Gender and identity (Archaeology)

Погребения женщин с предметами вооружения являются панкультурным феноменом для обществ степной/лесостепной полосы Евразии раннего железного века. Предлагаемая статья посвящена систематизации и интерпретации женских захоронений с оружием саргатской культуры Зауралья и Западной Сибири. Включение саргатских данных в общий контекст развития скотоводческих обществ Евразии позволит расширить наши знания о древних социальных структурах и месте, занимаемом внем женщинами

About a month before the general parliamentary election of April 2014, the renovations of Kossúth Square, in front of the Hungarian Parliament finished and both the square and the famous parliamentary building glowed in new splendor. The complete reconstruction of the square had started in 2012 and was pursued with big ambitions: to recreate the square in its original design of pre-1944, with the same statues as were established in the beginning of the 20th century until World War II. “The main square of the nation” is its new name, already pointing to the fact that the statues and composition of the square (including a 35 meter Hungarian flag) would represent the bases of Hungarian national identity, using renovated versions of the same statues that stood there 70 years ago. In this process, some statues, for example of Mihaly Karolyi, the first, leftist, Prime Minister of Hungary were also removed from the square.
I am curious to see in more depth how notions of gender identity are represented and reproduced in the choice of two statue groups. On the example of the Kossúth- group and the Tisza-memorial, I examined what functions and characteristics women and men represented in the larger context of the nation’s “main square”. I argue that in its representation of women as mothers, carers, and auxiliary figures in their relation to the male statues, the mainstream discourse around national identity is relying on a hierarchical vision of heterosexual gender identities. A militarized view of masculinity stands on top, above the passive feminine reproducers, who are nevertheless important for the survival of the nation. Further, through its Christian- centeredness, ethnic and religious minorities are excluded from mainstream discourses around the historical events represented by these statues.

The identity taxonomies of age and gender are under researched concepts for Neolithic Britain. The nature of Neolithic funerary assemblages, often disarticulated and commingled, has meant that models surrounding individual identities have not been theorised and instead theoretical models have focussed upon collective group identities. Using Northern England as a study region, this research demonstrates that through the comparative analysis of Neolithic funerary assemblages variations are present between demographic groups and appear to be chronologically distinct. The results are used to propose some new suggestions as to how age and gender contributed to and maintained identities in Neolithic Northern England.

Gender, together with style, religion and landscape, is one of the most popular topics in rock art studies. This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the subject. It is not a work of research but a book which seeks to summarise the state of play.. The account of gender in North American rock art (with some forays into rock art traditions elsewhere in the world) in Chapters 4 to 8 is undoubtedly the best part of the book. The information provided is fascinating because of its complexity, its erudition and its sophistication. The author’s knowledge of a vast range of relevant literature is most impressive on issues such as the relation between rock art and fertility shrines, authorship, life cycles, puberty rites and ritual landscape. Most of the information given is related to ethnographic sources, effectively bringing out the challenges their use entails in the interpretation of rock art. This book will have a significant impact on the field of North American rock art studies and will become a standard work of reference and point of departure for much future scholarship.

Archaeology of Death E-learning

Dear Colleagues,
As the Covid-19 safety measures are limiting our communication, please use the following web link to download presentation of the Archaeology of Death course.
https://cuni.academia.edu/JanTurek/Teaching-Documents
Since the lesson 4, that we have already missed I include much more texts and references, so you can use it as e-learning material.
Let’s hope we are going to have chance to catch up with the lectures later the spring term.
Meanwhile stay safe
and
Good luck!

Sincerely
Jan Turek
Center for Theoretical Study


The lecture provides a basic overview of the theory and methodology of the study of funerary areas, burial contexts and social and symbolic perception of death in prehistoric societies. Through the archaeological evidence of funerary rituals will be presented not only prehistoric people's attitudes toward death and the afterlife but also their culture, social organization, symbolic systems and cosmology. The focus on archaeology of personhood will be targeted mainly on the analysis of age and gender categories. Introductory topics summarize the methodology of field and laboratory research of funerary data in archaeology including application of scientific methods, spatial analysis of burial data and palaeodemography. In the interpretation section of the course an attention is also paid to the social and ritual significance of death and the transformation of human understanding of mortality. We are going to focus on case studies from different periods and locations throughout the world from Palaeolithic to the rise of historical societies. Case studies will further shed light on the social interpretation of burial data and their use in reconstructing social relationships, and will present significant discoveries. The end of the course is devoted to the ethics of the archaeological research of funerary and the political and ethical controversies surrounding human remains. This lecture is designed for audience among archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and others who have a professional interest in funerary evidence, or general curiosity about past death and burial.

This course will survey the art and architecture of the Hellenistic Mediterranean from the 4 th century BCE to the 1st century BCE within the context of history and culture of the period. The Hellenistic Age is marked by diversity through increased cultural and commercial exchange, stylistic developments that represent both innovation as well as continuity across the three successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great: the Seleucids in the Near East, the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Attalids in Macedonia, as well as the independent Greek city states and kingdoms, and Rome. There is a rich assortment of evidence for the varied experience of women and power in the Hellenistic age that challenges meta-narratives of gender performance and expectation in the ancient world. Major themes will include the representation of the body, myths, the relationship of politics to art, and recent discoveries and developments in the archaeological approach to the period.

Southern Italy from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE was an area of intensive cultural contact and exchange. Even prior to the Roman conquest, local communities experienced significant social and cultural change. It will be argued here that these changes also had a considerable impact on gender roles. The paper furthermore addresses the impact of time and space on the development of social roles connected to gender, both on the subjective, personal and on the objective, absolute scale. It will be demonstrated that there seems to be a remarkable shift in gender conceptions in pre-Roman southern Italy. The study discusses the role that the new, eastern Mediterranean influences and people may have played in this process, looking at possible forms of interaction, disposition, and agency, both on the indigenous and on the immigrant side. Finally, these observations and suggestions will be compared
with an apparently analogous and better documented situation in the colonial past and its long-term consequences. While one should exercise caution in drawing parallels between the protohistoric and recent pasts, it seems that strikingly similar processes, especially regarding the development of gender conceptions and inequalities, can be observed – in both cases leading to the empowerment of the male side and a de-powerment of the female side within the indigenous communities.

A reconsideration of some previous archaeological interpretations of gender may offer much more variability and freedom to our current understanding of gender identity. The perception of gender in archaeological interpretations commonly reflects our current social reality. In the Western Christian worldview, the traditional gender categories of men and women were based on biology and presume the primacy of reproduction in human societies. Alternative social roles were judged as deviations by the biased majority. The extremely difficult position of homosexuals in 20th-century Western society was caused mainly by the lack of an appropriate and commonly recognised gender category that could accommodate them. Not surprisingly, the concept of transsexualism developed in cultures that only recognised and valued two gender categories, based on biological sex. Tribes in North America and Siberia had gender categories ready for such cases.

The necropolis of Novilara (Central Eastern Italy) has been known since the 19th century.  Beetween 1892 and 1893 Edoardo Brizio excavated in two contigous localities named "Molaroni" and "Servici" where he discovered at least 263 graves dating to the 8th and the 7th centuries BC. In 2012 new researches began and new graves were brought to light.
Among all the skeletal remains whose age-at-death has been identified, 82% belonged to adults while only 18% belonged to infants, children and adolescents. The lack or presence of grave-goods in sub-adult burials higlights an age-releated distinction linked to particular passages in the life-cycle and to the social recognition of these changes. The number of artifacts does not increase with the age of child at death, as if the criterion of some ceremonial obbligations was the social rank of their encompassing social unit rather than age-releated definitions of personhood. Moreover children's grave goods seem not be so clearly gender related, as if specific 'social gender' identification was acquired later in life, in adolescence.
Based on evidence, it seems that in Novilara infants and children were not given a formal burial until the last quarter of the 8th and the beginning of the 7th centuries BC. The presence of sub-adult burials, which in most cases appear to have been in close correlation with adult burials, reveals the existence of expressions of social status linked to families that led the ancient community during the so-called Orientalising period.

One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. Butler, drawing upon this famous quote from Simone de Beauvoir, distinguishes between a person's biological sex and their culturally-informed gender roles. She argues that a woman's gender was not simply culturally imposed upon her but was actively performed, being mediated through language, gesture, actions and material culture. Gender is continually (re-)produced through material engagements and the repeated corporeal performance of acts; it is grounded in lived, embodied experiences and it is how people choose to situate their identities and social roles within accepted cultural rules. Instead of simply being the biological female this approach highlights performativity, the agency of doing and thus becoming a woman. I will combine Butler's performativity perspective with Knappett's notion of the material layering of the body-effectively the creation of a second skin and the extension of the body's boundary through manipulation of material culture: namely body modification, cosmetics, hairstyles, apparel and ornamentation. To explore how being a woman was performed materially in Late Bronze Age Cyprus I will draw upon two key areas of archaeological evidence: a) The rare examples of local iconography depicting the female form; b) Evidence for personal adornment and treatment of the body (for the most part furnished by funerary evidence. The aim is to establish different ways in which female gendered identities were created, expressed and performed in Late Bronze Age Cyprus.

This investigation explored the feasibility of using hand prints to infer the stature and gender of “classic” San Luis Rey Style pictograph participants in southern California. The findings from this pilot study tend to validate ethnographic descriptions of neoadolescent female involvement in making pictographs, as well as suggest activity by older adolescents—possibly male. Hand print data acquisition and analysis needs to be refined and incorporated into the discussion of rock art participation and function whenever applicable.

The present text concerns theoretical and methodological aspects of burial archaeology, with special attention given to the graves of the Late Mesolithic site Skateholm in Southern Sweden. It is argued that ‘burial-places’ in general need to be discussed individually from a ‘bottom-up perspective’ in order to minimise the bias of general assumptions based on other data of the same region and time period. Such microarchaeological studies focus on social practice involved in the disposal of the dead as a mediating level between the local and particular on one hand and the normative and general on the other. The study suggests that the Skateholm site can be divided into four different phases of burial activity, each with significant changes in both burial ritual and in the view of dead bodies; one phase even suggests possible use of the site by two separate groups. Special attention has also been given to two diachronic horizontal patterns. One is the marginal placement of dead dogs and children at the borders of the main area, arranged as small clusters in the four cardinal points. The other concerns postdepositional manipulation of dead bodies and graves.

This paper will deal with figural representations of swimming girls on the so-called cosmetic spoons from New Kingdom Egypt
(c. 1550-1070 BC). These elaborately designed objects were made mostly in ivory and were probably used for perfumed ointments.
Their basic form is a loosely dressed or nude swimming girl holding a recipient more often than not in the form of a duck
or a gazelle. The handles of the so-called caryatid bronze mirrors of New Kingdom Egypt are also in the form of loosely dressed
young girls. Figural representations of the swimming girls of cosmetic spoons and the standing girls of mirror handles have the
iconography of a nubile girl in common. Like the swimming girls, mirror handle girls sometimes hold small animals in their hands.
Parallel representations on New Kingdom Egyptian paintings help us to identify these girls as nfr.wt “beauties”, understood as
unmarried girls or social virgins. The paper compares the iconography of the swimming girls of cosmetic spoons and the standing
girls of mirror handles. It also discusses if the function of the objects and the tactile nature of their use could indicate that the
girls in question are maids. Like it was previously suggested for mirror handles (Quack 2003), to hold such an object in the hand is
to have a docile maid in the grasp of the hand. This is emphasized by the fact that the swimming girls are depicted in moments of
leisure, namely swimming and catching ducks. Grasping these figural representations of maids would have meant not only having
control of their bodies but their activities and free-time.