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Always the Same Old Stories? The Representation of Prehistoric Women and Men in Scientific Communication, Popular Culture and the Media
Abstract
During the last 25-30 years, archaeological gender research has changed the androcentric image of prehistory, created an awareness of the diversity of gender concepts of the past and challenged the public's image of archaeologists. But has it also influenced the general public's ideas about the past? This paper looks at the portrayal of prehistoric people in museum exhibitions, newspaper articles, school textbooks, video games, etc. It also aims to initiate a debate about the impact that representations of the past in the popular media have on today's gender discourses and whether we as experts can and want to influence them.
This chapter, and the volume that it introduces, situates gender in current archaeological debates. The central argument is that gender archaeology as a field of study is in crisis, although some research communities are better positioned than others. This predicament not only affects the relevance and credibility of the field before the larger archaeological community, but also the circumstances in which gender-concerned archaeologists conduct their research. First, we assess the state of gender archaeology in Europe and North America, attempting to find explanations and propose solutions for the field’s decline. We then review the place of gender within the major theoretical and methodological debates which have influenced archaeology in the past decade, especially in Western research traditions, such as the Third Science Revolution, posthumanism, new materialism, intersectionality, mobility, and violence. We argue that although gender has largely been absent from these debates, this should be an inseparable component of research and narratives on the human past. Finally, we explore the impact of present global tensions and online trends in the dissemination, visibility and accessibility of archaeological gender research.
Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe is a major research project that examined the archaeological labour market, qualifications and opportunities for archaeologists to enjoy transnational mobility across twelve European Union member states. The research was carried out in 2007-08 and was primarily funded by the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (Leonardo da Vinci II strand).
The EAA Committee on Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe has been working to deliver the
Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe 2014 project since it began on 1 October 2012.
This is a project supported by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union that is bringing
together participants from twenty European states to identify how archaeology is defined as a profession
in those countries. It is seeking to find out what they do, how they are qualified and rewarded, and most
importantly, how to maintain the skills of professional archaeology in the post-2008 economic situation
we all find ourselves in. It is a successor to the previous Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe
project which ran from 2006-2008.
Gender archaeology has made significant strides toward deconstructing the hegemony of binary categorizations. Challenging dichotomies such as man/woman, sex/gender, and biology/culture, approaches informed by poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theories have moved beyond essentialist and universalist identity constructs to more nuanced configurations. Despite the theoretical emphasis on context, multiplicity, and fluidity, binary starting points continue to streamline the spectrum of variability that is recognized, often reproducing normative assumptions in the evidence. The contributors to this special issue confront how sex, gender, and sexuality categories condition analytical visibility, aiming to develop approaches that respond to the complexity of theory in archaeological practice. The papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of bodies, personhood, and archaeological possibility, challenging a priori assumptions that contain how sex, gender, and sexuality categories are constituted and related to each other. Foregrounding intersectional approaches that engage with ambiguity, variability, and difference, this special issue seeks to “de-contain” categories, assumptions, and practices from “binding” our analytical gaze toward only certain kinds of persons and knowledges, in interpretations of the past and practices in the present.
Les expositions archeologiques presentent non seulement des donnees chronologiques, de la culture materielle et des techniques de production, mais aussi sur l’organisation sociale et la dynamique sociale. Cela cela comprend aussi le genre et ses developpements au cours du temps. Afin d’explorer plus loin ces informations nous avons mis sur pied un projet d’analyse des expositions permanentes en Autriche. Notre postulat de depart etait que nous allions rencontrer dans nos enquetes des modeles: des representations stereotypees des relations entre les sexes, et dans une moindre importance des femmes dans la sphere de l'artisanat, de l'economie, de la politique et de la subsistance. Nous ne nous attendions pas a rencontrer des images fortes du role des femmes ou les montrant comme influentes et actives. Les donnees preliminaires confirment une grande partie de nos hypotheses initiales: les femmes, quand elles sont representees, sont depeintes comme inactives et inproductives.
Klassische Medien wie Rundfunk, Film und Fernsehen sind ebenso wie die „Neuen Medien“ Internet oder Computerspiele längst Gegenstand der Geschlechterforschung. Dieses Lehrbuch macht mit Begriffen, Theorien und Problemen des Feldes vertraut und befähigt Studierende, dies auf aktuelle Phänomene anzuwenden.
Die Autorinnen stellen theoretische Modelle der Geschlechterforschung vor und beschreiben ihre Anwendung in der Medienforschung. Zentrale Begriffe werden erläutert und Fragen zur methodischen Anlage von Gender Media Studies diskutiert.
Zahlreiche Fallbeispiele verdeutlichen den spezifischen Ertrag der Geschlechterforschung für die Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften. Zugleich liefern sie Material, um die konkrete Umsetzung von Forschungsfragen in eigene empirische Arbeiten zu erproben. Wie wandeln sich Geschlechterverhältnisse in Journalismus und PR? Wie lassen sich Medientexte in Zeitung, Fernsehen oder Internet analysieren?
Das Buch integriert sowohl sozial- als auch kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven zum Verständnis von Geschlecht im gesamten Spektrum der Medienkommunikation.
How ‘progressive’ have archaeologists been in the progress made on gender studies during the 1990s? All archaeologists, male and female, must accept the need to theorize gender, and to rethink accordingly their traditional research priorities. Feminist theory is essential for the study of gender in archaeology because it has paid closer attention to gender as an analytical category than any other body of theory, and at the same time made important links within and between disciplines. Most male archaeologists have been recalcitrant if not loathe to focus on gender as a key concept in archaeological theory, even though writers treating ‘masculinity’ in the social sciences and literary theory have been active in this field for over a decade. This study discusses masculinist reactions to feminism and suggests that ‘masculinist’ approaches are derivative of feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important contribution of masculinist scholarship has been to insist upon the existence of divergent, multiple masculinities, and by extension femininities, as opposed to binary oppositions or ideal types. The study of men and masculinities, of women and femininities, involves consideration of social and gender issues that should not become the exclusive domain of either women or men – the goal is an archaeology informed by feminism, one that looks critically at theories of human action and allows archaeological data to challenge existing social theory.
The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.
A queer archaeology is often equated to looking for ancient homosexuality. As a challenge to heteronormative practice, queer theory, instead, provides a framework for engaging with all aspects of identity formation and the processes and behaviors that mediate it. This article examines two primary points: (1) queer theory's relationship to feminist practice and archaeology and (2) its application to the construction and production of difference among ancient Maya commoners. Through this analysis, I explore how investigations of identity and status can and should be part of a queer analysis. Work at the Northeast Group, part of the site of Chan, Belize illustrates how focus on internal class composition, specifically change through time, "queers" traditional models of ancient Maya class formation.
Als Heinrich Schliemann im Jahr 1873 den von ihm als „Schatz des Priamos“ titulierten Hortfund entdeckte, erlangte er – quasi aus dem Nichts heraus – nicht nur in Deutschland, sondern weltweit große Berühmtheit. Einem archäologischen Laien, so schien es, war geglückt, was bis dahin keinem Gelehrten gelungen war: Schliemann hatte das mythische Troia Homers lokalisiert. Dieser Band untersucht anhand der wirkungsmächtigen Entdeckungen Schliemanns die Art und Weise sowie die Funktion der zeitspezifischen medialen Präsentation. Die Analyse stützt sich dabei vor allem auf die deutschsprachige zeitgenössische Presse sowie auf bislang unpublizierte Briefe. Die Studie legt zum einen neue Erkenntnisse zur Medialisierung, Popularisierung und Inszenierung archäologischer Entdeckungen im 19. Jahrhundert vor. Zum anderen verdeutlicht sie den stetigen und öffentlich ausgetragenen Kampf Schliemanns mit seinen mehrheitlich aus wissenschaftlichen Kreisen kommenden Kritikern. Die rhetorischen Strategien dieser Grenzziehung zwischen professionellen/akademischen und dilettantischen/populären Zugängen werden dabei klar herausgearbeitet. Das zugrunde liegende Phänomen lässt sich mit den Oppositionspaaren ‚Wissenschaftler gegen Entdecker‘ und ‚Stubengelehrter gegen Praktiker‘ beschreiben.
p>Since 2011 the project “Living History: Reenacted Prehistory between Research and Popular Performance”, conducted at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and at the University of Tübingen, analyzes different popular living-history performances of prehistory in a multidisciplinary manner. One of the subprojects initiated a web-based questionnaire on reenactors’ motives, their amount of work and their understanding of the terms ‘living history’ and ‘reenactment’ as well as their concept of ‘authenticity’. About 170 reenactors from all over Germany completed the questionnaire, which ran for thirty days in June 2013.
In this paper we present some pivotal results of this survey which illustrate that there exists neither a prototypical reenactor nor a homogeneous subculture but a wide spectrum of different groups, actors and, viewpoints. Living history respectively reenactment is not a phenomenon whose single aspects can be examined uncoupled and independent from each other. It becomes rather clear that the actors’ specialties, activities, personal preferences and engagements are linked to each other and are mutually dependent.
supplemental material : questionnaire used for the survey in June 2013</p
p>The term ‘living history’, in Germany often translated as lebendige/wiederbelebte/erlebte Geschichte, stands for a specific form of popular representation of history. While it has its roots in the USA, it might almost be called a global phenomenon today. The English term ‘reenactment’ is quite often used as a synonym, but originally referred to the replay or reenactment of concrete historical events (often battles), while living history tries to simulate living conditions of the past in the present. Reenactments at open air museums seem to be popular because they emanate a hands-on and authentic atmosphere. Reenactors often employ a whole range of visual, acoustic and haptic possibilities. This specific kind of historical representation is based on the persuasiveness of the ‘real’, the ‘tangible’, and the ‘comprehensible’. Reconstructions and performances arouse public interest and in doing so the mediated conceptions of history (Geschichtsbilder) have a lasting effect.
In this article I focuse on the re-enactors’ motives to engage in living history activities and on their didactical concepts. The paper is founded upon empirical research, mainly interviews with some group-members of the so-called Ask-Alamanni.</p
Archaeology has been a persistent theme for video games, from the long-running Indiana Jones and Lara Croft franchises to more recent uses of archaeology in games like Destiny and World of Warcraft. In these games, archaeology is often portrayed as a search for treasure among lost worlds that leads to looting and the destruction of cultural heritage. In this article, we review the current state of archaeological video games, including mainstream and educational games. While this is not an exhaustive discussion, it provides an introduction and overview to the current landscape. We propose that an understanding of current popular archaeological video games is important to archaeologists for three reasons: (1) it is a source of potentially dangerous misconceptions about the discipline that must be addressed; (2) it can be a source of inspiration for funding and a means to recruit new students to the discipline; and (3) games can be leveraged as teaching moments in classrooms and public discussions. It is important that archaeologists recognize the ways the discipline is being portrayed in such public contexts, in order to maximize the potential benefit for archaeology and to prevent further misconceptions about the subject.
Archaeology, like many of the sciences, works to a masculine metaphor, the (male) archaeologist as hero explores and tames the mysteries of his (female) subject. Feminist theory has made important criticism of positivist science on these grounds, drawing on much the same postmodern theory as ‘post-processual’ archaeology. How do the ‘post-processuals’ appear, seen in the feminist light?
Gender is the information that has not been recovered by archaeologists who lack a theoretical and methodological framework to do so, statements on gender have not been absent in archaeological interpretation. The methodological barriers have not kept many archaeologists from inclusion of assumptions about roles and relationships. The organization of gender behavior relates to and is a part of most other aspects of past cultural systems in which archaeologists have always been interested. Archaeologists have to understand gender dynamics at some level to continue to pursue some research objectives set out for: site functions and uses; subsistence systems that are based on task differentiation; inter- and intra-site spatial phenomena; the power and role of material culture; mechanisms of cultural solidarity and integration; extra-domestic trade and exchange system; and the course of culture change. This chapter stimulates critical awareness of the role of archaeologists in employing and perpetuating gender stereotypes and androcentric perspectives. It is also hoped that archaeologists can realize how the roots of the barriers to elucidating past gender arrangements and ideology lie in two related domains.
Artistic reconstructions of ancient life are powerful blends of archaeological interpretation and imagination. Like other narratives about the past, they can project contemporary gender roles and relations on ancient peoples, and can reinforce or transform ideas about gender in the
present. This article examines the construction of gender ideologies in National Geographic illustrations of prehistoric life. Our analysis of 204 pictorial reconstructions from 1936 to 2007 reveals that women and women's work are significantly underrepresented and undervalued, while exhibiting
evidence of temporal change in response to societal factors and editorial influences. A vigorous archaeology of gender has had little impact on the magazine's imagined past; in some respects, the ancient women depicted in the last twenty years are just as scarce, passive, and subordinate as
they were in the postwar “backlash” of the 1950s.
This essay examines drawings of antiquities in the context of the history of early modern scientific illustration. The role of illustrations in the establishment of archaeology as a discipline is assessed, and the emergence of a graphic style for representing artifacts is shown to be closely connected to the development of scientific illustration in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The essay argues that the production of conventionalized drawings of antiquities during this period represents a fundamental shift in the approach to ancient material culture, signifying the recognition of objects as evidence. As has been demonstrated in other scientific fields, the creation of a visual system for recording objects was central to the acceptance of artifacts as "data" that could be organized into groups, classified as types, and analyzed to gain knowledge of the past.
In this paper I suggest that gender archaeology has followed the three main feminist epistemologies as described by Sandra Harding (198634.
Harding , S. 1986 . The Science Question in Feminism , Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press . View all references): feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism. I explore the main principles of these orientations and discuss their use in gender archaeology, offering examples from Norwegian, Spanish and North American contexts. My purpose is to trace a genealogy of gender archaeology from the point of view of epistemology that will reveal its feminist character. Even though it has been developed within the processual and post-processual contexts of archaeology, a review of its epistemological principles will show that gender archaeology must be situated within a wider feminist framework.
Rooted in anthropologists' long-standing roles as producers, users, and disseminators of images, this brief article takes the pulse of ethical considerations related to visual media in the discipline. Reflecting on the intent, content, and implications of the Society for Visual Anthropology–sponsored visual ethics discussion sessions at the 2007–9 American Anthropological Association meetings, we seek here to situate these events in the context of recent disciplinary engagements with image-based responsibilities and to assess their relationship to comparable endeavors in allied fields. Our considerations come together in a discussion of why, how, and to whom visual ethics matter. Ultimately, we put forward a series of tentative proposals for the Society for Visual Anthropology's future navigation of these issues.
Numerous publications on gender archaeology present case studies that incorporate gender in their analyses, but make little
use of feminist theory and critique, and are ambivalent or negative to feminism. Aspects of Norwegian, British and American
gender archaeology are discussed in relation to a desire for the ‘mainstream.’ The reasons for, and consequences of, a lack
of feminist theorizing and engagement are related to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges.
As new media technologies increasingly populate our toolkits, questions arise about whether archaeologists are yet even competent users of orthodox media. Prior to engaging with emerging tools, this paper takes one step back to probe the subtexts of traditional two-dimensional archaeological images. Of interest is whether the many implications of these images can be made poignant via personally manipulating and imposing upon their form and function. Influenced by the work of various playwrights, artists, anthropologists, cultural theorists, and archaeologists, this paper examines what is legitimate in our practices of picturing the past, and what it means to explicitly-perhaps illicitly-interfere with typical archaeological visuals. Via tentative experiments with assorted maps, photos and illustrations, I endeavour to turn these orthodox modes of engagement into more defiant tools of discovery and critique. Ultimately, my objective is to disrupt convention and prompt archaeologists to confront and respond to themselves (and their responsibilities to others) in their everyday interactions with media.
Die Studie beschäftigt sich mit Themen der Ur- und Frühgeschichte von der Altsteinzeit bis zum Frühmittelalter und ihrer Darstellung in gegenwärtigen deutschen Lehrplänen, Schulbüchern, Unterrichtsfilmen und Jugendbüchern. Sie fragt danach, wie diese Repräsentationen die Rezeption von Archäologie und ihren Forschungsergebnissen in Teilen der Öffentlichkeit spiegeln. Es handelt sich um eine qualitative Inhaltsanalyse aus archäologischer Perspektive.
Die analysierten Medien weisen bestimmte Charakteristika auf, die sie als Untersuchungsmaterial für die Fragestellung besonders geeignet erscheinen lassen: Sie wurden in der Mehrzahl von Personen geschrieben, produziert oder herausgegeben, die in der prähistorischen Archäologie nicht ausgebildet sind. Dabei wollen die Autoren, zumindest im Fall der Schulbücher und der Unterrichtsfilme, den Anspruch der Wissenschaftskonformität erfüllen, d.h. archäologisches und historisches Wissen dem aktuellen Forschungsstand entsprechend darstellen. Die Medien spiegeln, welche Ergebnisse der Fachwissenschaft von den Autoren bevorzugt rezipiert werden und auf welchen Wegen sich die Autoren informierten, was Rückschlüsse auf die Wirksamkeit der archäologischen Öffentlichkeitsarbeit erlaubt. Die Medien enthalten für das Zielpublikum der Kinder und Jugendlichen komprimiertes Wissen, das auf eine lebendige und interessante Art und Weise vermittelt werden soll. Didaktische Ziele und pädagogische Grundüberlegungen beeinflussen somit nicht unerheblich die Selektion und Präsentation von Fachwissen in den untersuchten Medien. Diese werden dadurch zugleich Spiegel der Gesellschaft, ihres Umgangs mit Geschichte bzw. Spiegel der Fragen, die die Gesellschaft an die Geschichte stellt.
Aus archäologischer Perspektive fällt vor allem in den Schulbüchern zunächst eine Vielzahl an Sachfehlern auf, die zu korrigieren wären: von groben Fehlinformationen über Detailfehler bis hin zu verbreiteten populären Geschichtsvorstellungen. Eine Fehleranalyse und -korrektur, aber auch die Frage nach den Ursachen für die Probleme bildet daher einen wesentlichen Bestandteil der Arbeit. Dabei galt es auch, aufzuzeigen, welche Fehlinformationen und inzwischen populär gewordenen Bilder aus der Forschungsgeschichte des Faches selbst stammen, also originär wissenschaftlich sind. Die analysierten Medien werden damit zu einer interessanten Quelle für Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Rezeptionsgeschichte.
Die Publikation gliedert sich in drei Bände: einen Textband mit einem Grundlagenkapitel und einer nach Epochen und Themen gegliederten Analyse (Band 1), einen Katalogband mit einer Lehrplansynopse und Rezensionen der untersuchten Medien (Band 2), und einen Tafelband mit Übersichten, Grafiken und Abbildungen (Band 3).
Eine Gesamtzusammenfassung in deutscher, englischer und französischer Sprache findet sich in Band 1 auf den Seiten 793 ff.
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