly, it's not even a cultural norm. And to be honest. That's really cool. That article really seemed to challenge viewpoints and had a really good response. Yeah, so it's neat. Yeah, so that is probably a good place to end for this 20-minute segment. We ran over a couple of minutes. That's fine.
00:46:59
Speaker
But when we come back, we will talk a little bit more about some of the other things we can do to try and help change perceptions of women and gender in the archaeological record and other ways that it's gotten better.
00:47:23
Speaker
Hey podcast fans, check out the Ark 365 podcast at www.arkpodnet.com forward slash ark365. That's A-R-C-H 365 for your daily dose of archeology. Each episode is less than 15 minutes long and we have some great guests recording about awesome archeology. We also try to throw in some definitions and basic archeological information. So check out the 365 days of archeology podcast only in 2017 at www.arkpodnet.com forward slash ark365 today.
00:47:52
Speaker
Mine is also on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and Google Music by typing art 365 into the search. Now back to the show.
Incorporating Gender Bias Awareness in Education
00:48:04
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. On today's episode, we've been discussing the sometimes problematic gendering of artifacts.
00:48:16
Speaker
And when we left, Deidre actually had a comment that she wanted to make. So we're just going to kick it off right there. OK, thanks. I'm hearing about, you know, other people's, you know, feminist archaeology, gender and archaeology experiences. And it seems that it's so very, very small when there should be a
00:48:40
Speaker
Not only part of base archaeology, this needs to be a bigger part of general education. I shouldn't have to have to seek out, you know, gender articles on gender bias and archaeological interpretation. It should be part of the mainstream class.
00:48:58
Speaker
I should have to go, oh, this one person had this great class. I had so many great archeology professors from so many different academic genealogies. I had people of different genders teaching my archeology classes, my anthropology classes, and I didn't get this. And I should. There's no reason I shouldn't. Even as an aside, like, hey, challenge your biases, boys and girls, and everyone else involved. But you can't do that just in archeology.
00:49:27
Speaker
We maybe can start with archaeology, but we're so small part of the world, even the academic world, and people are coming to archaeology from the other parts. We might start the movement here, but we need to get people all the way down the education line, all across society to acknowledge gender biases and the great wonderful spectrum of gender
00:49:58
Speaker
that the facts are not gendered before we can even move this forward. I think that's one of the problems that we're writing into is that we don't have, as specialists, we don't have good exposure to these theories without really seeking them out. And even then, it's a pain in the butt. It really is. You're right. You are totally right. The fact that it's even viewed as a specialty is just a huge problem. Yeah. Because it shouldn't be.
00:50:27
Speaker
Like you said, something that you have to seek out. It should just be something that is acknowledged and addressed. Everyone is at least aware that it's a thing that they should be talking about. I mean, everyone's going to have different opinions because everyone has different opinions. We can't really get over that.
00:50:43
Speaker
I mean, why do we get so much, you know, here's some useware interpretation of this projectile point. And here's how you would source this projectile point. Here's how you would source this clay. What about extremely gravid females in a hunter-gatherer society when it's time to move with the seasons? Why aren't we talking about this? Well, we know why, but
00:51:05
Speaker
We need to get it out there. It needs to be part of the general education.
Challenging Traditional Gender Roles
00:51:11
Speaker
I mean, not just archaeology, not just anthropology, not just academia. Yeah. Well, and that gets back to when it was brought up earlier, I think it was Emily that was talking about education because feminism to most of the public is anti-man.
00:51:29
Speaker
And it's not. It's a theory of anti-math. And it's not. Exactly. It is not. That is like the last thing it is. So this is where you get into things in early education, like high school, middle schools, where these theories are presented incorrectly.
00:51:49
Speaker
These ideas that are supposed to be more equalizing are presented as an opposition when, in fact, it is not. I remember having a stupid Facebook argument with a woman who was anti-feminist because her thought was it prevented her, she said, because I want to be able to stay home with my kids. I said, that's fine. Feminism actually gives you
00:52:14
Speaker
makes it so that the idea is that you have a choice because her thing was like, I want, you know, I don't want my, uh, to be told I have to go work and I can't stay home with my kids, but I want my daughter to be able to have the choice to have kids or not. And I'm like, well, that sounds like a feminist stance if I ever heard. Or my friend Alfred who's a stay at home dad.
00:52:42
Speaker
Yeah. Why should this be so weird? It should be. He has this really, and you know, things come up to him and people are either, oh, so where are you rejoining the workforce? How's your unemployment going? Is half of it and half, and the other half is, oh, you're a man doing a traditionally feminine thing. You're so brave. He's like, I'm a parent.
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, like when people ask if your husband may be sitting, that one kills me. I have good help from my friend Alfred's little daughter because whenever people come up to that, he does squash it. He's like, I'm a parent. This is a thing parents do. That's awesome. Well, it gets back to just the fact that some people just think it's
00:53:29
Speaker
too hard, I guess, to think about? I don't know, women in our theological record? Or it's like, it's too much of a jump if people are still thinking like, oh, is your husband babysitting tonight? Ha, ha, ha, ha. And it's like, no, no. You see babysitting and making pottery?
00:53:52
Speaker
I'm wrong as well. But every case study that I've ever looked at academically in a classroom setting, we have spent at least a few minutes talking about ethnocentrism and examining that in that article.
Preservation Bias and Gendered Artifacts
00:54:07
Speaker
So why can't we also just take a minute to sit there and also examine gender bias? You know, if you have the time to examine the ethnocentrism, you have there's no reason that you don't have time to examine this as well.
00:54:21
Speaker
Definitely. And going from there, it sounds like there are quite a few issues, not only with gender bias and the archaeological record, but then extending even further into preservation bias. What do we actually preserve? What do we actually research? And Chelsea, I know you wanted to get into that. Yeah, so some of that, and I'm going to kind of circle us back around to Vikings because that's my area. Circle around in a boat?
00:54:51
Speaker
Yeah. But you do have issues. It has been pointed out that swords are generally pretty big. Axes are pretty big. And if we are going to assume that those are male, those are also going to be recognizable as signs of status in the archaeological record. You're going to find them. They're big. They're really hard to miss. If you have an archaeologist,
00:55:20
Speaker
You can identify that there's like a three foot sword in a grave. Like you should probably find yourself another archeologist. There's a large toothpick. Going back to some of the more things that we think might be traditional feminine objects. Um, some of them are smaller. You know, jewelry is, is often smaller than swords. Um, you know, and it's might not be as well.
00:55:49
Speaker
preserved as well. Um, could be easier to miss. I know I have a friend who, whenever she runs an excavation, she always says that there's a prize for the person who finds the most beads, even if she knows that there's probably not going to be any beads found at this site. She wants people to pay enough attention that they could find, you know, beads that are like, you know, seed bead size, that really tiny beads.
00:56:18
Speaker
Um, and if it's CRM, they're going work faster, but slower. Right. So you, you could miss some of the smaller things. You also have textiles that often don't preserve particularly well. Um, they're also, you know, wooden objects. They, the OSA workshop is a great example of this. There are tons of wooden objects that survives there and including, you know, some animal heads that they think may have been
00:56:48
Speaker
used in, in processional, um, and other things, but that is really an extraordinary Viking find. And if you don't know about it, you should check it out. Is it the, the Oselberg where we have a, a woman ship burial, but somehow she's not achieved in. Yes. The, it is the most prestigious burial from the Viking age, from people of either biological sex that has ever been found and somehow.
00:57:17
Speaker
People try and dismiss the fact that she could have been a chief sinner, could have been important, or they try and give her a different status. Oh, she's a princess with no power. She's a princess, or she is a priestess, or the burial mound was on a plane rather than up in the mountains.
00:57:44
Speaker
Clearly, she was on a plane, so she couldn't have been important, except that plane was a major waterway, and the mound is large enough that everyone on the plane would have been able to see the mound, and it would have been incredibly bizarre. Oh, I'm sorry, wait. What are we arguing? Preservation bias. But you have these art effects that did survive in the Rosenberg Burial that may not have survived in other burials.
00:58:13
Speaker
which is a big problem because. And these are all big things. Yeah. We could also say that some of our focus is because our methods that we're taught are come from checking out these big, sour, chewy objects and not the everyday data. I've talked with an archaeologist and she takes soil samples and extracts
00:58:43
Speaker
hair DNA from the various animals and people that were in that area. It was like blow up my mind when I saw it. But then I was like, why should this blow up my people right here? They left stuff. People shed, animals shed. It showed me mind blowing that we can extract this little tiny data.
00:59:05
Speaker
Like the way we gather our data even is biased against the smaller everyday objects. And it's in those smaller everyday objects that we get the story of people. Well, and also how money is allocated in lab settings. I know of one instance where there are a lot of artifacts and granted underwater conservation can be a lot more expensive, but the concretions that have
00:59:32
Speaker
you know, pins, beads, the tiny things are on the very bottom of the list of the things that are going to be conserved.
00:59:41
Speaker
There's at least five muskets ahead of that. With all likelihood, those muskets are not going to tell us as much information as the beads and the pins and the tiny things are going to. But they're exciting and they're flashy and, you know, sexy. Yeah. And so it's a whole, you know, the funding becomes an issue. The space allocated becomes an issue. The time allotment becomes an issue all based on that these male gendered artifacts are more important
01:00:09
Speaker
or are going to tell us more when that's inherently not true. Is that true for basketry textiles and whatnot as well? I'm not as familiar with a museum curation and how that all pans out. Yeah, it is a very, a very specialized specialization. And I know that's crazy, but like, there are very few people who can and do do such things. It's, yeah, it's,
01:00:38
Speaker
very seldomly studied, it is generally difficult to find. There are only a few contexts that preserve them regularly and steadily. That would be like cave, dry cave context is a lot of the work, the material that I work with. So that's definitely one, and you don't see that on the East Coast. In that region, you generally get wet sites occasionally, and same with the Pacific Northwest.
01:01:05
Speaker
And then in the Southeast, you get clay impressions, which are helpful, and you get those in Europe. So there's a lot of different ways to look at these things, but they are similarly not prioritized, like Jessica was saying, for funding. Rare places know how to preserve them is another thing, because it is such a unique specialization.
01:01:32
Speaker
But aside from even just basketry and textiles, you have other things like cordage and sinew, which are used for everything else. So sites like Monte Verde in Chile is an amazing, fabulous, probably the sexiest site ever. And close behind is this new site in BC, which dates to a similar time range.
01:02:02
Speaker
they have this deep time and perishables. And it's interesting looking at them on the invertey side, if you take away the perishables, the lithics are entirely unimpressive and would not be enough to convince that it's even a sight. They're underwhelming stone tools, one could say, and there's no
01:02:29
Speaker
there's no point types to identify at the site. So if they're all, you know, flaked stone tools, they're all cobbles and like a chipped pebble types of pieces. But what, you know, the stuff that sells it there are the tent stakes that are still there. It's a collapsed house with like the wood beams and
01:02:56
Speaker
like reserves of different types of plants for basketry or for textiles that were put aside. I mean, there's the stuff that preserved and really kind of sold the site and put the nail in the coffin for the pre-clovis.
01:03:11
Speaker
stuff is amazing. It was done so long ago, and it's so widely accepted. But in every intro class, it's kind of like, yeah, there's this satin down in Chile, we're not sure how it got there. But nothing's, you know, older than clothes, at least, you know, the thought was about 10 years ago, or five years ago, or three even. Now it's kind of much more well accepted that there is other stuff, but it's difficult to find. So with
Inclusive Research Practices
01:03:37
Speaker
the regions where I have a lot of dry caves and I have perishable stuff, the rest of that stuff is gone and the rest of the region if it's not in that cave context. The region I've done a lot of work in, there's a lot of the dry caves, and you're absolutely right with the preservation. There's hardly any stone tools or even bones in those. Some of these are deposition sites and some of them were living sites.
01:04:06
Speaker
The other stuff is so cool. There's one cave, and there's just tons of children's shoes. Pre-smart children's shoes. To the point where we can do a typology. Oh my God. I know. It's amazing. But that, you know, that gets into the archeology of children. Why are these children's shoes here? Why is there just one shoe here? Are these only children's shoes? Are the adult shoes the same?
01:04:33
Speaker
do you ever find a child's shoes, pair of shoes? You always find one, right? Like on the sidewalk. And in historic context, I found the closest I found to a pair of children's shoes was one and a half children's shoes. Yeah, it seems to always go back to what are the underrepresented things being, not being studied. So women, children. Where are your elderly?
01:05:02
Speaker
I mean, if someone isn't doing a lot of walking, they're not out hunting your mammoth, but I bet they make a kick-ass basket. Yeah, the archaeology of elderly individuals is fascinating and understudied as well. And plays very much into gender because perceptions of gender change with aging of ourselves and of others. And all of this context, preservation,
01:05:33
Speaker
Learn it, do it, think about it, you know? Really, we're just trying to set everyone else up for future research projects. You need to, we've got ideas. Email us, we'll give you topics. I know that age I am and what I've experienced and what I want to have the opportunity to do, maybe if I'm lucky, but if I ever start changing people's minds that are coming up and go, hey, look at everybody.
01:06:01
Speaker
Yeah. You gotta look at everybody. Not 50%, not 10%. Everybody. That's how in my last lecture for the semester, it's like, look at everybody, dumbass. Because just think of it, if, if you are interpreting projectile points as a male activity, it isn't going to be an able bodied
01:06:28
Speaker
You know, male of what we would consider working age, you know, they're post pubescent. They may have father children. How much of the population is that? 10%? Maybe? If you're lucky, considering people have a tendency to fall off a cliff and get sick. You're right. We're discounting so many people.
01:06:50
Speaker
who are able to, a woman's not gonna wait around for a guy to be like, are you just scraper, but he's off doing something. I'm just gonna sit here and wait. Oh, whoa, it's me. No, she's gonna make a damn scraper. Exactly. Or beautiful girl at this point. That is probably a good point to say we are coming up again on the end of our last segment.
01:07:18
Speaker
Look at everyone dumbass, seems like a great ending point. But if anyone has any final thoughts on the matter that they're just dying to share. I have like a quick one. Yeah, of course. When looking at gender and looking at gendering artifacts, when you study this, when you teach this, when you realize this, you're not just saying, look at the women.
01:07:47
Speaker
What you're really doing is saying, look at everybody. Look at the people that are gender nonconforming. Look at the people that are of different genders. Look at the people that are old. Look at the people that are young. And that's what this gets down to. Don't just look at this very small representative sample that's not representative of the population. And that's why you have to think about gendering artifacts and gendering archaeology.
01:08:14
Speaker
nice just to kind of go off of that you know if you're gonna go ahead and put your western bias on a site just do it all the way like who's important to you is your mom important to you how about your sister or your brother or your grandma and grandpa maybe think about where they would be in context of the civilization or the period that you're looking at because we all know that the world doesn't roll around us so if we're gonna put our perspective on a site like you know if you're gonna do it wrong do it all the way
01:08:42
Speaker
Just run with it. Yeah, I definitely want to add, I guess the only closing thoughts I have is, is thinking about that, um, what Linda Hercomb has termed the missing majority, you know, especially in places where you have horrendous preservation bias, um, or even just like, you know,
01:09:11
Speaker
in a lot of the Northwest area, there's no, like I said earlier, there's no ceramics. So what do you have, lipics? And how, you know, what are we not seeing? Think about what you're not seeing. Think about what may be seen with what we have. We have this assumption that all stone tools are for the processing of animals and hide and, you know,
01:09:37
Speaker
What else could be seen here? What other things are we not looking at? And just reanalyze existing collections, revisit old sites, and just don't assume that what's been written is written in stone. And if we've learned anything from post-percessualism is that there's many stories out there. Children, elderly,
01:10:06
Speaker
any, you know, inclusion of different labels.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:10:14
Speaker
You have, as well as gender non-performing, you have just this wide variety that isn't seen or looked at. And even just asking the question of what might this look like in this region, this context, this culture is a big step forward. For sure. And I would like to add to the
01:10:36
Speaker
comment about if you're going to go with your biases, really go with your biases, which, you know, we all have them, um, identify yourself when, when you're writing so that whoever is trying to, to look at your work at a later date knows, you know, I'm a feminist by archeologist or.
01:11:02
Speaker
I am a creationist or, and they can decide for themselves whether or not, or to what degree they think your biases impacted your work. Exactly. That's a really good point. Self-identify your biases, which will also make you a better archaeologist because as you're aware of them, you can start to address the issues that they can cause. And that makes you a better person too. Yes.
01:11:31
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Believe it or not, it's not all about archaeology, guys. So I think that brings us to the end of our episode. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me. It is always an absolute pleasure. Yeah. And for the listeners, if you have any questions about tonight's episode, or you want to get in touch with any of us,
01:11:58
Speaker
moving forward about what we've talked about, we can always be reached at the womeninarchaeologyatgmail.com. And we will put that link in the show notes. Bye!
01:12:23
Speaker
We hope you have enjoyed the show. Please be sure to subscribe and rate our show wherever you listen. We are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and probably whatever your favorite podcasting app is. Remember to like and share. If you have questions or comments, you can post them in the comment section for the show at the Women in Archaeology page on the Archaeology Podcasting Network site, or email them to us at womeninarchaeologypodcast.com. This show is part of the Archaeology Podcasting Network,
01:12:51
Speaker
and is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle. You can reach them at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Music for the show was Retro Future by Kevin MacLeod, available at Incomtep and Royalty Free Music. Thanks for listening. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster.
01:13:15
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com