Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology

Abstract

In the past decade, archaeologists have given considerable attention to research on gender in the human past. In this review, we attempt to acknowledge much of this diverse and abundant work from an explicitly feminist perspective. We focus on reviewing a selection of approaches to gender that are anchored to specific theoretical standpoints. In addition, we highlight several approaches that challenge an archaeology of gender that does not explicitly engage with the implications of this topic for research, practice, and interpretation. From our perspective, we suggest the value of situating gender research within an explicitly feminist framework, and we draw attention to some of the important insights for archaeology from the wider field of feminist critiques of science. Last, we draw attention to the crucial implications for the practice of archaeology.

Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

“…In juxtaposition with positivist accounts of "scientific process" which views archaeology as one of the natural sciences [174], the account of archaeological fieldwork in Çatalhöyük and other examples of contemporary practice which I presented in this paper highlights the need to refine our conceptualizations of archaeological practice so that they account for its purposeful, discursive nature, in line with earlier work on scholarly activity conceptual modeling inspired by cultural-historical activity theory. This view resonates with Margaret Conkey and Joan Gero's call "to increase the visibility of human agency in knowledge production, becoming more conscious of, and making more public the choices that accumulate into what is known about the past" and "to organize archaeological field projects in less hierarchical fashions, avoiding the situation of a single unchallengeable authority who pronounces judgments from the top" [175], adopted by Morgan and Eve in their "radically transparent" practice of sharing current interpretations and interim excavation reports as a vindication of a politically and theoretically informed interpretive digital archaeology [86].…”

Feminismo, teoría y práctica de una arqueología científica

“…De hecho, las arqueólogas feministas criticaron desde muy temprano este tipo de arqueología de género (Conkey y Gero 1991;Conkey 1993;Conkey y Gero 1997), precisamente porque el empiricismo no iba acompañado de compromiso teórico (p.e. Conkey y Gero 1997;Bender 2000;Conkey 2003;Engelstad 2007 (Conkey 1993: 8).…”

“…El resultado ha sido una relativa buena (o al menos mejor) cantidad de evidencia empírica sobre mujeres en el pasado, y un debilitamiento del proyecto feminista inicial: la reivindicación de la igualdad de mujeres y hombres, y sobre todo, de renovación epistemológica (p.e. Conkey y Spector 1984;Conkey y Gero 1991;Conkey y Gero 1997, Wylie 1997, Engelstad 2007.…”

“…Más recientemente, la producción bibliográfi-ca se ha multiplicado y diversificado enormemente, incluyendo tanto trabajos de contenido ligado al género, como revisiones historiográficas ( (Bender 1991;Cordell 1991;Nelson 1991;Levine 1991;Claassen 1994;Reyman 1992;Parezo 1993; Díaz Andreu y Sørensen 1998), tecnología y análisis ideológicos (en , o la enseñanza de la arqueología y la presentación del pasado (Claassen 1992;Gifford-González 1993;Conkey y Tringham 1996;Romanowicz y Wright 1996;Conkey 1991Conkey , 1995Conkey y 1997Wiber 1997;Moser 1998;Joyce, Guyer y Joyce 2000).…”

“…El discurso feminista es múltiple, teórica y metodológicamente (Conkey 1993;Conkey y Gero 1997). La arqueología feminista acoge, de hecho, puntos de vista contradictorios.…”