Gender in the Earliest Human Societies

This chapter briefly surveys what (little) archaeologists can say, with accuracy and general agreement, about gender roles, relationships, ideologies, and processes contributing to the forms and transformation of the earliest human societies. It sketches out just a few of the fundamental and vexing issues swirling around the question of how archaeologists can or should go about researching and modeling ancient gender practices. In many ways, the initial concern with finding and giving credit to women in prehistory was an intellectual movement shaped not by discoveries on the ground or in the laboratory, nor by fundamental challenges to the everyday practice or archaeology. It is only since the mid‐1980s that a serious and systematic concern with understanding gender roles, relationships, ideologies, and gender‐related processes has come to the fore in archaeology. The chapter touches upon some of the major epistemological and methodological issues beginning to appear on the receding horizon.