Gender portrayals in death

Given the press release today, I wasn;t actually planning to release this one next, but it feels like kismet! 

In the introduction to her 2016 paper, Stratton states: “When analysing human osteological material, one of the key aspects studied is the sex of the skeleton. The osteologist, based on various anatomical features, will attempt to define each individual as either male or female. Right from the initial assessment, the skeleton is being fitted into a binary (male/female) system, before any interpretation of the material is even started.” (Stratton, 2016, pg.855). Whilst this is true of modern-day post excavation methodology, there are some limits as to how successfully this can be carried out, “Sexing of skeletons has a varying degree of certainty, and some skeletons will defy categorisation, either due to poor preservation or being intersex (Fausto-Sterling 1993).” (Stratton, 2016, pg.855) These limitations were even more prevalent in the past, before osteoarchaeology became a prime archaeological specialism. Therefore, this sexing of skeletons often fell to the interpretation of the burial practices themselves, and the associated grave goods.

McLeod’s "Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 AD", paper, discusses the misgendering of occupants of graves due to attribution of gender based upon grave goods, corrected by the DNA and osteo sexing of burials in British Vikings, showed that previously sexed as mostly male, was a 50-50 split. (McLeod, 2011).

During a recent symposium on Gender in Death held by Leiden University, (April 2021) Mark Haughton (University of Cambridge) proffered his opinion that after its initial boom, in the early 90’s gender archaeology has lain dormant until the last 5 years or so.  That in essence, the wrong details were being paid attention to in burial practices, or rather, the expected gender associations with goods were being adhered to with little thought to a more open interpretation.

In a similar vein, Stratton goes on to make the point that links between sex and ways of treating the body, for example, burial positions or types of grave goods, are often assumed as gender differences, where gender and sex become conflated. Unlike some earlier archaeologists who had to make interpretations based upon these positions, and the gendered associations of that time’s society with various typologies of grave goods. We now know that sex is biological, whilst gender is in fact a social construct, formed through the assumption by an individual of specific roles, “the use of certain material culture, and interaction with other individuals (Strathern 1988; Conkey and Spector 1984; Sorenson 1991; Wylie 1991).” (Stratton, 2016)

 

Historically, British archaeologists have been known to base their interpretation on traditional Western concepts of gender. According to Stratton, a more open interpretation could be based upon “non- Western concepts of gender in which there may be more than two genders, where individuals may transcend gender categories, or where gender can be fluid and changing.”

 

A prime example of this is the case of “The Red Lady” of Paviland, found at the Goat’s Hole Cave. In 1822 William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University, was called upon to examine the "bones of elephants" found by Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies, the tusk of a mammoth. During a week spent there in January 1823 his famous discovery took place. However, due to religious beliefs and social constraints regarding our understanding of gender at the time, his interpretation was erroneous. Buckland's determinations misjudged both the skeleton’s age and sex. Following his belief in gap theory, and Cuvier’s logic that there was no human interaction with now extinct animals, led him to conclude the grave was Roman, buried amongst the pre-existing fossils during the historic period rather than a member of a population that existed pre-flood. Buckland also assumed that the skeleton was female, largely because it was covered with red ochre dye, and found with decorative artefacts, seashell necklaces and other jewellery carved from the tusk of a mammoth. According to Sommer (2007), Buckland preferred to bestow a questionable moral and social status to the Red Lady – his interpretations ranged through tax collector, witch, prostitute – than concede that ‘she’ might have been a contemporary of the mammoths, bears and hyenas whose remains were found next to human ones.  This interpretation stayed in place until William Sollas revisited it, moving away from looking at it on the basis as an individual human being, instead focusing upon its relative position in human prehistory. The Lady became a Cro-Magnon male, and thus was raised the question of the origins of ‘modern’ humans (Sommer, 2007).

 

Most recently, in 2000, a multidisciplinary project led by archaeologist Stephen Aldhouse-Green, attempts to place the burial into a cultural context regarding their role and society’s perception of the individual in question. The Red Lady is now referred to as a ‘He’, becomes a ‘shaman’ and according to Aldhouse-Green, an indicator that Wales, ‘has been an active participant in European developments for more than 25,000 years’ (Sommer, 2007, pg. 266). It is interesting that when a woman, the individual was presented with what most of society would consider a morally reprehensible role, whereas upon identified as male, takes on a spiritual, guiding role. Sadly, the misnomer “The Red Lady” remains in all publicly accessible articles and media.

 

Mike Parker Pearson, states that “Archaeology is a continuous struggle to excavate our own preconceptions and unacknowledged assumptions” (Parker Pearson, 1999, pg. 96). He alludes to our over reliance upon attributing meaning to grave goods, and the double standards at pay when similar goods are found in male or female graves. He explicitly references the 1980s critique by Meg Conkey and Janet Spector on Winters’s previous 1960s analysis of Late Archaic burials in the American Midwest. In the original interpretation, Winters had assumed the presence of trade goods in both graves, symbolized that the men were directly involved in long-distance exchange systems, whilst those in the women’s burials indicated gift-giving from the males. Likewise, quern stones were attributed to females undertaking domestic tasks, and males in the creation of tools. (Parker Pearson, 1999). This, however, makes for an excellent example as to how the societal conventions and expectations we as individuals are exposed to shapes our interpretation of the past via an unconscious bias. Winters looked at this site from a male perspective in the 1960s. Western society was comprised of the idea that the man is the chief breadwinner, women navigate towards the role of a housewife once married. Marriage bans were still impacting and impeding female solo career development at this point both in the western world. Winters would have been working in a male dominated field, in a society that promoted these gender divisions.  A couple of decades later, in the 1980s Conkey and Spector are similarly influenced in their reappraisal of the same data. I was born in 1982, and my childhood, these women’s formative years of their careers would have been filled with the mantra that we as women could “have it all”. Fashion was centred around shoulder pads and power suits, and television commercials around convenience foods that allowed women to feed their children a cooked meal after a full day at the office.   

 

At a recent symposium, Amy Jefford Franks, discussed the burial designated BJ581, originally unearthed during the Swedish Birka excavation in 1878. It was one of only two graves with full weapons, and its occupant was interpreted as the archetypal male Viking warrior from the beginning. DNA analysis published in 2017 established that biologically the body was female, furthermore she was not local, but originated from Southern Scandinavia. (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al 2017) The narrative that this was a local, elite, male warrior was undone. But almost instantaneously the new narrative presented to the public took on the trope of “The Viking female warrior”. This is a current popular obsession, the idea of using images of Viking shieldmaidens to sell a product to the public. The two most popular now being in the Vikings television series, and the additional female character promoted in Assassins Creed Valhalla. The results of this study call for caution against generalizations regarding social orders in past societies.

In terms of how these findings are presented to the public, apart from as above, which is almost a fetishization. At a keynote speech in 2019, Hedenstierna-Jonson mentioned that the team behind the paper had attempted to send drafts to several journalists who had refused to publish citing that it would “not be interesting enough for their readers”. When the paper was published in September 2017, it caught the public interest and was covered by 130 international news agencies within a fortnight. This suggests there is a public interest in the female gender in archaeology that is not made accessible as a part of public heritage.

 Stratton (2016) argues for an engendered approach to archaeology, which moves beyond the study of gender to understand past lived experiences, of which gender identity would be just one facet.

In theory, this may go some way to eliminate the problems faced when archaeologists try to assign gender, rather than a binary sex to the occupants of graves. Parker Pearson (1999) runs over the complications encountered with the constant regendering of the Vix Princess. Firstly, a princess or queen, then believed to be a male transvestite priest, before her latest osteological study suggesting she is most likely, biologically female. This of course casts no light as to whether the individual was in fact, intersex, trans, cis, or as Bettina Arnold has suggested for the similar Stuttgart-Bad burials, an honorary male. (Parker Pearson, 1999, pg.97)

Many of the burials that are classified as female have fallen victim to sensationalism in their media representation to the public, which often falls into two camps. The Warrior woman trope, or the valued male possession. From intersex burials being compared to Nordic sagas such as Hervor Hjörvard (although Judith Jesch has reservations about the accuracy of the translation from old Norse leading to inaccurate mythology), the Tarim mummies being represented by the ‘The Beauty of Xiaohe’, and the Pazyryk female burials being compared to the Amazons.

Pope and Ralston (2011) highlight those prominent voices in archaeology that have perpetuated these assumed stereotypes. They look to the 1986 study of the social status of burials at Münsingen-Rain, Switzerland by the current Chief Executive of CIfA, Peter Hinton. On finding the most high-status burials were female, Hinton disregarded the link between wealth and status, suggesting instead that “women were perhaps wearing their ‘bridewealth’ which a man would use ‘as a symbol of his wealth by displaying it on his wife’.” (Pope and Ralston, 2011)

“90.9% of the very rich graves are those with female burials...At first this seems to indicate that women have a higher status than men. At this point we have to abandon the assumption that wealth is always equivalent to status... because the alternative is to postulate a matriarchal society—for which there is no ethnographical or historical parallel. An alternative interpretation of this phenomenon is that the woman is being used to display her husband’s wealth; that she is a symbol of his status... that a richly ornamented woman is a status symbol for a man.” (Pope and Ralston, 2011)