ABSTRACT
Gender archaeology has by now become a relatively well-established research topic within archaeology. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of edited volumes, a rapidly expanding number of papers and even a few journals and newsletters dedicated to this subject. It is, therefore, very surprising that in this literature historiographic analysis of women archaeologists has played only a minor part. Likewise they are hardly acknowledged in the ‘folk’ histories of the discipline (Lucy and Hill 1994: 2). The need to understand the disciplinary integration of women, to appreciate the varying socio-political contexts of their work, to reveal the unique tension between their roles as women and their academic lives, has become obvious and is strongly felt in many areas of the discipline. The insights yielded by such analysis will have significance at many levels and will be of paramount importance for the intellectual history of archaeology. In particular, they will force a much needed revision of the disciplinary history by revealing its mechanisms of selecting and forgetting, and will play an important role in the analysis of archaeology’s knowledge claims.
