Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology

There has never been a single way that social life has been organized by sex.

The ancient Greeks saw men and women as expressing varying degrees of a single sexual potential; many Native American societies considered sexual identity as something that changed and developed during a lifetime, and recognized three or four categories of sexual identity.

Ranging from the earliest European hunters who created the first human images known to us almost 30,000 years ago to the lives of men and women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who seldom appear in conventional histories, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives explores how men and women have represented sexual differences, and lived lives shaped in part by those differences.

Professor Joyce shows not only how archaeologists learn about the lives of men and women in the past, but also why the stories they can tell are important to hear today. She challenges us to reconsider how we think about sex and its implications for each person. Showing the critical role of the material world in forming our experiences of and concepts about sex, this book connects archaeology firmly to contemporary studies of material culture and identity. 35 black-and-white illustrations