ABSTRACT
Science has traditionally been billed as our foremost producer of knowledge. It has rarely been billed, as well, as an important producer of ignorance. Yet, the production of ignorance by science may well be inevitable, at least as inevitable as the production of knowledge. Ignorance as well as knowledge is produced by science in many other ways, such as by framing research problems to foreground certain issues rather than others or by choosing certain technologies rather than others to carry out the research. Although women have been firmly associated by archaeologists with plants, both with gathering them and with cultivating them (after), when archaeologists have turned to the profoundly culture-transforming shift in subsistence practice represented by the invention of agriculture women have disappeared from discussion. For centuries it was claimed that women are intellectually inferior to men, and for centuries the basis for such inferiority was sought in biology.
