Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Women's role in history inaccurately reflected by archaeological record
A button I purchased at an archaeological site that my wife and I visited on our honeymoon says, "Love is fleeting, stone tools are forever."


["True love an sometimes fade, but money stays green forever." -- Cary Grant]

In nearly every hunting-and-gathering society studied by anthropologists, there is a fairly strict division of labor between the sexes: men hunt and women gather. If this were true for ancient groups, then the archaeological record would be dominated by the hunting activities of men. The gathering activities of women, on the other hand, would be nearly invisible.

University of Wyoming archaeologist Nicole Waguespack, in the December 2005 issue of the journal American Anthropologist, acknowledges the problem but argues that it's not as simple as it seems.


I actually read the title and thought "Great, another post-modern feminist interpretation" but it's pretty good.