A world of women

History tells us that complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination. Not all hierarchies are morally identical, some being more extreme than others. Most people are taught that their social hierarchy is natural and just while those of other societies are based on false or ridiculous criteria.

In the West we are taught to scoff at racial, religious or ethnic discrimination and yet the rich live in affluent areas, get better health care and go to the better schools simply because they were born into rich families whilst the poor tend to have higher incarceration rates and less pay simply because they were born into poorer families.

Hierarchies in History

The earliest legal system was are aware of in detail is that of Hammurabi who established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. In 1776, the Americans established an order of whites, blacks and native Americans. Women were not included at all. Hindus adhere to a rigid caste system.

Their god, Purusa created the Sun from his eye, the Moon from his brain, the Brahmins (priests) from his mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from his arms, Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from his thighs and the Shudras (servants) from his legs. The ancient Chinese believed Nu Wa created aristocrats from the yellow soil and commoners from brown mud.

Hierarchies serve an important function; they enable complete strangers to know how to treat each other without wasting time and energy getting to know each other. Notwithstanding innate abilities, the economic game is rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. The one system which has lasted through the ages is the dominance of men.

There have been a few alpha women – Egypt (Cleopatra), China (Wu Zetian), Britain (Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II) and Russia (Catherine the Great) but usually it has been men who have taken leadership roles. This is probably because men are generally more aggressive and assertive for power – leadership roles in government, business and war.

This has forced women to accept more submissive roles even though they have shown that as scientists, innovators, in bravery and manufacture they are at least on an equal footing with men. Recently, women have shown that at least some are able to out-compete men in the sporting arena.

Archaeological material has frequently been used to reinforce these ideas about gender – and it’s not far from this to “like a girl”. But considering archaeological evidence from another angle, it becomes apparent that our expectations of gender roles can be problematic. In ancient terms, our gender divides are far from universal.

It is not the experience everywhere that gender falls neatly into binary categories of male or female; that is, into being either male or female, with nothing in between. In fact, the evidence suggests that much of what we perceive as core components of our identity were not significant categorising factors in the past. Rather, we see ambiguities in identities repeatedly represented in the material culture from archaeological sites. Reference also the “brotherboys and sistergirls” of the islands to our north and our slow uptake of the rainbow flag.

Ambiguous Archaeology

It’s often the case that the material is difficult to define or pigeon hole. Take, for instance, the stone monoliths from the site of Göbekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey. These shrine areas containing huge monoliths were constructed around 6,000 years or more before Stonehenge. The great pillar structures have traditionally been interpreted as representing male, phallic imagery.

However, this is by no means the case. As well as being impressive in their scale, many have been carved with additional features such as arms, hands and loincloths or belts. They are clearly ambiguous in their nature, neither human nor stone. We know the sculptors clearly had the skills to create naturalistic carvings, but they deliberately chose to make these different, crossing between one type of being and another. This says less about gender, and more about the fluid conception these ancestors had about the universe.

Similar issues are frequently encountered. In clay figurines, for example. Clear gender categories are found in some material, but there are others which are difficult to define. From the Neolithic of the Middle East, the vast majority of human figurines don’t portray either male or female features.

Many figurines actually combine male and female characteristics into single figurines, or appear either male or female when viewed from different angles.This is something which is now being recognised by archaeologists – our understanding is blinkered by our own perspectives of gender categorisation, and this will have determined our analysis to some extent.

Because of this, male imagery is traditionally thought to indicate themes of dominance and females are ascribed to domestic spheres. But the archaeology of the Late Neolithic of the Middle East – the roots of our own civilisation – doesn’t suggest much evidence for very differential labour roles or treatment. As has been demonstrated by a team of experts at Çatalhöyük, women and men spent comparable periods of time within the house, ate the same diets, engaged in comparable tasks (leaving skeletal markers on bones) and were buried in the same ways.

And at a site called Domuztepe, a feature called the Death Pit was found which contained the remains of around 40 people who had been specially treated after death and the focus of funerary feasts. No observable difference in the treatment of males or females was discernible. And this pattern is repeated in various mortuary assemblages, such as in the phenomena of plastering skulls dating to a couple of millennia earlier. This was a practice previously thought to be unique to males, but it’s now recognised that comparable numbers of men and women were treated this way.

So there are numerous examples of apparent gender equity, as well as examples of more ambiguous third gender representation. Most skeletal collections contain a proportion which are not easy to categorise as male or female. This raises issues for the historical basis of our understandings of gender, gender roles and identities.

We need to challenge what it is to be “like a girl”, where these ideas came from and how they have proliferated. If our gender categories and the identities they promote are problematic, then biases and inequality based on these differences become even more flawed. We need to talk about all these issues, and particularly interrogate the well worn narratives that are used to support these ideas. Archaeology is no bad place to start.

Ancient Matriarchies

One of the world’s oldest matriarchal societies is in China in the foothills of the Himalayas. women are equal, and perhaps superior to men. Mothers and grandmothers head households, women conduct business, and property passes down the female line. Nuclear families do not exist. Instead, women take lovers and have children, but they live separately from their partners. A man’s place is in his grandmother’s house, raising his sister’s children.

In west Sumatra, among the Minangkabau, for example, the world’s largest continuing matrilineal society, with a population of over 5 million, an ancient culture based on customary practice – called “adat” – has repeatedly transformed itself in the wake of conversion to Islam in the 16th century and more than two centuries of European colonial rule. But women’s ownership of land and property continues to secure their power, and customary practice does not allow men to act without them.

Here, in largely agricultural communities, in the lush volcanic highlands of the Indonesian archipelago, ancestry and family name continue to be passed down through the female line, along with house, land, and livestock, although men may now pass business earnings to their sons, following Islamic law.

Husbands move into their wives’ homes on marriage, and all decision-making requires consensus based on principles of mutual responsibility.

In the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, which roughly translates as “Abode of the Clouds”, in reference to the mountainous terrain it occupies between Bhutan and Bangladesh, live the Khasi. Theirs is one of few matrilineal societies where a family’s youngest daughter – not the eldest – inherits her mother’s wealth and property.

All children trace their lineage from their mother’s side of the family. The youngest daughter is known as the “khadhuh” or head of the family. Her house is open to everybody, including any orphaned or unmarried male relatives. Her maternal uncles act as advisors, but do not wield authority over her.

There are many more societies in which matriarchal traditions from the past continue to shape social organisation in the present. These include the Haudenosaunee in North America, the Bribri in Costa Rica, the descendants of the ancient Nairs in Kerala, and a significant number of communities in Africa’s “matrilineal belt”.

Africa’s matrilineal societies go back more than 5,000 years. They are commonly thought to originate in an ancient diaspora of Bantu-speaking peoples from an area around modern day Nigeria and Cameroon, spreading out across the continent.

Matrilineal traditions of descent and the inheritance of land are still followed in many Bantu-speaking communities, including the Bemba and the Luapula peoples of Zambia, for example. Matrilineal traditions have strengthened these women’s socio-economic status, compared to neighbouring non-matrilineal societies.

And, of course, there are other societies that do not fall into any of these simple binaries. Australia’s Aboriginal people, for example, have a variety of different gender arrangements, including traditions in which men govern men, and women govern women. Aboriginal communities run by women tend to be happier, safer and alcohol free.

Similarly, in North America, missionaries who encountered the Haudenosaunee, were surprised by the obstinacy of their children who persistently swapped English pronouns to reflect the Haudenosaunee belief that women were the more important gender. They promptly set themselves to work to “correct” the children’s “errors”.

A fluid future

19th century intellectuals defined matriarchy as a “corrupt” phase of human development that later gave way to a “rational” male dominated society, either cataclysmically or by a process of evolution. Many – including Karl Marx – decided women’s inferior social status was due women’s intrinsic weakness, not the material conditions in which they found themselves.

Unlike Marx, Friedrich Engels gave the decline of matriarchies a material and historical dimension, arguing it was the creation of private property in archaic societies that had ushered in the “world historical defeat of the female sex”.

These sweeping accounts of human civilisation were based on gender stereotypes, which frequently characterised women as “too weak” and men as “too strong”. Modern western society has come a long way in liberating both sexes from these stereotypes, and the future of gender status and relations may prove every bit as fluid as the past.