Warriors and Weavers

The way we represent gender in museum displays says much about the way we view gender in our own societies. Yet despite this (or perhaps because of it), gender has not been a contested area for museums in the same way as have race and ethnicity; indeed, feminist critiques of museum displays are still relatively rare (Kavanagh 1994: 370; Porter 1996: 106; Sørensen 1999: 138). ¹ Furthermore, where exhibitions in Britain have specifically focussed on women (eg, Kavanagh 2000), these have tended to concern social history—that is, they have dealt with the daily life of the past two hundred years or so. The focus is on the familiar past, the lives of our grandparents and their parents, in times of rapid change when women’s roles were being redefined. This trend has been facilitated by oral histories which help to build a fuller and richer picture of women’s lives (Kavanagh 1994: 372–73). Gender issues, however, are rarely addressed in relation to archaeological displays (but see Chabot 1988 for a discussion of gender in the Jorvik displays). There are two main reasons for this. First, gender issues are still, to a large extent, a marginal area within the discipline of archaeology itself, despite an increasing literature on gender in archaeology. Second, the remote past is somehow seen as politically ‘safe’, as disconnected from the concerns of today. Yet at the same time, the remote past legitimates the present through appeals to ‘origins’ and the ‘natural order’. Archaeological displays are therefore deeply implicated in the construction of social identity.