ABSTRACT
Archaeologists interested in issues of gender would agree that it is no longer tenable to involve ourselves in gendered discourse simply as a vehicle for the identification and location of women, though it remains necessary to balance the scales in terms of writing histories. To be engaged in gender research is not tantamount to studying women in the past, as if they alone were synonymous with gender or somehow constituted a monolithic and unchanging entity. However, gender still remains peripheral in many minds as a topic of focus, perhaps because earlier archaeological theorising often sought to isolate gender as a single structuring principle, yet divorced it from other social factors. While such a radically political standpoint was entirely warranted at
the outset, it should not be the case that gender is assigned primacy; otherwise the resultant field of speciality emerges as another privileged mode of discourse with its own bounds of exclusivity.1 It is now axiomatic that gender is embedded within a more elaborated, sophisticated social matrix, yet this is rarely operative within archaeological inquiry as opposed to the social sciences.
