Archaeological gender research

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Archaeological gender research , gender archeology or gender archeology is a relatively young specialty of archeology for gender research alongside settlement or environmental archeology .

description

The beginnings of archaeological gender research lie in the USA, Scandinavia and Great Britain. The essay entitled Archeology and the study of gender by American archaeologists Margaret W. Conkey and Janet D. Spector , published in 1984, is considered to be pioneering . Objects of gender archeology are the different roles, behaviors, tasks and characteristics of women, men and other genders in the societies of the past without writing. In addition, different gender concepts and ideologies of prehistoric societies are researched. The basic theoretical assumption of this research direction is that gender roles are not biologically conditioned and innate, but are largely learned and part of the social order. In order to be able to examine such role distributions in the past, it is necessary to recognize one's own androcentric thought models as such. The area (including semiotics , systems theory, etc.) belongs to the post-processual approaches in prehistory and early history research.

Gender archaeologists are in the overwhelming majority female and mainly use burial grounds to investigate differences between men and women in prehistoric societies and their tradition in the material remains. These differences may have physically survived, although they are not always obvious and therefore open to interpretation. The differences between the sexes are also examined in relation to belonging to social groups such as families, classes, age groups and religions. An important tool in gender research is anthropological sex determinations on skeletons and corpse burns .

See also

literature

  • St. Burmeister & N. Müller-Scheeßel: Social groups - cultural borders 2006
  • MW Conkey & JD Spector: Archeology and the Study of Gender. in: Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 7 pp. 1 - 38 (1984)
  • JE Fries & JK Koch (eds.), Excavated between material clusters and time slices, perspectives on archaeological gender research. Women - Research - Archeology 6, Münster 2005.
  • KP Hoffmann: Gender research , published in: D. Mölders / S. Wolfram (Ed.), Key Concepts in Prehistoric Archeology. Tübinger Archäologische Taschenbücher 11 (Münster 2014), pp. 111–114 available online
  • S. Karlisch, S. Kästner & E.-M- Mertens (eds.), From bone man to human woman. Feminist theory and archaeological practice. Women - Research - Archeology 3, Münster 1997.
  • Th.Wagner : From feminist ethnology to gender archeology - rule and domination , in: Christian Sigrist, (Ed.) Macht und Herrschaft (publications of the working group for researching the religious and cultural history of the ancient Near East) 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. Margaret W. Conkey and Janet D. Spector: Archeology and the Study of Gender . In: Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 7 (1984), pp. 1-38, Springer, JSTOR