 to think about if and how our views on things have or have not changed over the past decades. I think the two of us really got interested in detail enough so that we actually have done some research and writing on it in the late 1980s when her language of the goddess came out and people started calling us up newspapers asking us our opinions and we suddenly realized that we actually should articulate an opinion right and then we realized just how interesting it was as part of our wider philosophies about how to teach archaeology, how to inferences work and at what point points which is almost all the way along the way do people have to dip into theoretical assumptions about things and in particular just even calling something a female figurine or a statuette much less a goddess is in of itself an interpretation and how you name artifacts and then how you make these moves and how you try to deal with what is inherent in archaeological data and that is its ambiguity that it's always ambiguous and what everybody wants is a unambiguous story and I think Ruth and I are both very committed to having keeping that ambiguity in there and so with much of Maria's work which moved more and more so especially throughout the 1980s and into the 90s and even earlier she moved from somewhat ambiguous stories to less and less ambiguous stories where there was more closure more definition about this is the way it was in the past. We were both getting developing ideas of the feminist practice of archaeology at that time and it was within this context that our interest in ambiguity the ambiguity of archaeological data and the sort of celebration of the ambiguity rather than a turning away or a mystification of the ambiguities this is at this time this developed and there were many other aspects. Is Maria's work a feminist enterprise or is it not and it was at this point that we were showing that in fact there are many aspects of her work which are not feminist even though it would seem to appeal to feminists because of its focus on women and the focus on gender and the importance of the respect and empowerment of women. We still considered it not a work not a work of feminist archaeology. I think it's the crux of the problem because it's because we have different aims in doing our archaeology from Maria's that we have a different agenda different different viewpoint different standpoint on what is what is our knowledge on the basis of archaeological data. I think that that's where a lot of our differences come and actually we had a seminar conference a little while back on the feminist practice of archaeology and we were all asked to give our ideas of what what a feminist practice of archaeology is and each one of us came up with rather different things but there were some there were some commonalities I think weren't there. I think as we know with even what feminism is there's a lot of things and it's also changing a lot as we go on as we learn more and the feminist work in the Academy of the 1990s is very different from what was going on in the 1970s and things like that but I think what another point that that Ruth mentioned that would differ among feminist archaeologists is of course who their audiences are and by the time Maria got to be writing things like the language of the goddess in a way she was she had a different audience than the audience that Ruth and I mostly have and one of her most supportive audiences was outside the Academy and these people influenced her and sort of helped her and guided her in some ways in terms of what her response was to be and you can you can chart I think this dynamic you know I haven't sat down and done it but I think you probably could see how her ideas change in relationship and response to an audience. I think all feminists are concerned with the production of knowledge who produces it who gets to be able to decide what is knowledge worth knowing what the questions are that are worth asking and I think all feminists agree that questions about issues of gender and identity and maleness and femaleness are high on the list yet at the same time what much feminist archaeology has moved towards is an increasingly stronger critique of an authoritarian view that individuals we are authorities on something we're very uncomfortable with feeling like we're authorities we feel we have certain things that we can bring to the table for discussion but we also feel that anybody who tells us that they know that it's this is what happened in the past has got to be questioned because we're not going to know this is what happened in the past if I can just button there that's what's interesting with Maria that in a way she did challenge authority she did challenge the established authoritative picture or story of what happened in prehistory by writing about old Europe a time when women were powerful or were respected which was very different from the story that had been written before on the other hand she wrote that story in an authoritative fashion we feel that she wrote it this is the story this is the alternative this is it this is and I am an archaeological authority and so that you have to believe me because I know more about this this data I have thought about it more I'm more experienced than anyone else so I'm now going to show you how those words of mine were taken completely out of focus and actually changed the meaning of them Maria presented her interpretations at many international conferences but was often harshly criticized by her colleagues who disputed her conclusions and did not understand her methods anybody who tells us that they know that it's this is what happened in the past has got to be questioned because we're not going to know this is what happened in the past unless if I can just button there that's what's interesting with Maria that in a way she did challenge authority she did challenge the established authoritative picture or story of what happened in prehistory by writing about old Europe on the other hand she wrote that story in an authoritative fashion we feel she felt she had it so I should have used the word authoritarian rather than authoritative but you can see how that was how that was changed the meaning was changed because it didn't have the rest of my sentence there so now we'll come back to continue this it's true we do have to look at people's contexts and what gets rewarded in the in the world the institutional reward systems that reward people who have definitive theories and they get the publicity journalists call up and they ask us a question about what might have happened in the past and we say well you know it's very complicated well they don't want to hear that they want to hear an answer so there's a lot of pressure on everybody and certainly Maria and of course again she certainly is of a somewhat different generation than both Ruth and I and as we oftentimes say one generation solution is the next generation's problem and so we are more able now to recognize and again in an increasingly multicultural world that there are these multiple perspectives multiple sets of experiences going in and that the kinds of accounts that try to present a more homogenized and univocal or one sort of perspective kind of view are harder to sustain and make less sense to us in the in the worlds that we operate so this need to be able to say something certain did they believe in the goddess were their goddess worshipers were women respected is to not not to be able to say anything certain in that realm is disappointing and if we say you know that's often where it kind of rebounds for us there's a reaction against what we say because we can't say anything for certain so now i'm going to show you another excerpt from the movie itself the finished version where you can see that those questions that i asked are left hanging without without their their other part of the sentence which is talking about certainty where are they found what are they found with did they believe in the goddess were their goddess worshipers were women respected i first heard that i didn't even realize that was my voice asking those questions because it was so out of context but um so that in that kind of with that dreamy music behind it and leaving the questions hanging anyway so let's continue sorry to be jumping around like this but this is the nature of tool okay well so i think we're ready now to move on to the final film but wait this is not going to help you do that and archaeological data if you take it creatively can actually lead you into many interesting ideas it can be more liberating yes if you look at it as a way to liberate the way in which you think about the past as well as the present and especially about the relationship between the present and the past you know most people often think that there's the past and there's the present but what we're really all talking about is the relationship between the past and the present and if we think about alternatives as being ways and what we would what we emphasize in our classes with our students is they they can't just say any old thing when they're talking about archaeology they have to ground it somehow there are what philosophers in science call evidential constraints play solid fired right no head right on the floor down to the garbage right so that there that can be liberated with alternatives and then you can decide what you want what you want to use what can be done with and so forth when somebody makes an assertive sort of statement instead of saying oh yeah that's the way it was say no wait a minute how do they know that how did they come to that and how people even select images and photographs and things like that which are never neutral and that if there's any field that needs imagination it's archaeology you really need to be able to imagine other ways of existing and being and how material culture can mean in different ways and that you've got to have a good imagination to be an archaeologist it's not just a matter of being willing to sit in a muddy trench or something like that it it really is something and of course one of the things that happens while you're excavating is that well unless you go crazy otherwise is your imagination has to just sort of free float while you're there it's great great great great great great great great and you know finding things but yeah it's not free floating no it's just free floating in a way but it's always free floating as you say it's grounded so it's imagination that's grounded literally one more excerpt Meg okay hang on very important this one I think the other really important aspect to this is to place the backlash to Maria in a wider context of backlash which has certainly been going on with feminist approaches and the anxiety it's been generated by a society that realizes that now their workforce is dependent on women and that the government is still trying to control women's bodies women's futures and that for many people the backlash may be as much a result of their own anxieties about themselves their inability to change to be in a changing world and their own insecurities and we see that more widely with a feminist backlash and I think the attempt to pull out a meaningful history for women whether it's truthful or not or how it is truthful is is a wider social issue and a social problem today and so I think we can't just see it in the terms of the history of archaeology but it has to be placed in a wider context of a deeply problematic feminist background where are they found what are they found with there you go are we ready to go now we'll move on to someone who does use visual evidence and so forth really fantastically and this is Sarah's story was her master's project at the Berkeley School of Journalism in 2019 she's received several awards and invitations to festivals and we note in here that there are quite a few Berkeley former students and colleagues here but only some because there are many many more here and elsewhere that have contributed to it but this is this is a great presentation of where somebody comes in not an archaeologist with an anthropology background but not an archaeologist to try to put together a very engaging often using humor and so forth to tell us a little bit more about their story so also Sarah's presence in them in this presentation is doubly relevant because especially thinking about how the footage from our interviews has been manipulated even not just cut but manipulated because Sarah in her current employment by the Washington Post her interest is in forensic video analysis which is the manipulation of video to change its meaning and meaningfulness and she's doing this as part of the Washington Post's fact-checking initiative the team that is doing that when it comes to history the stories were told fit a simple narrative tigri looks with admiration at Angkor have a nice day okay women are the gatherers the girls who went to Big Berry and the homemakers who need protecting the men are the warriors the artists and the hunters who do the protecting but where do these stories come from some start here at archaeological sites this excavation is in israel and it's where i dub as a college student the days started at 4 a.m with breakfast pvngs and a 30-minute drive to site when we got there we grab tools drag ourselves to the squares and start digging we toss buckets it's great pickaxe and sometimes break materials oh shit occasionally we find something unexpected archaeologists working in israel found one of the first known wine sellers the thrill of discovery is one reason i love archaeology some other perks we're meeting my best friends and partner but that last summer on the dig i picked up a camera and found a new thrill i never looked back until i met the archaeologist margaret may conkie is now well documented integrating between neanderthals and modern humans i personally have 306 neanderthal variants which is more than 88 percent of the people that 23andme have tested but that's okay i like having neanderthal i've always been a big fan they would not have made it as long as they did if they weren't great and adapted and doing all the right thing uh i did work and it wasn't my duty to see can i have a picture of you oh sure sure sure sure yeah not with my selling glasses right okay meg inspires a lot of people she got me started on this journalistic excavation where i traveled across the country and over the Atlantic to visit museums experts and even a swedish island once inhabited by vikings to understand how we've simplified men and women and if it's more complicated than what we've been told new york's museum of natural history it's among the most trusted institutions of knowledge in the world major discoveries take center stage here like this australopithesis skeleton otherwise known as lucy the skeleton is believed to be a close relative to humans and around 3.2 million years old the hominid is also famously female within 24 hours of finding the fossil without adequate scientific analysis etc they named it as lucy they named the skeleton after the famous beetle song that played during the celebration the day of the find now it turns out she was quite small other fossils were found that were bigger so immediately became clear the research that we're working on it that males are large and females are small she didn't look like anything we had ever found before she was something very different and because of that she opened up for us and an entire new chapter on human origins but some scientists argue that we may not be able to tell the sex of lucy the skeleton is after all a non-human incomplete fossil anthropologist adrian zillman says for all we know lucy might just as well have been a male as a female all we know for sure is lucy was small so the debate over lucy's sex continues but in the meantime hager worries about the consequences of her long-term representation as a female if you go to the american history museum you will see a diorama where there's a male and there's a female she's representing the female and the male is much bigger but the man has the arm around the female and seems to be guiding her seems to be protecting her and the view of the past has traditionally been that the male is the guardian and the breadwinner and the female moves along with them and what i find most disturbing is it does take it to the general public and say this is the way we are and because this has a long evolutionary history don't even think about changing this is how it is lucy was a trope for passive small females the opposite for males was the strong warrior or hunter a stereotype seen in most places especially sweden so this is the prehistories our exhibition this is the oldest woman in sweden for the moment she's 9 000 years old and you know the interesting thing with this is that she had some hunting tools with her so that led to the conclusion among the archaeologists that this could not be a woman it was a man so if you were a hunter you were a man critical to the development of that idea or ethnographies of gatherer hunter societies there were these old-fashioned ideas about living primitive in the most pejorative ethnocentric way that living primitive people were frozen in earlier stages of human evolution in small bands they still existed as they always had as early man once which was convenient for people studying cultural evolution because then you just have to trot around the world in the present and see ancient examples frozen in time there was a picking and choosing of ethnographic studies that corroborated that the men do the hunting and women don't the ethnographers were primarily men and they would primarily talk to men they assumed that the men would know what was going on with everybody and the men were doing the important stuff anyway they paid very little attention to women and most of the information they got about women came from men interestingly enough in some instances whether something got considered hunting or gathering depending on who was doing it fishing might be considered hunting if men are doing it and it might be considered gathering if women are doing it and so we get this now listen to me closely yes we're hunters men just males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes why were women invisible and men were the main focus well if you want the short answer why were women invisible it's because we live in a patriarchal society archaeology long had a reputation as a very masculine field and even as women began to enter the field women typically tried to become honorary men we had a notion of what a real science is a male scientist who walks into the lab in their little white lab coat and leaves the culture at the door science doesn't work that way science never has worked that way science never can work that way because guess what the human walked into the lab right the human walked into the lab and nobody leaves their culture at the door it's impossible this is really a very strange to figure it out because it's your turn to start off isn't it she works out of sumo wrestler or crouton daughters well as a woman of African and Cherokee descent there is no objectivity in history I can look at the same archive as three other people and all three of us come up with different stories the tapio-maché foundation for the replica of the warrior's grave has been made ready for a long time archaeologists thought they were approaching their research through a gender neutral lens because they didn't see men and women they just saw the the norm which was the men men wrote about men doing things men did not write about women doing things and when women wrote they tended to write about the men doing things they were embedded in the same society the story we tell about early paleolithic hunter-gatherers is the men found awesome stones and they chipped them away and made really sharp knives and then they went running after the mammoths and the bison and all these other big animals and then they slaughtered them and then everyone ate lots of meat and was strong and the women did everything else in southern Ethiopia these barren hills may conceal the earliest evidence of man's existence primarily he was a hunter people are making assumptions about things to help them get to an answer that they either unconsciously want or definitely want or one that's really problematic there was a lot more sharing of activities in hunter-gatherer society gender roles are not as absolute as we want to think when you actually go and see what people do the idea of rigid gender roles in the past started to seem ridiculous Diane Gifford Gonzalez wrote you can hide but you can't run about the imagery of human evolution so showing all of these paintings that accompany articles mostly for the general public about the past and almost without fail there is a woman on her hands and knees scraping a hide in the background and it looks just like a 1950s housewife scrubbing her kitchen floor it's a bit of a vicious circle because we assign gender roles to hunting and gathering people that we are pulling from our own experience of gender roles and calling that natural you know they say a woman's place is in the home and I suppose as long as she's in the home she might as well be in the kitchen and that explains my mom how come you always do the outside cooking well I'll tell you son now women do all right when they have all the modern conveniences but us men are better at this rugged type of outdoor cooking sort of a throwback to caveman days we're using the past to justify the present but we're talking about the past in terms of the present we don't have to use the past to normalize a present that we one don't want don't need and actually don't have the evidence for in the past anyway you know something was happening in the wider cultural setting that starts raising a lot of different kinds of questions and breadth of talent among women all over the place anthropologists a lot of women were part of that movement and they started rethinking their own discipline the primary start was the question where were women in prehistory women had to have been doing more than gathering and tending babies for 500,000 years a million years that just started to seem stupid this was the start of feminist and gender archaeology and meg was one of its founders historians had asked wonderfully a number of years ago is there a usable past for women and i think one of the things that we've tried to do is to make women everywhere realize that they were important in the human past because of their labor so women's labor even today is not valued as it should be we implicitly recognize as women that the pay gap and the wage gap is an injustice that persists through secrecy and it's an injustice that persists to the present day so to think that by adding to the conversation that we don't have to be like this because it's always been this way but rather because people in the past were inventive creative collaborative work together their labor was valued well if it was that way in the past why can't it be that way in the present though meg and her fellow squeaky wheels started to challenge the norm in the 80s these gender assumptions were difficult to shake everyone from hunters to cave painters were men and some people couldn't accept other realities in 1988 randa white decided to feature a woman as a cave painter in a national geographic illustration the importance of all of this for me was that at the time it was estimated that they had 60 million readers every month because as you well know national geographic is in dentist's office and doctor's offices and everywhere uh in america the illustration was one of the first real expressions of gender balance in the past she was surrounded by some men but she was clearly the actor and her female sex was indicated by the fact that they just left the side of her tunic open to show that she had a breast randall didn't expect a call from the national geographic editor the night before publication the line that that i remember coming out of his mouth was dr white you know as well as i do that women never would have been allowed to do anything this important and in the day before this image went to press before the story went to press they used their graphics computer at the time to transform her into at least a gender neutral but almost certainly a male figure uh to conform to the preconceptions of one of the senior editors at the magazine so men had agency and women didn't like the most famous stereotype of masculinity the viking warrior the northman sailed by the sun in the daytime and the stars at night men were macho fighters on their longship scaring the clergy in 1888 archaeologists introduced the world to 581 the quintessential high status viking warrior buried beside the skeleton were two horses weapons and gaming pieces ever since the burial was excavated it had been assumed that the person in the grave was male and actually all we did was to use dna and we proved that this person was in fact female it took a moment for the penny to drop when we say hang on 581 is female um because this is a famous grave yeah i mean you have immediately got our attention yeah the image that we have at the vikings is still very very male dominated and i think that is something that certainly factors into the reactions to this burial this person cannot be a warrior because women can't be can they they're too weak or they're you know it's against nature and all kinds of sexist rubbish so again projecting it's a bit like one of those rorschach ink blots you know where where there's actually nothing there and people see what they bring to it these pagan pirates warriors colonists and merchants poured over much of Europe what was the reaction from academia um when the reaction in the beginning was surprise uh and skepticism it must be the wrong skeleton and if it's not the wrong skeleton it must be something else it's not a warrior she was representing a dead husband there is a tendency to take away the agency of women and interpret a man with tools to be the actual user of the tools while a woman with tools would be representing somebody who used the tools and and this is something that we still are doing uh even though we we should know better we're in sweden until thursday and we're just going to the island for today okay it's a short trip my excavation ends here on the island where the viking warrior was buried i wanted to see the very place where she lived and died almost like i was stepping into the past to meet her the vikings believed in legacy long after death but they were reduced to simple stereotypes that are slowly unraveling we'll never fully understand the viking warrior but we do know her story is much richer than what we previously thought but just think of how many other women in the past we've ignored or mischaracterized what would the present look like if we knew their stories history i mean our story is complicated like us and there's every indication that we probably did have lots of different genders maybe just two but who knows people of different ages different races ethnicities so many broader possibilities there's so many more black archaeologists in my generation than the previous generation there's so many more native american archaeologists in my generation still a small group but it's growing queer people are growing and we're getting louder about being queer unless in the closet nico do you know how i get my panel back that i may disappear perhaps click on the um oh here we go yeah it looks like it's about one o'clock but are there any questions jordan um just one in the youtube chat from uh christine about how you got the uh the cutting room floor excerpts whether that was something you have from the get go or or a recent request um i asked them for it after we saw the movie and saw that we only had two seconds each just about it was two excerpts i think um i wrote to them and said i would be very interested to get what we said to them because i felt that there was something really some really good things that we were saying like a record of it so they sent us that it's not anything like the full three hours but it's it's something good i'm glad we got to see exercise selves and i appreciated the the contextualization within uh how those ideas evolved as well um uh a question from nico um says last month randall haas at all published an article on a female big game hunter burial that included a review of 27 hunter burials that could be sexed in nearly half 11 of the 27 in the americas were female i was surprised that a review like this hadn't been done some years ago maybe this is part because the ability to sex remains have improved recently perhaps you have a comment on this well i actually reviewed that article um for um responded to that article for science magazine um and uh if you look at the response uh other kinds of comments um about it and nico and others actually many of those so called other tested uh um situation are actually very weak and feeble in terms of the evidence and um i think bob kelly from uh wyoming actually felt that there was really only just a couple of them um but i do think that in the case of the um example um that haas and colleagues published that they did use a new technique about um proteins um in their analysis of the skeletal material that it wasn't just based on morphological inferences from things like the pelvis which in itself is lori hager and sabrina agarwal and others would tell you uh is a very problematic sort of indicator it's not um anything one way or another but so there is a new way and it was described in that haas article uh that appeared in science thank you for that um it looks like christine has one question about uh the what do you think the impact uh that sarah calen's film has had in the u.s press is you have a sense of its reception yet because it's not publicly available gotcha as far as i know is it meg you you could you could confirm that um she did show it at the mill valley film festival a couple of years ago and uh it had several showing up here it was last year and um uh it it was very favorably reviewed people really liked it i think her use of humor and um sort of some of these uh blasts from the past in videos or television shows or whatever which at the time people took straightforwardly and seriously you know we weren't critiquing leave it to beaver but we of course now critique leave it to beaver and all of the other kinds of things very rapidly so it does show a lot of change cultural change and cultural um understandings and you know some of the wider cultural movements the so-called women's lib or even the demonstration after the election of um that guy in the white house um uh it was uh with all the pink hats and so forth you know it really shows that there's been cultural changes over the years as well um it is i think she would allow people to use it for classroom teaching um i have lent it to uh my version to at least one person who was teaching an archaeology of gender class and um she actually was surprised about finding this as a topic because in her undergraduate education and anthropology they never seem to have covered this as a topic as recently as the mid 20s you know 2015 and so forth so that was kind of a shock to her so it does mean that some of us here at Berkeley have been for decades uh much more engaged with this serious topic with serious implications for people's social and gender relations today in ways that have not yet spread even around the country in anthropology departments yeah i think it could be used to to um disseminate to a much broader audience um to make other people aware of this of the whole biases that are still going on um i think that that could it could really work if she if she did disseminate it um but it's always a problem for you know it's a kind of dilemma that young filmmakers have that um how if they put it on youtube then it's they get they get no professional or not much professional um or monetary right now and now it's on youtube now it is on youtube that's right buried yes i suppose um well so a quick segue out of that um if we've got time for one more question that will be my own um uh in light of of um sort of pedagogical concerns which by the way if you want to use your classroom teacher and want to use that film in your class get in touch with meg um uh but that was something that came up a bit in in the talk and the films here um what what do you see as sort of the next steps for pedagogy um on these issues in in archaeology and more broadly well i think um i mean there is a international workshop uh going on now on zoom which is kind of about archaeology archaeological pedagogy and of course i think the scope of our concerns in archaeological pedagogy are not just limited to issues of gender and whatever gender means these days because even in the decades that people like Ruth and I and our colleagues here and elsewhere have been working on this topic the very notion of what gender means has itself shifted and changed enormously but of course now there are many other components of the um what makes for a if you will a distributed person different identities different uh concerned has expanded enormously uh which is both exciting and a real challenge so i think uh and you know just to name a few um sort of notions of um indig in indigeneity um racial or ethnic uh kinds of uh aspects as well um among many so as well as disabilities and other perspectives on uh what humans are all about and what perspectives they come to bring to the world in terms of both their ontologies and their epistemology so i think the challenge is even greater these days than it has been before but i think that this is something that archaeology has the ability and the capability and the creativity to rise to and and and deal with and i think that's our challenge thank you for that all right um well i guess that brings us to the close for today and then the close for this semester so thank you both very much and thank you to all of our presenters this this semester and all of our faithful attendees over over youtube and we look forward to seeing you in the spring