Becoming gendered in european prehistory: Was neolithic gender fundamentally different?

It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naïveté. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 cal BC onwards; the latter still form the norm in European and American contexts today, and our standard theories and methodologies are designed to uncover this specific form of gender. In Bronze Age gender systems, gender was mostly binary, associated with stable, lifelong identities expressed in recurrent complexes of gendered symbolism. In contrast, Neolithic gender appears to have been less firmly associated with personal identity and more contextually relevant; it slips easily through our methodological nets. In proposing this “contextual gender” model for Neolithic gender, we both open up new understandings of gender in the past and present and pose significant questions for our models of gender more widely.</jats:p

Future world: Anticipatory archaeology, materially affective capacities and the late human legacy

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Equinox Publishing via the DOI in this recordUsing the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern

Archaeology, Architecture, and the Postcolonial Critique

Peer reviewe

Being Mesolithic in life and death

Fifty years ago approaches to Mesolithic identity were limited to ideas of man the hunter, woman the gatherer, and evidence of non-normative practice was ascribed to "shamans" and to "ritual", and that was that. As post-processual critiques have touched Mesolithic studies, however, this has changed. In the first decade of the 21st century a strong body of work on Mesolithic identity in life, as well as death, has enabled us to think beyond modern western categories to interpret identity in the Mesolithic. Our paper reviews these changing approaches, offering a series of case studies of such approaches, before developing these case studies to advocate an assemblage approach to identity in the Mesolithic

Use-wear analysis reveals the first direct evidence for the use of Neolithic polished stone axes in Britain

Polished stone axes have long been recognised as one of the most important forms of material culture in the Neolithic. Research over the last 40 years has done much to understand their origins, patterns of exchange across Europe, deposition, and social importance. Despite this long-recognised importance, little work in Britain has focused on the actual use of these objects. This article presents the first use-wear analysis of 20 Early Neolithic polished stone axes from Britain. This research shows that whilst many were used for woodworking, no doubt associated with forest clearance as agriculture spread, this masks the detailed and variable roles polished stone axes played in the emergence of Neolithic worlds in Britain, which use-wear has the capacity to reveal

Enduring relations: exploring a paradox of new materialism

In this paper we examine tensions between understandings of material things as either bundles of relations or as things-in-themselves. Rather than take either of these positions, we instead set out an argument for approaches that allow us to modulate between these understandings whilst treating both as relational. Taking such a position allows us to understand how things endure through time without returning to any notion of essence. We explore the theoretical arguments through an analysis of one particular enduring material phenomenon: the Neolithic chambered tomb of West Kennet