ABSTRACT
Over the last decade and a half gender studies in archaeology have moved us far beyond simple discussions of male and female identities based on fixed assumptions regarding sex and gender identities. Gender is now understood as the result of diverse social processes, continually being negotiated and renegotiated, culturally specific but mutable, changing throughout the life-cycle and connected to biological sex to different degrees in different societies (e.g. Moore and Scott 1997; Moore 1988: 7, 25; Nordbladn and Yates 1990: 224-225; Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1; Sorenson 1992: 32). But if one were interested in beginning a search into the ways in which women were represented in the burial record by examining skeletons biologically determined as female, what would one encounter? While this chapter can in no way address all the questions posed by the evidence, it can at least explore briefly the pitfalls and potential of such a search.
