The integration of gender into archaeology as a “structuring principle fundamental to interpreting past societies” (Gilchrist, 1991:499) is still incredibly new to the field. Archaeologists may have become more attentive to their assumptions regarding gender in the years since Conkey and Spector’s (1984) important treatise, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” but only 18 years ago, Alison Wylie (1991) still had cause to ask, “Why is there no archaeology of gender?” While historical archaeologists had a timely response to her plea with the publication of Gender in Historical Archaeology (Seifert, 1991a), the newness of the consideration of gender made this response varied with regard to what constituted appropriate goals, stemming from differences in the conceptualization of gender and resulting in differences in the methodological approaches to its archaeological study.
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Vermeer, A.C. (2009). Men–Women and Children: Gender and the Structuring of Historical Archaeology. In: Gaimster, D., Majewski, T. (eds) International Handbook of Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72071-5_18
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