Review: \"Lourdes Prados Torreira, ed. La Arqueología Funeraria desde una Perspectiva de Género\"(coordinated by Clara López Ruiz and Javier Parra Camacho), II Jornadas Internacionales de Arqueología y Género en la UAM.

Book Reviews

151

Lourdes Prados Torreira, ed. La Arqueología Funeraria desde una Perspectiva de Género (coordinated by Clara López Ruiz and Javier Parra Camacho), II Jornadas Internacionales de Arqueología y Género en la UAM (Colección de Estudios 145. Madrid: Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2012, 417pp., 1 plate, 76 figs., 2 tables, pbk, ISBN 978-84-8344-218-0) This volume on ‘Funerary Archaeology from a Gender Perspective’ contains the proceedings of the Second International Meeting of Archaeology and Gender which took place at the Autonomous University of Madrid between 21 and 23 April 2010 and whose main theme was the archaeology of death from a gender perspective. The volume has two main aims. On the one hand, it seeks to continue the dissemination of gender archaeology among researchers and students, following in the footsteps of the first meeting, which took place in 2006 (Prados Torreira & López Ruiz, 2008). On the other hand, it aims to offer a space for research on gender archaeology, open not only to those who have been working for years from a gender perspective, but also to those approaching it for the first time. The book is situated in the context of the growing interest that gender studies have experienced since the 1990s, both in Spain and in the rest of Europe (e.g. Dommasnes & Montón Subías, 2012). This fact is, of course, linked to the feminist movement, which has succeeded in introducing this new way of perceiving the world in the institutions and centres of knowledge production in general. As in other disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, or economy, women have started to be visible in archaeology. Recovering women’s pasts in history and prehistory is indispensable if we want to achieve a more complete understanding of the origin and development of societies and cultures through time. Two decades after the publication of the first works

regarding this issue (Gero & Conkey, 1991), gender studies are now accepted as an essential element of the academic world as a whole. Although androcentrism is still present (p. 28), the inclusion of specific gender archaeology papers in general volumes (Tarlow & Nilsson Stutz, 2013) furnishes proof that ‘the times they are a-changin’’. From the Chalcolithic through the Bronze and Iron Ages of Spain, including ancient Egypt, France, and Portugal, twenty-two authors (seventeen women and five men) of seventeen papers (fifteen in Spanish and two in English) examine how we can identify gender through the funerary record, as well as more concrete questions such as the gender given by a social group to objects produced in the past (p. 80), or the kind of information regarding gender that we can extract from funerary contexts. The book covers a great diversity of contexts and, therefore, provides the reader with a broad perspective and some useful ideas to interpret diverse archaeological contexts, including funerary, from a gender perspective. In this way, discussions revolve around the examination of inhumations and recurring associations of grave goods and individuals (Blasco Bosqued & Ríos Mendoza, Alarcón García & Sánchez Romero, Rísquez Cuenca & García Luque), iconographic aspects and their relation to gender (Berrocal-Rangel, Izquierdo Peraile, Santos Velasco), the examination of childhood (Grací Castañeda & Javier Parra Camacho), or the critical assessment of specific issues such as the link between

152

grave goods and gender (Quesada Sanz), or the validity of anthropological studies of cremated remains (Prados Torreira). The Iberian Peninsula is better represented than other geographic regions, with fourteen chapters centred on it and only three dealing with case studies located elsewhere (Arnold, Quesada Sanz, Dommasnes). It is important to mention that only a few chapters draw on the study of recent excavated material. Most of them revise already known case studies, showing that there is still a lot to do regarding ‘very well’ known sites and cultures from a gender perspective (Belén Deamos, Arnold). Although gender studies or gender archaeology could appear as monolithic perspectives, there are important theoretical differences within them (Cruz Berrocal, 2009). Unfortunately, these are not represented in this book. This is, from my point of view, the first consideration that must be made regarding the book in general terms. The differences between gender archaeology and feminist archaeology are only briefly addressed in the first chapter by Montón Subías, who talks about death and gender in Spanish prehistory. Actually, the whole volume is clearly influenced by so-called ‘gender archaeology’, and it does not include any clear example of the more explicit, ideologically speaking, ‘feminist’ perspective, usually linked with Marxism. The reader could have the impression, after finishing the book, that what is shown in the volume is all that actually can be done regarding women and archaeology. Another issue that must be borne in mind concerning the volume as a whole is that, despite the fact that Montón Subías clearly mentions that gender archaeology is not equivalent to an archaeology of women (p. 29), almost every subsequent chapter focuses on women. Some chapters not only centre on women, but do not even mention men (Alarcón García &

European Journal of Archaeology 18 (1) 2015

Sánchez Romero, López Grande, Izquierdo Peraile). There are some exceptions (p. 270), but these are not really developed, apart from the chapter by Santos Velasco, where an opposite perspective is presented. This unilateral use of gender concepts appears inappropriate to me, for gender is a relational category (Benhabib, 1992: 52, quoted in Lagarde, 1996). It is extremely complicated to analyse women’s position in an isolated way, without knowing men’s roles and comparing them with each other. In fact, the interest in investigating the position that women held in the past, in reclaiming a space for them in history, is the consequence of understanding the inequality between men and women in the present and the disagreement with the current status quo—questions that were initially raised by feminism. But, paradoxically, gender studies are not always feminist. Indeed, they have introduced a change in the object of study, that is, ‘women as women’ (Moncó, 2011: 34), but they reproduce, at times, traditional perspectives and are not necessarily interested in women as an oppressed group. In this sense, the separation of gender studies from feminism is costly (Lagarde, 1996: 21), for they risk becoming just a subsidiary section of research and not a complete critical approach. It is worth noting that, although not explicitly mentioned in all the papers, the authors are apparently conscious of having studied archaeological materials that are not representative of the whole population, and which do not even represent all women. In fact, in most of the cases, the women they refer to belonged to the elite (p. 10 or p. 312). In fact, some chapters focus on exceptional graves such as the burial of Casa del Carpio (Pereira Sieso) or the burial of the so-called Vix ‘princess’ (Arnold). To many authors, recovering women’s pasts means, unfortunately, recovering selected women’s past.

Book Reviews

Nevertheless, and returning to my first issue, the fact that the general approach is gender archaeology does not mean that all seventeen papers are alike and depart from the same kind of assumptions. Regrettably, despite this variability, there is a lack of contrast between different theoretical perspectives in the contributions of this book, a component that, in my view, would have been necessary to stimulate further intellectual debate. Yet, this problem is not limited to this book; for within Spanish archaeology, there are other examples in relation to gender or feminist archaeology in particular (RAMPAS, 2011), just as in archaeology in general. In spite of the previous remarks, the coordinators and editor have assembled an interesting volume on death and gender archaeology in the Spanish language—a relevant fact if we take into account that most of the bibliography on these themes is published in the English language (Arnold & Wicker, 2001). The volume brings together an important number of researchers who analyse different cultural contexts and chronological periods. There are two aspects shared by almost every author, with the exception of Dommasnes (p. 369). On the one hand, they embrace the possibility of studying social groups and the gender identity/roles of past people from funerary materials, bearing in mind that social life is materialized through ritual (p. 126), because ‘the dead do not bury themselves’ (p. 221). On the other hand, they highlight the necessity of carrying out osteological analyses (p. 246, p. 266, or p. 324, for example) to determine the sex of individuals. Despite this, weapons constituting funerary assemblages are pervasively interpreted as indicative of ‘warrior burials’, even in the cases in which they are associated with an individual that has been sexed as a woman (p. 355) through osteological analysis (Quesada Sanz).

153

In my opinion, the weakest aspect of the volume, apart from the aforementioned lack of contrast between theoretical approaches, are the big qualitative differences between papers. While some of them present very well-documented and thought-provoking studies (Quesada Sanz), others are insufficiently developed (Perea). In the latter case, the author analyses just one variable (in this specific instance, the link between men and gold, and between women and silver) and, in my opinion, does not provide any new results—as the author even admits on one occasion (p. 92). Probably, this heterogeneity is the result of the inclusion of researchers with limited or no previous experience in gender studies. This is, nonetheless, a desirable step towards the development and dissemination of gender concerns within archaeology. Altogether, in spite of these critical comments, this book provides a good introductory overview of the gender archaeology that is currently being developed in and around Spain. Although gender archaeology has already come a long way, there is still a lot to learn, and the volume is a valuable stepping stone in this direction.

REFERENCES Arnold, B. & Wicker, N.L. eds. 2001. Gender and the Archaeology of Death. Walnut Creek: AltaMira. Cruz Berrocal, M. 2009. Feminismo, teoría y práctica de una arqueología científica. Trabajos de Prehistoria, 66(2):25‒43. Dommasnes, L.H. & Montón-Subías, S. 2012. European Gender Archaeologies in Historical Perspective. European Journal of Archaeology, 15(3):367‒91. Gero, J.M. & Conkey, M.W. eds. 1991. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Oxford: Blackwell. Lagarde, M. 1996. Género y feminismo. Desarrollo humano y democracia. Madrid: Editorial Horas y Horas.

154

Moncó, B. 2011. Antropología del Género. Madrid: Síntesis. Prados Torreira, L. & Ruiz López, C. eds. 2008. Arqueología del género: 1er encuentro internacional en la UAM. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. RAMPAS. 2011. Revista Atlántica-Mediterránea de Prehistoria y Arqueología Social, 13. Tarlow, S. & Nilsson Stutz, L. eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of

European Journal of Archaeology 18 (1) 2015

Death and Burial. University Press.

Oxford:

Oxford

MARTA CINTAS PEÑA University of Seville, Spain DOI 10.1179/146195714X13820028180766

Felix Riede and Miikka Tallavaara, eds. Lateglacial and Postglacial Pioneers in Northern Europe (BAR International Series 2599. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014, 206pp., pbk, ISBN 978-1-4073-1231-6) This publication follows on from the session ‘Lateglacial and postglacial pioneer human re-colonisation of northern Europe’, held at the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Oslo (Norway) in 2011. In the call for papers, the following research questions were addressed: (1) Why were some regions occupied earlier and at higher population densities than others? (2) How did these hunter-gatherers deal with and enculturate landscapes wholly devoid from people? (3) How did they face the challenges of making a living without neighbours, both socially and economically? Twelve oral presentations and eight posters were presented at the meeting—thirteen of them are included in this peer-reviewed publication. I have to admit that the volume editors’ introductory chapter brought on a bad start for this reviewer. Already on page 4 there is a misspelling of the name of one of the authors (and also the name of one of the editors on the book cover). On page 5, we are introduced to the unnecessary cryptic expression ‘non-pedestrian means of transport’. Could this simply mean boats? Or are sledges included, given that they are not pulled by pedestrians? Why leave the readers alone with expressions so

wide that they are devoid of meaning? The same page ends with an eighty-nine-word long sentence that I needed to read twice, and still do not quite understand. And in the midst of this: a reference to my own paper published in 2009, where I am (1) ascribed meaning that I do not recognize, and (2) (along with Anders Fischer) accused of ‘rob[bing] these prehistoric huntergatherers of their own history’ and ‘turn [ing] them into little more than pale reflections of the more detailed ethnographic record’ (p. 5). I can only speak for myself, but I would not even dream of robbing these people of anything, and certainly not turn them into pale reflections. And I have no reason to believe that Anders Fischer would do otherwise. At best this is sloppy, as the cited reason for the bold accusations is wrong. My reason for lingering on this (to me) annoying detail is that it represents a common, but dubious, practice in academic discourse. Bold characterizations legitimized by miscitation counteract what all of us strive to achieve: constructive debate across regions, opinions, and scientific traditions. In general, mis-citations are difficult to detect. When you do, they most often