Perspectives on gender identity in prehistory : So reason the scholars

This essay examines how four archaeology scholars reason about gender. I have used a qualitative method in making this study of their dissertations. The aim is to obtain a deeper understanding of gender identity in prehistory, gaining a broader appreciation of how this might be expressed through archaeological material. This essay takes its theoretical departure from postprocessual thinking, where gender perspectives, including feminist and queer theories are in focus. The result of this study shows that the scholars have a postprocessual, structuralistic theoretical perspective in common, and that they use stereotypical identity-descriptions. The conclusion is that gender identities can be interpreted and categorized from archaeological material