Ethnoarchaeology and Gender

In the early 1990s Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa embarked on a new phase of ethnoarchaeological research that focused on gender dynamics. Realizing that archaeological treatments of women's and men's roles had not kept pace with the burgeoning work on gender relations, sexual stratification and related issues in cultural anthropology, we returned for additional fieldwork with our Chipewyan friends and consultants in Patuanak and Knee Lake, Saskatchewan. Several additional late historical archaeological sites were documented, providing a total of 44 sites in our regional database. Adapting a "task differentiation" framework developed by Janet Spector, we systematically interviewed Chipewyan women and men about a range of subsistence activities involved in the pursuit, harvesting, processing, consumption and storage of animal and plant food resources and products. By integrating such testimony with observation of ongoing hunting and fishing behaviors and historical archaeological patterning, we developed several empirical generalizations about women's and men's behavior in foraging societies that have implications for archaeological interpretation generally.

Our key conclusions include:

1. the simple but undeniable reality that women hunt,
2. spatial organization of hunting is affected by gender and the social composition of task groups, with all-male teams operating sporadically at great distances, all-female teams hunting continuously at short-distances, and mixed male-female teams operating at intermediate distances from camps or villages,
3. "hunting" has poor archaeological visibility when narrowly construed as killing,
4. "hunting" has considerable archaeological visibility when interpreted as an integrated system of travel, preparation and logistics preceding kills and the intricacies of butchering, processing and distribution following kills,
5. intra-site differences in use of space are likely to signal men's storage of gear which is deployed in distant non-village bush settings versus women's storage and curation of gear which is activated within village landscapes,
6. visibility of archaeological remains is affected by patterns of disposal ("bush" vs. "village-centered" hunts) as much as, and in some cases, more than, by the nature of the subsistence economy itself, and
7. political economic changes can distort the sociospatial organization of hunting by segregating women's and men's lives and activities.

 

 

 

Read more about it:

Jarvenpa, Robert, and Hetty Jo Brumbach. 1995 Ethnoarchaeology and Gender: Chipewyan Women as Hunters. Research in Economic Anthropology 16:39-82.

Brumbach, Hetty Jo, and Robert Jarvenpa. 1997a Ethnoarchaeology of Subsistence Space and Gender: A Subarctic Dene Case. American Antiquity 62:414-436.

Brumbach, Hetty Jo, and Robert Jarvenpa. 1997b Woman the Hunter; Ethnoarchaeological Lessons from Chipewyan Life-Cycle Dynamics. In: Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. Cheryl Claassen and Rosemay A. Joyce, eds., pp. 17-32. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.