The History of Gender Archaeology

Abstract

In this chapter, the history of gender archaeology is traced, focusing primarily on Western academia. A clear link is demonstrated with waves of feminist action. We begin with the antecedents, the first studies on women undertaken amid first-wave feminism by nineteenth-century women travelers and Egyptologists, alongside considerations of the changing social role of prehistoric women in Victorian evolutionary perspectives, until these were superseded by culture-historical perspectives in the 1920s. In the second period, we recognize the impact of 1960s–1970s social movements that developed feminist theory, to the early years of gender archaeology in the 1980s, with an apex of interest in the early 1990s. In the final section, we discuss a move from theory to practice and the application of contextual method and scientific techniques to large data sets, the recognition of the possibility of different genders in the archaeological record, and new feminist archaeologies.