Considering gender analogies in southeastern prehistoric archaeology

ABSTRACT

Prehistoric archaeologists have done very little yet to explore how gender “works” within the historical processes of social construction during the long prehistory of the Southeast. As we undertake examinations of gender ideologies, roles, and relationships, applications of analogs play an important role. This is despite a distinctly unsettled agreement on uses of analogy in archaeology. In this piece, I explore archaeologists’ continued unease with the use of analogy in archaeological interpretation, assigning part of the blame to underlying and unresolved epistemological issues. A disciplined and studied use of formal analogies is suggested.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• analogy
• epistemology
• prehistoric archaeology

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Meagan Dennison and Renee Walker for organizing the session, Gender in Southeastern Archaeology and Beyond, at the 2013 Southeastern Archaeological Conference which lead to this paper. Editor Betsy Reitz and three anonymous reviewers labored to improve this work, and I strove to accept their guidance. The reader will know that I did not always heed their advice, and that any errors remaining are mine alone. Several years of method and theory students acted as unknowing/unwitting sounding boards for some of these ideas, and I thank them for their contributions to my thinking on these topics. I wish to also acknowledge Elizabeth Benchley and John Worth for timely “bull” sessions, Maureen Meyers for the tip-off, Ian Brown for a needed push, Roz Fisher for her encouragement, and Janet Levy for instilling in me the idea that tackling gender issues in archaeological research is really just part of being a good archaeologist.

Data availability statement

The Little Egypt site materials are curated at the University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology. Data associated with the Little Egypt site can be provided by contacting the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Ramie Gougeon received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Georgia. He is currently an associate professor at the University of West Florida. He was co-editor of the book Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians (University of Tennessee Press).

ORCID

Ramie A. Gougeon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9246-1554

Notes

1 I use this term to reflect our current period of theoretical pluralism, regrettably termed “processual plus” (Hegmon 2003). I use “enlightened” in both a complimentary and ironic way. In the former intent, the term expresses my appreciation for approaches that are rooted in positivism yet are aware of relativist, ideological, symbolic, phenomenological (etc.) elements of the human condition. In the latter sense, I am making a tongue-in-cheek reference to ourselves as Enlightenment scholars, not seeking to understand “progress” as they did (although certainly seeing cultural change as constant; see Trigger [1996:101]), but certainly making lofty proclamations that, at times, might more resemble the eclecticism Harris accused Boas of promoting (Harris 1968:284–285). Our schizophrenic discomfit and continued uses of cultural stages and periods also has roots in the developmental, progressive views of history held by Enlightenment thinkers (see Stahl [1993:237], after Fabian [1983]).

2 I suspect LeMaster uses this term to decry the nearly two decades that elapsed since the beginnings of second-wave feminism of the 1960s before gender and feminist issues appeared in southeastern research, with these also occurring a decade after calls for the same in neighboring regions and the discipline in general (see also Albers and Medicine [1983]; Conkey and Gero [1991]; Kehoe [1992]).

3 I would also point readers to the analysis of publication trends in American Antiquity and Historical Archaeology undertaken by Victor and Beaudry (1992:Figures 9 and 12) demonstrating the slow climb in publications by women in the field from 1967 to 1991, especially in the areas of paleoethnobotany and ceramics analyses. See also Gifford-Gonzalez (1994) for her examination of trends for women in zooarchaeology. See also Conkey and Gero (1997:439) for their commentary on how archaeological research and the production of archaeological knowledge “clusters” by gender, and what the implications for these trends may mean.

4 In these instances, both works center specifically on single-gendered uses of cave or rock shelter sites. Because of the presence of only one gender in these specialized sites, a gendered approach to interpretation is practically required. When sites contain the mixed records of multiple genders, other interpretative frameworks centered on group or at least genderless social processes tend to be used.

5 I wish to make clear that I do not equate ethnographic analogy with cross-cultural ethnology (see Peregrine [1996]). However, as cross-cultural ethnology has been championed as a preferred alternative to analogy and promoted for use in explorations of gender roles (Hayden 1992), this brief review of the strengths and weaknesses of ethnology is appropriate.

6 We could reasonably argue that many southeastern archaeologists still tend to be consumers rather than producers of theory (Johnson 1993).

7 As one sage reviewer of this paper noted, archaeological research is funded by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and not many disciplines cross that line.