When women become men : A study of sex and gender in prehistory based on osteological and archaeological sex assessments

This essay, When women become men, is written with the intention of illustrating a way in which archaeologists and osteologists can work together to derive from the notion that men and women, and masculinity and femininity, are two rigid binary components which oppose each other. This is done on a practical level by analysing the graves from the Viking age burial site at Stora Hallvards, Silte parish, Gotland, Sweden. The analysis has been carried out through the means of osteological and archaeological sex assessments and osteological means of age assessment on the individuals. The main questions asked are how well the archaeological and osteological sex assessments correlate with each other, and what it means when they don’t; whether or not there is a difference in sex and gender based on age; and how the non-normative individuals in the materials can be reached. The essay has been written through intersectional feminist theoretical perspective with a base in queertheory, and an introduction has also been given to different views of, and ways in perceiving, sex and gender in different cultures around the world, with a broad time perspective to broaden the sex/gender discussion over time and space. The results of the analysis show that the archaeological and osteological sex assessments matched in 47,8% of the cases, and did not in 8,7% of the cases. The results are then discussed from a gender perspective, and it shows that there are differences between both children and adults, but also between adults, and between children. The difference can to some extent be linked to age. In this essay, it has been shown that it is fully possible to interpret the material based on more parameters than femininity and masculinity, and that this can only be achieved by seeing gender as the wide range of humanity that it actually includes, such as identity, status, sexuality, occupation and age. All that is required is that one is open to the idea that gender is not linked binary to biological sex