Synopses & Reviews
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 Livesexplores 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.
Synopsis
A compelling examination of gender, sexuality, and trhe family in ancient societies.
What was it like to be a woman in prehistoric times? Did the sexual identities and gender roles found in modern society exist hundreds of thousands of years ago? Were age and other social distinctions as important then as now? And how can we ever hope to know, when little evidence survives except for fragments of bone, pottery, and jewelry?
Rosemary Joyce draws on a wealth of recent studies that reveal the history of sexual identities to be a diverse and compelling one, offering profound challenges to modern stereotypes and assumptions. Maya Queens and Old European matriarchs, African-American midwives and Central Asian Amazons: through these and other examples, Dr. Joyce demonstrates that the distinction between men and women was by no means the only way in which ancient people defined themselves, nor even the most important one. She also suggests that same-sex desire, far from being regarded as unnatural, could occupy an important and accepted place in some cultures. 35 illustrations.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
A compelling examination of gender, sexuality, and the family in ancient societies.What was it like to be a woman in prehistoric times? Did the sexual identities and gender roles found in modern society exist hundreds of thousands of years ago? Were age and other social distinctions as important then as now? And how can we ever hope to know, when little evidence survives except for fragments of bone, pottery, and jewelry?
Rosemary Joyce draws on a wealth of recent studies that reveal the history of sexual identities to be a diverse and compelling one, offering profound challenges to modern stereotypes and assumptions. 35 illustrations.
Synopsis
There has never been a single way that social life has heen organized by sex.
About the Author
Rosemary A. Joyceis Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former museum director and curator at Harvard University and UC Berkeley. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Honduras since 1977 and her books include Gender and Power in Prehispanic America, The Languages of Archaeology, Embodied Lives, and Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives.