ABSTRACT
Jan Swammerdam, seventeenth-century naturalist and pioneer of dissection, made a startling discovery-that the ant-hill’s Lord, the beehive’s King are in fact females. Sadly, he did not receive the recognition that posterity accorded to Galileo (Byatt 1990). The Sun does not revolve around the Earth, nor does the ant-hill or beehive revolve around the male of the species. In the words of A.S.Byatt’s fictional poet, Randolph Henry Ash, the ‘commonwealths’ of these creatures were not as ‘man’ had supposed. Yet Swammerdam remains an obscure historical figure. Why? Perhaps because questions of sex and gender have had a limited impact on science until the last 10-15 years (Conkey and Gero 1991, Diamond 1991), and then only marginally. Indeed, as the editors of Engendering Archaeology (Conkey and Gero 1991) suggest, gender is still regarded as something of an optional extra.
