Essay on the main contributions of feminism to archaeological theory.
Introduction
In its stages of conception, archaeology was considered to be merely a sub-discipline of both history and anthropology, and, in many cases, was restricted as a rich man’s hobby. Developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the initial episode in the history of theoretical archaeology is usually referred to as ‘culture history’, a means by which early archaeologists established rudimentary predictive models patterning human behaviour within designated temporal and spatial contexts via the interpretation of artefactual evidence.
Though universally popular during the first half of the twentieth century, culture history was rebelled against during the 1960s. Perceived as restrictive due to its reliance on categorisation of artefacts the paradigms of culture history were abandoned in favour of the newly developed school of thought known as ‘New Archaeology’. In an attempt to incorporate a level of scientific reasoning to anthropological archaeology, these primarily American archaeologists, chiefly Lewis Binford and his associates, moved away from simple descriptions of the past in favour of questioning why cultures developed and adopting hypothesis evaluations (Renfrew and Bahn, 1996). The scientific basis and reliance of New Archaeology instigated the widespread development of processual archaeology.
Two decades later, processualism’s focus on science and impartiality were increasingly questioned. Led by Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, a new approach to theoretical archaeology emerged, which emphasised the necessity of relativism in archaeological investigation (Shanks and Tilley, 1992). This methodology, known as post-processualism, however, has been criticised by proponents of processualism and New Archaeology for abandoning scientific competency and rigour, and the debate over the most appropriate theoretical approach to any archaeological analysis is still much in evidence.
Theoretical archaeology now relies on a wide range of influences. During the 1970s and 80s, gender-related and feminist archaeology became popular among those archaeologists seeking a post-processual approach to cultural…
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Tags: archaeological theory, cave art, female roles, feminism, feminist, investigation
