Archaeologies of Gender and Violence

287 Pages·2017·36.783 MB·English

by  Bo Jensen, Uroš Matić

Archaeologies of gender
and violence

Archaeologies of gender
and violence
edited by
Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen
Oxford & Philadelphia
Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
OXBOW BOOKS
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and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
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© Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2017
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-688-2
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-689-9 (epub)
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Front cover: Sassanid plate, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Accession Number 57.709 (design by Ali
Roustaeeyanfard).
Back cover: Roman sarcophagus (detail): The retinue of marine Venus. 220/230 CE. Paris, Louvre Ma
396 (after Rumpf 1939, Pl. 25 no. 72).
Contents
Preface ....................................................................................................................................vii
Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen
List of contributors .............................................................................................................viii
1. Introduction: Why do we need archaeologies of gender and violence
and why now? ....................................................................................................................1
Bo Jensen and Uroš Matić
2. Revisiting the myth of matriarchy, rethinking determinism,
seeing anew ......................................................................................................................24
Stephanie Koerner
3. The honoured and the sacrifi ced? Gender and violence at a sanctuary
of the late 3rd millennium BC in Central Germany ...................................................45
André Spatzier, with anthropological analyses by Marcus Stecher and Kurt W. Alt
4. The role of violence in the construction of prehistoric masculinities ..................77
Lisbeth Skogstrand
5. “Her striking but cold beauty”: Gender and violence in depictions
of Queen Nefertiti smiting the enemies ....................................................................103
Uroš Matić
6. Les demoiselles d’Entremont: Violence, gender and headhunting
in Iron Age Europe.........................................................................................................122
Ian Armit
7. Violence against women in Graeco-Roman Egypt: the contribution
of Demotic documents ..................................................................................................133
Christine Hue-Arcé
8. Death and the maiden: late antique images of nubile females as agents
and victims of lethal violence .....................................................................................151
Susanne Moraw
vi Contents
9. Heaven for me, hell for the “others”: An agenda on sex and body
from Sassanid Persia ...................................................................................................179
Maryam Dezhamkhooy and Leila Papoli Yazdi
10. Skull-cups and snake-pits: Men’s revenge and women’s revenge
in Viking Age Scandinavia .........................................................................................197
Bo Jensen
11. The weapons make the man? A re-analysis of early Anglo-Saxon
weapon burial and interpretation ............................................................................223
Laura M. Whitehouse
12. Gender and Structural Violence in Prehistoric Peru .............................................247
Julie Farnum
13. Gender and violence in archaeology: Final commentary .....................................263
Louise Hitchock
Preface
Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen
This volume grew out of the conference session “Gender and violence in the past:
Materialities and corporealities”, chaired by the editors and hosted by the “Archaeology
and Gender in Europe” (AGE) working group at the 2013 meeting of the “European
Association of Archaeologists” (EAA) in Pilsen, Czech Republic (4–8 September 2013).
Some contributions presented in the original session were already earmarked for
publication elsewhere and could not be included here (cf. Matić and Jensen 2013);
other colleagues, who had been unable to contribute in Pilsen, off ered us contributions
to the volume. Thus, the volume developed through several dialogues: between the
organizers and the AGE members; between the presenters and delegates at EAA
conference session; and between the editors and new contributors to the volume.
From the initially planned session, it grew into a volume on archaeologies of gender
and violence encompassing some key issues and providing the reader with diff erent
approaches to the problem using diff erent case studies.
We would like to thank the AGE, the EAA, and especially the many colleagues
who generously helped us with peer-reviews. We would also like to thank everyone
who helped in the editing process, especially Simon Dix for improving the English of
some chapters. Last but not the least we thank Stephanie Koerner, who provided us
with an opening chapter stressing the ethical necessity of dealing with gender and
violence, and Louise Hitchcock who provided us with the fi nal chapter of the volume
and further encouraged the discussion we started with this volume.
List of contributors
Uroš Matić is an archaeologist and Egyptologist with a doctoral degree from the
Institute for Egyptology and Coptic Studies, University of Muenster (Germany) on
dissertation titled “Body and Frames of War in New Kingdom Egypt: Treatments of
Enemies and Prisoners of War”. In 2016 this project received a prize of “Stiftungsfonds
für Postgraduates der Ägyptologie”, Vienna (former Hans Goedicke Stiftung). He
published over 30 articles, among else on gender archaeology, violence in New
Kingdom Egypt, Aegean-Egyptian interrelations in the New Kingdom and the site of
Tell el-Dabca. Since 2009 he is a member and since 2016 co-chair of the Archaeology and
Gender in Europe (AGE) working party of the European Association of Archaeologists
(EAA). He has worked on excavations in Serbia, Hungary and Bulgaria since 2006 and
from 2012 has been a regular member of the archaeological missions in Tell el-Dabca
and Aswan (Egypt).
[email protected]
Bo Jensen is an archaeologist (PhD) educated in Copenhagen and working on
rescue excavations in the Danish commercial sector for a variety of employers. His
publications include the monograph Viking Age amulets in Scandinavia and Western
Europe (BAR International 2010) and a number of shorter articles, most recently on
the archaeology of ritualised killing, as human sacrifi ce and execution. His research
focuses on Viking Age Scandinavia; on issues of symbolism, identity and meaning,
and on how these phenomena interact with economy and the exercise of power; and
on source-critical issues concerning how representative archaeological archives are
and how far our ability to understand the past is structured and limited by past and
present data-collection strategies. His work seeks to utilise the entire archive of
archaeological knowledge, including stray fi nds and very early excavations, rather
than to rely exclusively on a few exceptional cases of perfect preservation and perfect
excavation.
[email protected]
Stephanie Koerner is a lecturer in Liverpool University’s School of Architecture,
and works as a self-employed independent scholar on projects and educational
programmes in the arts, which are anchored to local, national and international
educational and scholarly institutions. Many of Koerner’s current publication projects
grew through research and teaching since 2000 in the University of Manchester’s
School of Art, Languages and Cultures, in the subject areas of archaeology, art history
and visual studies, and museum and art gallery studies. She is the director of the
List of contributors ix
University of Manchester’s School–University Partnership Initiative-based programme
Mapping Interfaces Cultural Geography and Social Agency in a Complex World. Koerner is co-
director of the Sardinia-based International Summer School in European Prehistory,
and works as invited guest lecturer at several additional universities in the United
Kingdom and Europe throughout the year.
[email protected]
André Spatzier was since 2004 employed at the Institute for Art History and
Archaeologies of Europe at The Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on the
project “Der Aufbruch zu neuen Horizonten: Die Funde von Nebra, Sachsen-Anhalt und
ihre Bedeutung für die Bronzezeit Europas”. Since 1997 he has excavated in Germany,
Austria and Sri Lanka. He published numerous excavation reports and studies of
prehistoric enclosures in Germany. He is currently a post. doc. fellow at Landesamt für
Denkmalpfl ege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte.
[email protected]
Lisbeth Skogstrand is currently employed by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural
Heritage to develop a national research program for submerged archaeology. She has
previously been a lecturer in prehistoric archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology,
Conservation and History at the University of Oslo and has her PhD on the changes
in masculinities in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Scandinavia from the
Museum of Cultural History at University of Oslo. She has published several articles on
masculinity, gender, and feminist theory in archaeology, and especially studied burials
and rock art with a gender perspective. Her most recent publication is Notions of
Masculinity from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age in Scandinavia (2016).
[email protected]
Ian Armit is a professor of archaeology at the University of Bradford specialising in
the European Iron Age and the archaeology of confl ict and violence. He has edited
and written twelve books, including most recently Cultural Encounters in Iron Age
Europe (Archaeolingua 2016), Celtic Scotland (Birlinn 2016, 3rd edn.) and An Inherited
Place: Broxmouth Hillfort and the South-East Scottish Iron Age (Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland, 2013) and Headhunting and the Body in Iron Age Europe (Cambridge University
Press 2012). He has also published more than eighty academic articles and has been
an invited speaker in more than twenty-fi ve countries. He has conducted fi eldwork on
sites and landscapes in the UK, Ireland, France and Sicily, and is currently leading a
HERA/European Commission-funded international collaborative project, Encounters and
Transformations in Iron Age Europe (ENTRANS) with colleagues in Slovenia and Croatia.
[email protected]
Christine Hue-Arcé obtained her PhD in Egyptology from the Université de
Strasbourg in September 2015 after a degree in history at the Université d’Orléans