ABSTRACT
African archaeology has been slow in coming to the topic of gender. This does not mean that there has not been much said and implied about gender in the writings of Africanist archaeologists. On the contrary, where gender is not explicitly addressed may be where it is most profoundly embedded in scholarly perspective and most radically reliant on assumptions and essentialisms. This seems to be the case in the scholarship on Great Zimbabwe. While very little is said about the nature of the gender roles and ideologies that may have existed on the Zimbabwe plateau, assumptions about the gendered division of labor and male primacy in political life have led to a body of scholarship which places the rise of the state firmly in the male domain. Women are at best considered pawns in the social and political maneuvering of men, signifiers of male power. This essentializing of gender roles and ideologies is particularly entrenched because it is entwined with another strand of essentializing, that which regards Africans and African cultures as timeless and unchanging, without history, incapable of innovation. The women who lived and worked at Great Zimbabwe are thus doubly essentialized, as examples of women’s timeless, economically marginal roles and as the bearers of primal African cultural systems. These assumptions are utilized in a sleight of hand in which the processes of state formation are assumed to have been the work of men alone, and the profound social changes accompanying these processes are nonetheless assumed to have had no effect on gender roles.
