ABSTRACT
For some time, archaeologists have been concerned with the ways in which subsistence and production activities were allocated in past societies according to sex. Universal tendencies have been sought in the ethnographic record to attribute specific tasks to male and female (e.g. Binford 1978), and in archaeological contexts material correlates for such tasks have been given gendered interpretations (e.g. Flannery and Winter 1976). The ‘materialist’ basis of archaeology has promoted an interest in productive roles that may have over-simplified the relation between gender and the sexual division of labour. Indeed, attempts to make gender more visible in the archaeological record have proceeded on the assumption that an exclusive sexual division of labour was present (Conkey and Spector 1984). A conflation of sex and gender, labour and production has resulted, with the common assumption that ‘the function of gender is to organise labor’ (Claassen 1992: 3). Archaeological approaches have been influenced by debates in anthropology, especially the concern with kinship, and the linking of productive roles with a gendered hierarchy that consistently devalues the female. Such issues have dominated gender archaeology particularly in North America (e.g. Gero and Conkey 1991), with its more anthropological and processual roots, in contrast to the greater concern with gender identity and its cultural construction within European archaeology (e.g. Moore and Scott 1997).
