Becoming Gendered in European Prehistory: Was Neolithic Gender Fundamentally Different?

Abstract

It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naïveté. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 cal BC onwards; the latter still form the norm in European and American contexts today, and our standard theories and methodologies are designed to uncover this specific form of gender. In Bronze Age gender systems, gender was mostly binary, associated with stable, lifelong identities expressed in recurrent complexes of gendered symbolism. In contrast, Neolithic gender appears to have been less firmly associated with personal identity and more contextually relevant; it slips easily through our methodological nets. In proposing this “contextual gender” model for Neolithic gender, we both open up new understandings of gender in the past and present and pose significant questions for our models of gender more widely.

Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

“…In the LBK, gender is certainly not consistently expressed across all forms of evidence, as noted for Neolithic gender more widely by Robb and Harris (2017). While biological sex may not have defined gender during the LBK, it is argued here that sexed bodies did matter.…”

“…1) was considered an exception, particularly its burial evidence, which appeared to show more distinct binary gender patterning than elsewhere in the European Neolithic (Robb & Harris 2017, 138, 140). Separate to the issues identified by Robb and Harris (2017), there also continues to be a tendency to treat gender as a niche, or special interest, area of study. This is problematic because many of the models for prehistoric social organization, which form the context in which issues of culture change are examined, are underpinned by an assumption of binary gender, which is itself open to interrogation.…”

“…Bentley et al 2012;Brandt et al 2013) have confirmed earlier suggestions of patrilocal and patrilineal practices for the LBK (Eisenhauer 2003) but the implications of patrilocality for LBK identity (and vice versa) have yet to be fully addressed. Inspired by Robb and Harris (2017), this paper examines the evidence from the funerary record and bioarchaeological analysis of diet, mobility and health, asking what LBK gender was like; was it rooted in sex differences?…”

“…Asking why ‘there is so little gender archaeology for the European Neolithic’, Robb and Harris (2017, 128) issued a call to arms for archaeologists to rethink gender in this period. They conclude that gender was not the expected binary form, found, for example, in the Bronze Age from the third millennium bc (Robb & Harris 2017). Rather than operating as a cultural elaboration of biological sex which permeated all of social life, they argued that Neolithic gender was contextual to particular objects and practices (Robb & Harris 2017, 141, table 1).…”

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

“…Or they are too often cast as nothing more than “faceless blobs,” as Ruth Tringham () once quipped. For instance, Robb and Harris () note that archaeologists have long overlooked Neolithic gender precisely because they could not recognize it. They suggest a move beyond expectations of binary gender categories to appreciate the complicated, fluid, and multiple gender categories that characterized the Neolithic.…”