Discuss what archeology has revealed about gender relations in Early Agrarian era communities.

Question

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Answer 1

Archaeology has revealed something about genderrelations in Early Agrarian era communities, but this evidenceis ambiguous and provides at best only a partialanswer to the question of what impact agriculture and theemergence of sedentary village life had on the status ofwomen. This transition clearly changed the relative positionsof men and women, but there is no standard modelas to exactly how the change was manifested. Part of theproblem is that it is often difficult to isolate male from femaleremains in the archaeological record, and many of theartifacts discovered do not explicitly show that they wereused exclusively by either sex. Anthropologists and genderhistorians often try to reconstruct what might have beengoing on during this transition by making comparisonswith modern-day early farming societies. One assumption,for example, is that because men generally make the stonetools used by twentieth-century horticultural societies,they probably did so in the Early Agrarian era as well, butthis is hardly conclusive.

Studies of San foragers in southern Africa led someresearchers to argue that sedentism reduced the status ofwomen. Nomadic groups tended to be more egalitarian,with men’s and women’s roles equally important for groupsurvival. Sedentism changed all this, the argument suggests, by confining women to the relative isolation of thehome and freeing up men to play more public roles, includingcattle herding and “politics.” Eventually this transitionmeant that certain women’s jobs were designated as being of lower status, including drawing water from the well andother household chores.

Another interpretation of Early Agrarian gender rolesis that women may have taken the lead in persuading thecommunity to abandon nomadism and settle down throughactively and intentionally experimenting with plant cultivation,because survival as a nomadic forager was particularlyhard work for women. Anthropologists find evidenceto support such a model in observations ofSudanese affluent foragers. On the otherhand, analysis of skeletons from AbuHureya in Syria shows that farming wasprobably even more physically demandingthan foraging for women. Many of thefemale skeletons analyzed had deformedtoe bones and powerful upper arms, probablyfrom grinding grain all day, whereasthe male skeletons did not have thesedeformities.

These ambiguous interpretations arecomplicated by evidence suggesting thatliving standards initially declined in EarlyAgrarian villages for residents of bothsexes, compared to the lifeways of foragers.This may have been because farmersrelied on fewer foodstuffs than foragers,so their diets were less varied and less nutritious,which explains why the remainsof some early farmers appear physicallyshorter than individuals in neighboringforaging communities. Famine was areal possibility and constant threat ifstaple crops failed, and farmers probablyworked harder and longer hours and sufferedhigher levels of stress (we can tellthis from study of bones) than foragersas they attempted to stave off the myriadthreats to survival faced by Early Agrariancommunities. Within these communities, however, it isprobably safe to say that men’s and women’s roles (and consequently status) were increasingly clearly defined.