Archaeologies of Gender and Violence

Bo Jensen, Uroš Matić

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781785706899
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Uroš Mati? and Bo Jensen have brought together a team of both young and senior researches from many different countries in this first volume that aims to explore the complex intersection between archaeology, gender and violence. Papers range from theoretical discussions on previous approaches to gender and violence and the ethical necessity to address these questions today, to case studies dealing on gender and violence from prehistoric to early medieval Europe, but also including studies on ancient Egypt, Persia and Peru. The contributors deal both with representations of violence and its gendered background in images and text, and with bioarchaeological evidence for violence and trauma with a gendered background. The volume is rich both in examples and approaches and includes opening and closing chapters by senior scholars in the field assesing the current state of work and addressing the scholarship to continue on the line of this volume.

Chapter 1

Introduction:
Why do we need archaeologies of gender and violence and why now?

Bo Jensen and Uroš Matić

This book in context

This volume addresses the three-subject intersection of archaeology, gender, and violence (Fig. 1.1). Each subject has an extensive research literature of its own that cannot be covered in-depth here; each two-subject intersection has generated significant scholarship, but the three-subject intersection remains largely unaddressed in research so far. We suggest that this is a field whose time has come: archaeologists need to consider violence to understand past gender, and we need to consider gender to understand past violence. We must investigate how violence is gendered and how gender influences the frequency and specific forms of violence (Renzetti 2004, 132). Researchers outside archaeology may also benefit from archaeological insights when they try to understand gender and violence, past or present. Notably, a number of reductionist genetic arguments about the adaptive value of aggression appear to ignore the complexity of the human past, or refer to it only rudimentarily. Sociobiologists, too, assume that social behaviour has biological roots and is the product of long periods of evolution, but often fail to test their conclusions on archaeological evidence. As distinct layers of social action are unique to humans as opposed to other animals, sociobiology may well fail to adequately account for human complexity (Malešević 2010, 56). Archaeology may nuance such claims significantly because it covers past societies from the very emergence of our species to our present.

One good starting point for this introduction is the provocative title of Bertelsen, Lillehammer and Næss’ groundbreaking volume, Were they all men? (1983). Of course, they were not, and on some level even the 1800s pioneers of archaeology recognised this. Yet early works of archaeology were written as if only men mattered. When women were mentioned, they were described only as the writers wanted women to be (Skogstrand 2011). Past women were mostly invisible or silent, and their invisibility and silence was rarely questioned. Then, as now, writers tended to reproduce the triple fallacy that only men ever did anything important or interesting; that modern readers could and should only be interested in such supposedly masculine actions; and that this could be assumed without any supporting evidence or discussion (for critique see Hurcombe, 2007, 102). Early writers on archaeology generally assumed that only men ever fought wars, traded over long distances, colonised new lands, and practiced politics and religion, while women were busy cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the sick; and that war and trade and power are inherently more important and interesting than food and care; and that this is self-evident. These assumptions are based on a historically contingent gendered division of work and tasks, found in so-called “Western” societies. Yet, even among these societies, more diversity exists. Too often, these assumptions were transferred to the past societies with little or no critical reflection, providing various modernist gender mythologies with imagined deep pasts.

Figure 1.1. Mapping of the three-subject intersection with subjects and two-subject literatures. We contest that the dark area of three-subject overlap remains under-explored. (Bo Jensen)

One great achievement of gender studies, in archaeology and elsewhere, has been to challenge such unexamined androcentric beliefs and gender mythologies and to demand arguments and evidence for them. In some cases, evidence exists (e.g. in Viking Age Scandinavia, analyses of sexed inhumation graves show a strong association between biological males and weapon burial, suggesting that fighting was largely a masculine activity – see Gebühr 1994, and Jensen, this volume). In some cases, it does not (e.g. there is no real evidence that Viking Age migration was overwhelmingly male: Stahlberg 2001, McLeod 2011). In all cases, archaeology should rely on evidence, rather than on uncritical projections of the present down on the past. Equally, gender studies have challenged the importance ascribed to supposedly masculine activities: recent papers in gender archaeology have examined, for example, the career of a professional midwife as a central person in a community (Wilkie 2000) and the importance of women’s work in inns and the hospitality industry for medieval urbanisation (Hansen 2010). Other work has focused on inns and violence, as in Late Antique Rabbinic literature, where violence is sexualised: a literary stereotype in the Aramaic translations of the Bible likens the mistress of the inn to a prostitute, and casts her as a threat to guests (Grossmark 2006, 60–61). Elsewhere, experimental work suggests that, for example, making sails may have demanded as much skill and labour as did making hulls for Viking Age ships, implying that supposedly female textile workers contributed as much to success as did supposedly male carpenters. Even when we find that archaeology confirms recent gender stereotypes, with women caring, cleaning, cooking and sewing, we need not accept that this work was (or is) unimportant.

In some periods, in some spheres of activity, evidence suggests that “they” were all men, in that men monopolised certain spheres of activity and power. This is true for most European parliaments in the 19th century, for the 17th-century Lutheran church, and for much of political and church history elsewhere. In those cases, we must ask how this monopoly was established and upheld: we cannot assume, as did some contemporaries, that men dominated politics because women were biologically incapable of participating. Rather, such monopolies are created and upheld through carefully constructed and continuously upheld logics of privilege. In early modern Europe, intellectuals wrote endless tracts of theology, political philosophy and early bio-science to naturalise masculine privileges. More than 2,000 years of intellectual effort was invested into shoring up misogyny and maintain a conservative gender hierarchy in the face of profound economic, political and ideological change (see e.g. Laqueur 1993, 58f, for some starkly misogynist formulations). Thus, we can study gender violence even when it does not stand out as direct brute physical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “subjective violence” (2008). Any oppression (Žižek’s “objective violence”) based on gender merits our attention (see also below).

They were not all men, but gender studies go beyond merely observing that women exist and may suffer oppression. Specifically, gender studies are founded on the constructivist assumption that gender is a cultural variable and cannot be reduced to biological sex (Díaz-Andreu 2005, 14–15; Gilchrist 1999, 9; Rubin 1997; Sørensen 2000, 18). There has been much debate over how much or how little of the observed variation in health, psychology, lived experience and other areas depends on biology, and how much on culture. Regardless, gender studies must assume, a priori, that gender is potentially culturally variant and that different societies, including those that existed in the past, understand gender in different ways. They may differ in how many genders they recognise, and they very clearly differ in their understandings of what legal, ritual and economic rights and obligations a gendered person deserves. Consequently, their understanding of relationships between gender and violence also varies. The big questions in gender archaeology can begin with “Were they all men?”, but must proceed further: Since they were not all men, how can we learn more about what this meant for their lives? Johansen, Lillehammer and Næss’ volume has been hailed as the first anthology on the subject. It was followed by many more texts, most notably perhaps Gero and Conkey’s “Engendering archaeology” (Gero and Conkey 1991). For many English speakers, especially, that work was foundational to the archaeology of gender (see also Hitchcock this volume).

Today, the archaeology of gender is well-established. There are recognised senior scholars in the field, several good introductions for students and non-specialists (e.g. Bolger 2012; Gilchrist 1999; Sørensen 2000; Joyce 2008; Díaz-Andreu and Sørensen 1998; Dommasnes et al. 2010; Wicker and Arnold 1999), and well-defined standard methodologies for addressing at least some of the well-known, widespread challenges. Gender archaeology has matured significantly since the 1970s, and branched off, generating somewhat separate queer archaeologies and archaeologies of sexualities (for which see e.g. Dowson 2000; Schmidt and Voss 2000; Prentiss 2016). The establishment of gender archaeology as a recognised field has also led to token mentions and token chapters in archaeological works devoted to other subjects, and often blatantly uninterested in engaging seriously with gender studies. These are, of course, common malaises in any successful sub-field.

The archaeology of violence has followed a somewhat similar trajectory, somewhat delayed compared to gender studies: right from the beginning of serious archaeology, researchers realised that violence had existed in the past, yet they long failed to seriously question why or how. Many writers presented osteological and iconographic evidence for violence in purely anecdotal formats, without any attempt at synthesis or broader analysis. Much pioneering work was done on catalogues of weapons and fortifications, but work was often typological and chronological, with little attention to social meanings or consequences (e.g. the Northern European typology of bronze swords).

In the European academy, violence was long a marginalised subject. However, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the European involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq inspired a new interest in conflict studies, including new, better funded archaeological investigations. The 1990s saw an explosion of new interest in past violence, eventually published in a number of papers and anthologies (e.g. Carman 1997; Carman and Harding 1999; Guillaine and Zammit 2005; Otto, Thrane and Vandkilde 2006; Ralph 2012; Zimmermann 2009).

As with gender, much early archaeology of violence seems to proceed from the implicit assumption that past violence worked very much like present violence, most infamously perhaps in the case of the invasion-hypothesis: by the early 20th century, archaeologists throughout Europe accepted that changes in material culture, notably in pottery and burial customs, indicated invasions by new “peoples” or “folks” who replaced older populations, possibly through genocide (just as happened in contemporary colonies). As late as 1966, when Grahame Clark famously refuted most of the proposed theories of prehistoric invasions of Britain, he accepted those well-accepted by contemporary historians: the Normans, the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans and the Celts. Since then, the nature, and even the existence, of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic invasions have been much debated and doubted (see Clark 1966; James 1999). Even more recently, Marija Gimbutas proposed that European cultures changed when Old Europe was invaded by Bronze Age warriors from the steppes (Gimbutas 1974). Gimbutas describes a simple dichotomy between, on one side, peaceful, nature-loving, matriarchal Goddess worshiping Neolithic and Copper Age societies; and on the other side warmongering, patriarchal aggressive brutes with bronze technology. This dichotomy implies a whole chain of signifiers associating femininity with peace and masculinity with war. Later studies have highlighted how strongly Gimbutas’ work reflects much more recent war experiences (Chapman 1998).

It is almost a paradox that, at the same time, whole schools of culture-historical archaeologists entirely ignored violence. They described the spread of cultural traits with little attention to human action, almost as if these traits were viruses. Such studies differ superficially from invasion theses, but they too neglected to actually investigate past violence, leaving reader to assume that the past worked just like the present, only with different pots.

In this volume, we challenge this assumption. We suggest violence is culturally meaningful and culturally specific – just as gender is. This claim has long been recognised in anthropology and history where Thomas Hobbes (slightly unfairly) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have become iconic placeholders for opposed positions within the same approach: Hobbes famously argued that the life of man [sic] in his natural state is nasty, brutish and short and therefore it made sense for men to join together in a commonwealth and agree to mutual armistice, enforced by a sovereign. The “Hobbesian” belief in progress towards less violence can be found in many later works, including Marcel Mauss’ famous essay The Gift (1967; see Corbey 2006 for discussion). Mauss argued that exchange would allow archaic people to “lay aside the spear” and build peaceful social relations. Thus, Hobbes and Mauss represent the assumption that small-scale and past societies were more violent than later, large-scale civilisations.

Hobbes has been much criticised in later scholarship. He was not a historian, and his vision of the “natural state” probably owes more to the failed state of civil war England than to any report or reconstruction of small-scale societies. Certainly, the war of all against all, imagined by Hobbes, is a fiction: any successful violent action requires organisation and collective coordination, hierarchy and task division (Malešević 2010, 3). Critical archaeologists have attacked this approach for naturalising modern violence. Notably, John Carman points out how reconstructions of the Lower Palaeolithic presents violence as if it was an inevitable part of human experience (Carman 1997, frontispiece), and Adam Stout has investigated links between archaeologies of war and support for the “war against terror” (and, implicitly, the governments Bush and Blair – Stout 2008, 1f).

In contrast to Hobbes’ and Mauss’ optimistic beliefs in progress and civilisation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and many others) emphasised the negative aspects of modernity. Rousseau famously imagined noble savages living in a bucolic state of nature. He provided no empirical evidence for this and his account may be indebted to contemporary mythologisations of French Polynesia and the South Seas. This “golden legend” ignored the reality of violent and hierarchical societies in that region, as on Hawai’i and among the Maōri (for a discussion, see Besnier 1994, 288ff). Rousseau’s image of the noble savage was reproduced from the early Enlightenment through the Romantic period and dominated most 20th-century social science, though it has been widely discredited in anthropological and archaeological studies (see Malešević 2010, 91–92). Despite such reservations, more recent writers have adopted positions somewhat parallel to Rousseau’s and argued that specific forms of violence, and in particular of war, that are far more typical of large states than of small-scale societies. Polly Wiessner describes how the Mae-Enga in Papua New Guinea historically used exchange to build alliances and mobilised these for violence, and organised formalised violence to allow the groups fighting on the same side to form relationships and engage in exchange (Wiessner 2006, cf. also Fowles 2014). Clearly, this organisation of violence is quite different from the industrialised wars that shaped 20th-century Europe. Elsewhere, R. B. Ferguson has argued that our understanding of small-scale societies is biased by the “tribal frontier”: many ethnographies were collected in the aftermath of conquest, either among the conquered survivors, or in neighbouring borderlands unsettled by migrations of refugees from colonial conquest. The same events that made ethnography possible and urgent also biased the record towards violence, and gave a falsely violent view of small-scale societies (Fergusson 2004, but contrast with Helbling 2006, 114). Similarly, Roderick Campbell ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: Why do we need archaeologies of gender and violence and why now?: Bo Jensen and Uroš Matić
• 2. Revisiting the myth of matriarchy, rethinking determinism, seeing anew: Stephanie Koerner
• 3. The honoured and the sacrificed? Gender and violence at a sanctuary of the late 3rd millennium BC in Central Germany: André Spatzier, with anthropological analyses by Marcus Stecher and Kurt W. Alt
• 4. The role of violence in the construction of prehistoric masculinities: Lisbeth Skogstrand
• 5. “Her striking but cold beauty”: Gender and violence in depictions of Queen Nefertiti smiting the enemies: Uroš Matić
• 6. Les demoiselles d’Entremont: Violence, gender and headhunting in Iron Age Europe: Ian Armit
• 7. Violence against women in Graeco-Roman Egypt: the contribution of Demotic documents: Christine Hue-Arcé
• 8. Death and the maiden: late antique images of nubile females as agents and victims of lethal violence: Susanne Moraw
• 9. Heaven for me, hell for the “others”: An agenda on sex and body from Sassanid Persia: Maryam Dezhamkhooy and Leila Papoli Yazdi
• 10. Skull-cups and snake-pits: Men’s revenge and women’s revenge in Viking Age Scandinavia: Bo Jensen
• 11. The weapons make the man? A re-analysis of early Anglo-Saxon weapon burial and interpretation: Laura M. Whitehouse
• 12. Gender and Structural Violence in Prehistoric Peru: Julie Farnum
• 13. Gender and violence in archaeology: Final commentary: Louise Hitchock