Summary
Sex Roles and Gender Hierarchies in Middle Range
Societies: Engendering Southwestern Prehistory
Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies. Despite the
growing body of anthropological literature on the subject, however, many central
issues of relations between the sexes remain unresolved because they require
diachronic studies over considerable periods of time and under specific conditions
of change. The problem is compounded in the field of prehistoric archaeology,
which is still trying to devise methods for reexamining the past from a gendered
perspective.
The prehistoric American Southwest presents an ideal
case for investigating gender issues: It boasts a wealth of available data, secure
dating of sites, and the presence of multiple cultures that survived from the
prehistoric to the historic period. The SAR advanced seminar on "Sex Roles
and Gender Hierarchies in Middle Range Societies: Engendering Southwestern Prehistory" was
the first comprehensive attempt to examine the record of the prehistoric Southwest
in terms of gender. It was also the School's first all-female advanced seminar.
"Our goal was to assess changes in the sexual division
of labor and in gender hierarchies among the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi), Mogollon,
and Hohokam people between 10,000 BC and AD 1540," said seminar chair Patricia
L. Crown of the University of New Mexico. During this period Southwestern populations
shifted from migratory hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers and from small bands
to large communities. Each seminar participant examined the effects of these
changes on the lives of women and men, focusing on individual topics including
the organization of space; health, nutrition, disease, and violence; gender hierarchies
and social position; agriculture and hunting; food preparation; craft and tool
production; ritual activities; and mortuary goods and burial practices.
The group identified several trends that impacted gendered
relations in most of the studied regions, such as increased levels of food production,
productive and ritual specialization, time devoted to processing and preparing
food, and variability in health status among men, women, and children. As the
workloads of both women and men increased, unisex task groups apparently became
more important; a conclusion supported by the spatial arrangements of activities,
such as the appearance of special rooms where women gathered to grind corn.
The seminar also found that gendered relations became
increasingly differentiated over time. "No single generalization can be
made about the sexual division of labor or gender hierarchies after AD 1300," Crown
observed. "This variability is characteristic of middle-range societies,
which have many different solutions to similar types of problems. Such findings
would not be particularly surprising to cultural anthropologists. But it's significant
that we were able to monitor them in the prehistoric period and see when and
where they developed."
In addition to identifying specific areas where future
research needs to be done, seminar participants agreed that gender should always
be taken into account in examining any topic. "We want scholars to recognize
that it isn't possible to discuss most aspects of prehistoric life or cultural
processes in the prehistoric record without considering gender and sex," Crown
said.
Support for this seminar was provided in part by the generosity
of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
