Characterizing Roman Artifacts to Investigate Gendered Practices in Contexts Without Sexed Bodies (original) (raw)
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This article concerns the characterization of Roman artifacts so that they can play a greater role in gendered approaches to Roman sites—sites that constitute lived spaces but lack actual references to sexed bodies. It commences with a brief discussion on gendered approaches in the two main strands of Roman archaeology—classical and provincial. Within the differing frameworks of the wider disciplines of classics and archaeology, both strands focus on contexts with sexed bodies—burials, figurative representation, and inscriptions. The discussion serves as a background for more integrated and more interrogative approaches to relationships between Roman artifacts and gendered practices, approaches that aim to develop interpretative tools for investigating social practice in contexts where no representational or biologically sexed bodies are evident. Three types of artifacts—brooches, glass bottles, and needles—are used to demonstrate how differing degrees of gender associations of artifacts and artifact assemblages can provide insights into gender relationships in settlement contexts. These insights in turn contribute to better understandings of gendered sociospatial practices across the Roman world. www.ajaonline.org/forum/1944
Worldviews in Contact: Gendered Symbolic Systems and Votive Offerings in the Roman Northwest
Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, 2022
The Roman colonial project was critically intertwined with gender. Not only did men and women experience the impacts of colonialism differently, but with respect to imperial ideology the Roman worldview set up a gendered binary in which masculine, civilized Rome was obligated to control and care for an uncivilized, feminine other. I analyze gendered experiences under colonialism as well as the impact of this Roman gendered worldview through analysis of votive offerings from sanctuaries across Roman Britain and northern Gaul. As symbolically loaded objects chosen by individual men and women, offerings provide a unique perspective on these issues. My dataset, compiled from published sources and museum records, contains about 2,500 individual offerings and several thousand coins from five sanctuaries in Britain and five in Gaul. Rather than isolating specific offering types, I approach the dataset as a series of diverse assemblages, utilizing multivariate statistical techniques to identify patterns. My approach highlights the analytical challenges inherent in studying gendered offerings, most notably that prioritizing certainty with respect to the objects chosen for inclusion—prioritizing those objects most securely gendered and those most clearly offered rather than lost—would lead to an unsupportable underestimation of women’s level of participation in offering ritual. Analysis confirms that individual offering decisions reflect not only religious belief but also broader societal dynamics: the impacts of Roman colonial control are visible even in these personal religious decisions. An overall similarity in gendered proportions of offerings between Britain and Gaul suggests the power of the Empire to influence gendered participation across provincial borders. I argue that greater heterogeneity in objects offered at rural sanctuaries—and more women’s participation—relates to the status of cities as centers of Roman colonial administration. Moreover, the range of offerings chosen by both men and women speaks to socioeconomic diversity of offerers as well as the complex intersection of gender, economic status, and expressed ethnicity in this colonial environment. Finally, a symbolic approach to the offerings reveals the uptake of a Roman gendered worldview among those who left them, seen in the reifications of gendered binaries including public/domestic, civilized/wild, and impermeable/permeable. This study provides a valuable perspective on gendered behavior in this colonial context, but it also highlights the real impacts of a colonial project that was gendered at its core. By centering the role of this binary gendered worldview, I seek to refocus scholarship on identity and culture change in the Roman provinces: contingency, fluidity, and complexity in colonial culture and identity must be respected, but in doing so we cannot lose sight of the power of binaries in the lives of real people.
This essay will attempt to discuss the archaeological framework questioning the function played by gender in past societies and its influence in shaping contemporary ideologies on sex differences and gender roles. Being gender a cultural construct, it may be misleading to assume it always had the same implications. Different cultures had indeed considerably different understandings of gender categories and followed therefore disparate patterns in terms of gender relation arrangements. However, past societies are no longer here cavorting the earth for us to analyse and have a face-to-face discourse about their diverse approaches to social differences and this is where archaeology comes into play. For instance, by looking at the archaeological data it is possible to notice that gender interplays were often clearly displayed by means of material culture such as individual costumes, iconography and art, or in circumstances that involved burial activities (Sørensen, 2000: 8). To this extent, archaeology is a precious resource in order to broaden our picture of sex and gender interpretation in that “material culture becomes partner in the structuring of social relations” (Sørensen, 2000: 9). Insofar as it can be ascertained, material culture mirrors the way in which a particular society was organized and sheds therefore a light upon its social relations. This ideological framework weas enacted by the members of society who passed it on the subsequent generations through objects and symbols, carriers of and imbued with cultural meaning. Hence, material culture “serves as a bridge” (Sørensen, 2000: 9), it underpins the present theoretical discourse surrounding the legitimization of a gendered critique of the past with empirical and tangible objects. Especially when studying past non-literate societies, the artefacts unearthed in proximity of female or male skeletons can recount the distinct tasks carried out by the former and the latter; nonetheless, sex and gender differences ought to be critically considered also in terms of health, nutrition, violence, and labour distinctions (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley, 1998: 4). It is of the utmost importance to systematically discern these factors, and once a judicious observation has been made, they must be recorded accordingly rather than just taken for granted in line with gendered stereotypes (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley, 1998: 5), for archaeology can offer a “historical perspective on the social construction and changing nature and forms of ʻdifferenceʼ” (Conkey, 1993: 12).
The archaeology of sex and gender
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, ed. B. Cunliffe, C. Gosden and R. Joyce, OUP, 1029-47, 2009
Over the past twenty years, the themes of sex and gender have emerged as central concerns to archaeology internationally. The interrogation of gendered concepts and terminology began with the feminist critique of archaeology in the 1980s, and has continued in the more pluralistic archaeologies of gender that have characterized the past decade. Increasingly, archaeological considerations of gender address intersections with other aspects of social identity, such as age, class, sexuality and ethnicity, or are integrated in studies of embodiment. The key definitions and positions of earlier feminist archaeology have been challenged and reshaped, as the reflexive tradition of feminist research regularly remakes itself. Running in parallel with the development of gender archaeology, this period has also seen more critical attention to the definition of sex. The fields of bioarchaeology and burial archaeology have been concerned with achieving more rigorous identifications of sex in ancient human remains, while the study of human evolution has addressed the role of sexual selection in the origins of gendered behaviour.
Beyond the Binary: An Archaeological Perspective on Gender Identity
Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2018
This article is intended to provide a brief introduction to, and overview of, gender archaeology, including its history and terminology. I will present the common methods of identifying gender using evidence from settlements, burials, and ethnographic research to provide context for the discussion of gender variance. Then, I will compare the evidence of socially acceptable gender variance to unacceptable gender variance, drawing on methods and theories previously discussed. Finally, I will review the difficulties faced in the field and potential developments that could provide a greater insight into the gender identities of the past.
2012
Almost thirty years have passed since gender studies entered archaeological discourse in earnest. What is the current status of gender research? One of the aims of this book is to contribute to answer this and other related questions. Another is to shed some light on the pasts and possible futures of gender research. Contributions deal with publications statistics in journals over the last thirty years, neo-realist discussions of Mayan body-politic, intersectional analyses of current Swedish museum exhibitions and Viking Period bos brooches, masculinities in practice at a cultural heritage site, Viking period bodily abilities and disabilities and experiments regarding how once-lived bodies and lives may be materialized.
Medicina nei Secoli 23.1, 2011
The article considers how burial evidence might contribute to the undestarnding of gender, i.e. the socio-cultural construction of sexual difference, as a dynamic aspect of identity in a roman province, with a particular focus on women. This subject has hitherto received limited attention and its potential is too great to explore fully in a short paper. Given this costraint, the article indicates possibilities and problems rather than to offer definitive conclusions. Its emphasis lies on Roman Britain, but similar questions could be applied to other parts of the roman world.