Gender Roles - Female Warriors/Defenders

Over the past few years, more and more evidence continues to pile in showing both the existence (in fact commonality) of female hunters in prehistoric society, but also the bias which exists in archaeology and anthropology against acknowledging the role female hunters have played.

Here is a lovely paper which discusses the commonality of female hunters in prehistoric Americas.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/6/45/eabd0310.full.pdf

I’m also reading an extensive set of articles from ICAANE Vienna conference in 2016 on Human iconography and symbolic mean in near eastern prehistory, which reinforce these more contemporary views. It’s work it, but not cheap.
https://www.orea.oeaw.ac.at/publikationen/details?tx_news_pi1[news]=13488&cHash=01a59682cd757944a5c55f4e7f3c3a80

The notion that men hunted and women raised the children is rooted both in misogyny and a fundamental misunderstanding of how hunter gatherer societies work.

1 Like