Shamans, Queens, and Figurines

The Development of Gender Archaeology

Sarah Milledge Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315420233
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sarah Nelson, recognized as one of the key figures in studying gender in the ancient world and women in archaeology, brings together much of the work she has done over three decades into a single volume. The book covers her theoretical contributions, her extensive studies of gender in the archaeology of East Asia, and her literary work on the subject. Included with the selections of her writing-- taken from diverse articles and books published in a variety of places-- is an illuminating commentary about the development of her professional and personal understanding of how gender plays out in ancient societies and modern universities and her current thinking on both topics.

PART I
INTRODUCTION: LEARNING THE FIELD AND BREAKING TABOOS

THIS BOOK IS A CAREER memoir using some of my published papers to demonstrate one way to do feminist archaeology. It might be used as an extended response to Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book, Lean In (2013), in which women are encouraged to be more aggressive in business situations. While I haven’t worked in a large business setting, and can’t speak to Sandberg’s advice in that environment, I have spent my career in a university, applying for grants, publishing my work, competing for resources for my department, and generally leaning out as often as I leaned in (if I understand Sandberg’s vocabulary) in order to achieve desired results. In the academic world, in the museum world, in the world that includes both government and public archaeology, the rules are different. Just leaning in will not necessarily produce good results and sometimes could produce unwanted results.

Archaeology is an immensely satisfying way to spend a career, but it has had high barriers for women that often could not be leapt in a single bound. When I began studying archaeology, the practitioners were not all male, but the field was dominated by male practices and male metaphors (Nelson 1997a: 42–46). A friend recently described her place of work as “a cowboy atmosphere,” and the very existence of trowel holsters (Woodall and Perricone 1981: 507) puts the cowboy mentality in context for many women archaeologists.

In spite of the “cowboys,” archaeology is a satisfying profession. Discovery stimulates new ideas, solving puzzles posed by artifacts and sites is intellectually rewarding, and imagining the past through artifacts can lead to writing novels. Being part of the gender-in-archaeology movement has added even more spice for me, because it brings fresh insights into archaeological theory, encourages new methods of excavation, and suggests new means of interpretation. In addition, friends and colleagues who pursue gender in archaeology make interesting and lively comrades. But archaeological success isn’t just a matter of leaning in. The field of archaeology is more subtle than that.

Some events in my career were not at all fun, and they belong to the gender story as well. Events along my career path will find echoes in the experiences of others, women who have had to learn their field and then break taboos or at least twist the rules a bit to make them fit.

Insisting on becoming an archaeologist was the first rule I broke, since I had already accepted the societal role of wife and mother. Aiming for accessible writing was another no-no, but it didn’t inflict much punishment, except that one member of my dissertation committee complained (and that is the correct word) about my “graceful writing.” Apparently graceful writing meant unscholarly writing to him. Those were minor breaks, really only cracks in the rules. Taboo subjects, however, were well guarded by the gatekeepers. My infringements included taking women seriously in the present as well as in the past, followed by writing about ideology, shamanism, and even archaeoastronomy. It took a long time for any of these topics to be acceptable in the promised land of publication.

Archaeology is both practice and theory. The way archaeology is practiced may make as much difference to understanding gender in the past as articulating any kind of theory (Gero 1985). Because the personal is political, as early feminists noted cogently and insistently, the circumstances of a life are also relevant to the pursuit of a career in archaeology. Thus in this book, I use my own career track in archaeology to illustrate both the importance of equity issues for archaeologists in the present and the reverberations in archaeology resulting from putting women in the center of research into the past. To reach the point of being allowed to play in the field of archaeology, I had to learn the rules, and then I had to break some, and once in a while I helped to create new rules. Feminist archaeology, according to my definition, seeks equity for women in the past, present, and future.

I believe that gender in archaeology is important precisely because it isn’t merely theoretical. Each of us is constrained to live a life according to our gender, as well as other ways in which we are “situated” in the world. For example, when I did my first archaeology in Korea, I was a short and skinny, shy and non-threatening, dark-haired female who was invisible in a Korean crowd. People spoke to me in Korean on the subway if they didn’t see my face. It was a good place for me. Never before had I been grateful for not being tall and blonde.

On the other hand, I didn’t choose Korea because I would fit in. I wouldn’t have been in Korea at all had I not been wife and mother as well as archaeologist. My husband’s job took him to Korea, and I followed with our three sons. This was the beginning of my understanding that scholars do not interpret archaeology as disembodied minds but as part of a social system with a particular place in it. Our minds may embrace particular intellectual traditions, but our culture can provide stumbling blocks. Daily life can trump long-term plans.

My archaeological career has spanned more than four decades so far, during which changes in the anglophone world of archaeology have been extensive and profound. These events are reflected in my endeavors, as I abandoned my first love of Near Eastern archaeology and then ditched my alternate plan to work in Europe. Not only did I change the place of my research, I switched from researching the ungendered notion of subsistence and settlement in favor of pursuing gendered questions about leadership, power, and ideology. I created a niche in Chinese archaeology for myself after pioneering in Korean archaeology, and eventually tried other pursuits, especially writing novels about archaeological sites in Korea and China.

The attempt by a large contingent of archaeologists to shift the topic of gender into the center of archaeological discourse was an endeavor that I joined enthusiastically. While it has been only partially successful, for me the most important outcome of the gender in archaeology movement has been to make gender a respectable topic in archaeology. Some evidence of success of the gender in archaeology movement is an e-mail I recently received from a student in England, asking if gender is still an important topic. I thought, “Would you be writing to me from 6,000 miles and seven time zones away if it were not an important topic? And would you still be asking about a book I wrote twenty years ago if the topic didn’t have legs?” I declined to do the student’s research for her—instead, I directed her to the index of Gender in Archaeology—but I was pleased that there are still questions to consider. While inquiries from students can range from stimulating to amusing, their interest is a boon to the topic. I hope students will keep writing to me.

One of the best things about gender in archaeology is the friends I have made around the world. In addition to my American colleagues, I have been inspired by women who live far away—Miriam Rosen-Ayalon in Israel, Vivian Scheinsohn in Argentina, Rasmi Shoocongdej in Thailand, to name a scattered few (I’m afraid to start listing friends, for fear of leaving someone out). I have chosen my friends on three criteria—those who were bold enough to break the rules, those who were smart enough to know which rules to break, and those who were willing to put up with me. These friendships make a network that provides both energy and ideas, even if I don’t tap into it often enough.

Claire Smith, before she became president of the World Archaeological Congress, was a champion at intercontinental connections. From Australia, she would round up some of us to speak to her students at odd hours in an electronic chat room. Her students made dolls to represent archaeologists whose work they read, showing how they imagined them. I hope Claire will put on an exhibit of those dolls some day. I’d like to see what a Sarah Nelson doll looks like (or maybe I wouldn’t!).

Some other positive results of the gendering effort are that discussions of gender in archaeological site reports appear more often than they did three decades ago, and there is hardly an encyclopedia or handbook of archaeology that fails to include articles on gender. The field has been improved by greater awareness of the possibilities of adding gendered perspectives to our interpretations.

Gender in archaeology has been approached in many productive and interesting ways, and I have learned and borrowed from many others. This volume is not a history of research on gender, but it is offered as a record of one archaeologist’s responses to the changes in archaeology since the late 1960s, and the ways my own interpretations of the past have been both broadened and challenged by developments in the field.

Let me briefly recount the context of my classes as a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Michigan as a reminder of archaeology before gender. In the spring term of 1968, cultural evolution was the hot issue. “Man the Hunter” (Lee and Devore 1968) provided an all-encompassing explanation of early prehistory, based on extensive observations of current hunters and laced with a strong androcentric bias (Zihlman and Tanner 1978). The “Neolithic Revolution” (Childe 1951), with its perspective that the Mesopotamian region and Egypt were the cradle of everything, from the earliest plant and animal domestication to the beginnings of cities and civilizations, was still a viable topic. Archaeology was beginning to be interpreted according to Elman Service’s (1962) division of human social groups into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Sanders and Price 1968) and aspired to be a real branch of anthropology (Binford 1962).

In that era, new archaeological methods included both the broad and the detailed: for example, surveying wide areas, on the one hand, and flotation of soils from sites to detect evidence of plant use, on the other. Archaeologists were challenged to discover the causes of changes from hunter-gatherers to farmers, and from chiefdoms to states.

But there were many ways that women were left out: they simply didn’t appear in the evolutionary schemes. Focusing on gender in archaeology is important because discrimination against women is frequently based on stereotypes about women’s abilities, bodies, or brains. When archaeology can falsify such stereotypes, women gain in the here and now. Equity for women in the past has always seemed necessary to gain equity for women in the present. When I wrote Gender in Archaeology, Analyzing Power and Prestige (1997a), it was intended to be a counterpart to my co-edited book Equity Issues for Women in Archaeology (1994). Awareness of gender in the past and in the present is necessary to restore a balance in our understanding of the human past.

CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK

Part II, “Social Archaeology Gives Birth to Gender Archaeology,” is in part a retrospective of the era of processualism and social archaeology, with a few inklings even then of the ferment for change in archaeology, moving beyond process to people. I understood it as social archaeology, which became a platform for researching gender. In hindsight, I’ve been surprised by the fact that the Binfordian paradigm led me into social archaeology and then to gender. Perhaps it is even ironic.

The Korean work discussed in Part II describes my attempts to conform, but sometimes I had to invent new rules to get the job done as I perceived it should be. When I did my first independent work on subsistence and settlement in Korea, it fit into the then-current paradigm, becoming the title of my dissertation. In the Han River Survey, our intention was to locate Neolithic sites, but besides surveying we also dug test pits hoping to find evidence of plant use in the flotation samples.

I describe my life in Korea because when I wrote a version of this episode for a memoir class, the women all wrote in the margins versions of “me too.” Friends have been pleased to read how other women helped with the project. It may also be useful to current students to realize how much of any project involves studying beyond the immediate problem. Finally, my trials in creating a project have found echoes in other situations. For a woman to succeed in archaeology meant extra effort.

Part III, “Figurines and Equity Issues: Measuring Gender,” is situated in the early days of feminism in academe. As a result of a new emphasis on women in cultural anthropology, I became interested in female figurines, which seemed to offer possibilities for archaeologists to join anthropological discussions about women. I planned a session on worldwide female figurines that never came to fruition, but with extensive pictures it would have made a great coffee-table book. Someone could make a mint on such a book. I offer the idea freely.

Because these figurines are so varied, I thought representations of female bodies could be an important way to understand women of the past. For my first sabbatical, I created a project to photograph and measure Upper Paleolithic figurines of Europe. My research showed that the few figurines that were both truly obese and realistically carved demanded an explanation that included at least partial sedentism of the Paleolithic peoples of Europe. Both my hypothesis and my conclusions were unpalatable to the archaeological gatekeep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I Introduction: Learning the Field and Breaking Taboos
• Part II Social Archaeology Gives Birth to Gender Archaeology
• Part III Figurines and Equity Issues: Measuring Gender
• Part IV Queens: Women Wielding Power
• Part V Gender in Archaeology Spreads
• Part VI Perspectives from China
• Part VII Shamans and Ideology
• Part VIII Archaeological Stories
• Afterword
• References Cited
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• About the Author