Anthropologist Cheryl Classen has edited a series of mostly archaeological case studies exploring how Native men and women perceived the landscapes in which they lived, worked, and prayed. In essays that range from the Cumberland and Ozark Plateau to Mesoamerica, the nine authors brought together in this volume cast their eye over rock-art sites, cliff shelters, mortar holes, clay figurines, family camps, and, to some degree, ethnographies to uncover the different imprints of men and women on the land—as taskscapes, ritescapes, or storyscapes. Unsurprisingly, Native women receive more attention, as their role in reading and reshaping landscapes has often gone underappreciated in the archaeological literature.
The first four essays in this collection focus on the Cumberland and Ozark Plateau regions. Classen opens the section with a report on her own archaeological research, striving to uncover and understand the ritual landscape of women. In what can be described as a kind of cultural ecological approach to the analysis of rock-shelter sites and accompanying artifacts, she charts changes in use over time from purely subsistence activities such as nut processing, to natal activities such as birthing, to routinized ritual uses associated with fertility—ultimately transforming such sites into shrines. She extends her discussion to other possible fertility sites, including “footwear” shrines, vulvar glyph rocks, and “bleeding places,” sites where natural chemical processes result in “blood red” water in streams or pools. In probably the most speculative of the essays presented here, Classen’s work takes her far afield into Aztec symbology and contemporary Wixarika ritual to assign meaning to these sites. The second essay, by Franklin, Langston, and Dennison, posits that bedrock mortar-hole sites are indicative of female “taskscapes” of the Late Archaic and Early Woodlands periods, especially denoting women’s agency in selecting and using sites for a variety of related activities. The authors are careful to keep their interpretations grounded, acknowledging the limitations of ethnographic analogy and ambiguous archaeological documentation. Nevertheless, they build a strong case that women played a dominant role in family and community subsistence, paralleling a growing importance in both social and technical questions involved in subsistence decision-making. The next two essays draw on Siouan beliefs to interpret Mississippian rock-art sites and female flint-clay statues and effigies.
The second part of the book travels to the Plains proper. Mavis Greer and John Greer posit that the petroglyph-covered Indian Lake Medicine Boulder in northeastern Montana maintained a ritualized function into the historical period in the activities of Native women married to Euroamerican men. Indeed, these activities they equate to a “revitalization movement,” as women probably conducted rituals there to ensure the health and safety of their offspring at a time of demographic decline. Although no ethnographic or ethnohistorical accounts of the boulder’s use by Native women has currently been uncovered, Greer and Greer look to other accounts concerning similar sites along the Missouri River to bolster their hypothesis. The next essay, placed in the Plains section, as many of its examples are derived from the Blackfeet, should probably have started the collection, as it comprises an almost curmudgeonly reminder to the archaeologists that gender is an Indo-European linguistic category, and a confining one at that. Alice Beck Kehoe turns to the lived realities of Algonkian speakers to demonstrate that petroglyph-covered rocks, among other objects, can be other than human persons, but to recognize this, context, rather than syntactical features of their language, is important in making this distinction. Without such knowledge, non-native researchers may inadvertently impose their own categories onto the landscape.
The last three essays are set in the Gulf Coast and the western United States. First, Barbara Roth looks into forager adaptations in the Mojave Desert environment in the Late Prehistoric Period, focusing on understanding the impact of gendered decision-making and activities on the landscape by using comparative ethnographic data on historic land use and subsistence patterns. She ultimately speculates that a “gendered gaze” may have influenced site selection and use, with men drawn to upland settings to spy out bighorn sheep and other game, while women set their sights on dunes, lake shores, and river terraces associated with water and plants. Jessica Joyce Christie compares gendered constructions of social space and their natural settings in the Northwest Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. Given the dearth of archaeological materials, she draws her interpretations from an analysis of ethnographic materials, adding new dimensions to understanding the role and functions of chiefs in both regions. The final essay takes women away from their “assigned roles” in the archaeological record, an artifact of nineteenth-century patriarchal interpretative practices, to follow women along the pilgrimage routes of Postclassic Mesoamerica. In doing so, she reveals how an archaeological fixation on women’s fertility obscured their active economic, social, and political roles, in effect, removing them from the landscape.
In all, the essays in this collection provide a fascinating glimpse into how archaeologists incorporate gender into their interpretations. At their best, the essays demonstrate sophisticated interpretive technique, particularly when applied to necessarily incomplete and ambiguous archaeological data. At their most speculative, however, they veer into the realm of armchair anthropology, casting comparative nets far and wide. Nevertheless, all provide a useful reminder that the land has always been subject to a “gendered gaze.”
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[Review length: 867 words • Review posted on November 16, 2018]