Gender and the Archaeology of Death

Edited by Bettina Arnold, Nancy L. Wicker

Publication date:

26 June 2001

Length of book:

232 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759101364

Burials are places where archaeologists reasonably expect gendered ideologies and practices to play out in the archaeological record. Yet only modest progress has been made in teasing out gender from these mortuary contexts. In this volume, methods for doing so are presented, cases of successful gender theorizing from mortuary data presented, and comparisons made between European and Americanist traditions in this kind of work. Cases are broad in temporal and geographic scope—from Inuit burials in Alaska and Oneota mortuary rituals to Viking Scandinavia, Neolithic China and Iron Age Britain. Methods for identifying and analyzing gender are suggested for cultures at various levels of social complexity with or without documentary or ethnoarchaeological evidence to assist in the analysis. A volume of great interest for those attempting to develop an archaeology of gender. Visit Bettina Arnold's web page

Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Gender Ideology and Mortuary Analysis
Chapter 3 1. Killing the Female? Archaeological Narratives of Infanticide
Chapter 4 2. Life, Death, and the Longhouse: A Gendered View of Oneota Social Organization
Chapter 5 3. Gender Studies in Chinese Neolithic Archaeology
Part 6 Gender and Power
Chapter 7 4. Visible Women Made Invisible: Interpreting Varangian Women in Old Russia
Chapter 8 5. The Position of Iron Age Scandinavian Women: Evidence from Graves and Rune Stones
Part 9 Gender Roles and the Ambiguity of Signification
Chapter 10 6. Gender and Mortuary Analysis: What Can Grave Goods Really Tell Us?
Chapter 11 7. Sharing the Load: Gender and Task Division at the Windover Site
Chapter 12 8. Grave Goods Do Not a Gender Make: A Case Study from Singen am Hohentwiel, Germany
Part 13 Weapons, Women, Warriors
Chapter 14 9. Decoding the Gender Bias: Inferences of Atlatls in Female Mortuary Contexts
Chapter 15 10. Warfare and Gender in the Northern Plains: Osteological Evidence of Trauma Reconsidered

The book provides a much needed compendium of theoretical and methodological examples of engendered approaches to mortuary analysis...succeeds in bringing together several excellent papers that re-examine and test interpretive assumptions regarding gender and mortuary remains...valuable to those interested in the archeology of gender.