Gender Archaeology - Criticism

Criticism

Some archaeologists have openly criticised gender archaeology. One of those responsible was Paul Bahn, who in 1992 published a statement declaring that:

The latest outbreak - which bears a great resemblance to the good old days of the new archaeology (primarily a racket for the boys) - is gender archaeology, which is actually feminist archaeology (a new racket for the girls). Yes, folks, sisters are doing it for themselves... Hardly a month goes by without another conference on 'gender archaeology' being held somewhere by a host of female archaeologists (plus a few brave or trendy males who aspire to political correctness). Some of its aims are laudable, but the bandwagon shouldn't be allowed to roll too far, as the new archaeology did, before the empresses' lack of clothes is pointed out by gleeful cynics.

Gender Archaeology in Cross Cultural Studies

It has been argued that gender is not genetically inherited but a process of structuring subjectivities, whereas sex is biologically determinate and static (Claassen 1992, Gilchrist 1991, Nelson 1997). To some professionals in the field, however, sex is not “the ground upon which culture elaborates gender” (Morris 1995, 568-569) and “sexing biases have been identified among the methods used in sexing skeletons… When sex is assigned to a skeleton of unknown sex, it is a cultural act” (Claassen 1992, 4), pointing out the bigger cultural biases in the field of archaeology. These philosophies make Western biological anthropological methods of determining sex of fossils, not appropriate for cross-cultural studies given that not the same physical characteristics are used by all cultures to determine an individual’s sex. This approach of sexual fluidity, meaning that sex is not a cross-cultural concept and it is mostly culturally assigned, has been undermined by the wide application of DNA analysis to skeletal remains in Western Archaeology. The conclusions drawn from such studies performed by Western archaeologists, will be biased by their cultural influences and concepts of sex, biology and DNA. Hoping that analysis of both the material culture and ethnographic studies of the ancient society will provide a clearer picture of the role gender plays/played in that society, archaeologists are using more diverse types of data and incorporating other aspects of the collected data that they did not include before. Gender studies have often analyzed both males and females (Gilchrist 1991, Leick 2003), however, recent fieldwork has challenged the notion of this particular male-female dichotomy by expanding the categories to include a third or fourth gender in some non-Western societies that are explored (Herdt 1994, Hollimon 1997). Another way in which the fieldwork has challenged the usual study of gender archaeology is by analyzing more material culture like objects, activities and spatial arrangements in the landscape (Nelson 1997).