Gender, What About That?

         For the last couple of weeks we have been looking at the determination of gender in an archaeological context and this have me wondering how important this determination is in order to understand the culture of the archaeological society we study. Basically gender is "the cultural interpretation of sexual difference that results in the categorization of individuals, artefacts, spaces and bodies" according to the definition given by Gilchrist in 1999. Osteological evidences themselves cannot help with the interpretation of the gender because it is a creation of the society and it varies between society and over time.  

            Even in our days we notice some difference every day according to the gender: e.g. pink is a color reserved for girls. The construction of gender begins really early in life when we are babies and don't even see everything that surrounds us. Therefore the signification of the gender is extremely deep in our conception of life. In saying this, trying to interpret this conception of society from the past can be highly subjective because the signification of gender for us is likely to be a different one than the one of the society in study. If this conception takes a huge place in the culture today it surely had one as well for the older society. Furthermore, in certain actual societies, gender changes according to the life cycle, so it adds an other difficulty to the study of gender.

       Indeed, gender is an important factor in order to understand our evolution and the past communities. By putting our conceptions of gender aside and having a great understanding of the meaning of the position of the body and artifacts which surround the individual in the burial that is how we can understand the gender in an archaeological context.