3.1: Queer New World - Overview

Introduction

The word archaeology is derived from the Greek words arkhaios, which means “ancient,” and logos, or “study.” Archaeology is generally defined as the study of the human past using material evidence (i.e., physical things as diverse as pottery or pollen). In North America, archaeology is typically a subdiscipline of anthropology, along with cultural anthropology, linguistics, and bioanthropology. Archaeologists focus on the prehistoric, or preliterate, past, whereas historians study the literate past. These fields overlap, however, because historical records are sometimes used in archeology. The origins of archaeology are themselves archaeological because we know that ancient people across the world collected artifacts from periods that preceded them. For example, the Aztecs of Mexico collected objects from the earlier site of Teotihuacan, and officials in the Chinese Song Empire excavated, cataloged, and studied ancient artifacts from their own culture.

The current discipline of archaeology developed out of antiquarianism, an interest in ancient Rome, which has roots among Europeans as early as the fifteenth century but is most closely associated with the collection of ancient objects in the nineteenth century. These include objects related to sex and sexuality, many of which were placed in collections of erotica like the Secretum at the British Museum and, for objects from, in the Gabinetto Segreto of the Naples Archaeological Museum. Until relatively recently these sorts of collections were typically privately owned or restricted from public view, showing the discomfort that scholars and the public have had in addressing issues of gender and sexuality in open and systematic ways.

The use of physical evidence to reconstruct the past is challenging because things can have multiple meanings to different people or mean different things in different contexts. In 1917, the artist Marcel Duchamp placed an ordinary, mass-produced urinal in an art exhibit, and that new context changed its meaning from a functional, everyday object to a work of art. Similarly, cows are ordinary animals in North America and Europe, but in India they are sacred.

Thus, to understand artifacts, archaeologists must interpret them according to the cultural contexts the artifacts came from. This can be difficult because the context may be unknown (as in the case of looted artifacts), inadequately excavated (e.g., constraints of time or funding), or drastically changed by time (e.g., weather, erosion). Even when we have texts that relate to the artifacts, those texts may not address the issues with which we’re concerned. For example, ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing describes politics and ritual but not sex and sexuality. We also cannot ask the people who made or used archaeological objects what they meant. Although we can ask their descendants, their cultures may have changed enough that the original meanings are lost. The use of objects to understand complex and culturally varied concepts like gender and sexuality is especially challenging

In this chapter, I identify some LGBTQ+ themes in the archaeology of Mesoamerica and the Andes. I show that many of these new interests and observations have been inspired by feminist and queer theory. Although some aspects of queer theory have become almost mainstream in archaeology, the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality remain challenging ones for archaeologists.

Queer Archaeology: Some Basics

View “Queer Archaeology: Some Basics,” by James Aimers, a companion introduction to this chapter.

• What are some examples of categories and classifications in our study of the past that show how hard it is to be neutral?
• In Western culture, homosexual behavior didn’t have a fixed definition or identity until the late 1800s. Why is it important to understand this type of context when studying ancient cultures and artifacts?

Queer Theory and Archaeology

Queer theory is often considered an aspect of critical theory with roots in feminism. It is counterhegemonic and challenges archaeological normativity of all sorts—most notably heteronormativity.^[1] But critiques of queer theory are not limited to sexuality, and some people argue that queer theory is not a theory (or set of theories) that explains the world but rather a way of looking critically at normative assumptions about the world.^[2]

Archaeological engagement with queer theory came mainly through the influence of feminism.^[3] The growing influence of feminism in the twentieth century led to critiques of existing norms around gender, sex, and sexuality in many fields, and by the late 1970s these critiques began to inform archaeological studies. Nevertheless, many archaeological studies implicitly assumed that the norms and institutions that we take for granted today were present and important in the distant past. Thus, archaeologists often assumed that the Western sex and gender binary oppositions (male versus female and man versus woman) were normative across all cultures or that institutions such as the nuclear family and monogamy also applied to ancient cultures.^[4]

During the 1980s and 1990s feminist ideas became mainstream in archaeology, as shown in the many works about and by women in those decades. An important development was the entry of queer theory into the archaeological mainstream in the first years of the 2000s with two seminal collections: a thematic issue of World Archaeology and the proceedings from a 2004 conference titled Que(e)rying Archaeology.^[5] Since then, archaeologists have increasingly investigated assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality, and queer theory has been used to challenge normative assumptions of all sorts.

Although potentially any topic can be examined through a queer theory lens, the most influential uses of queer theory in archaeology have been in relation to gender, sex, and sexuality. This is in part because queer theory challenges essentialist and sociobiological ideas about these issues in popular discourse and in some scholarship. If we think of queer as being fundamentally disruptive, then a lot of early work that challenged fundamental assumptions could be called queer, even if those works were not labeled as such by their authors.^[6] These studies express a queer emphasis on the “instability of the subject” and the “fluidity of identity,” as well as the inclusivity characteristic of queer theory.^[7]

Queer theory has questioned universals, essentialisms, and especially, the categorizations we use in archaeology.^[8] In archaeology, binary oppositions related to sex, gender, and sexuality like man versus woman and homosexual versus heterosexual have been the most heavily critiqued. A “truly queer archaeology” will question “received categories of present-day sexual politics and seek to develop archaeological methodologies that do not depend on these problematic sexual taxonomies.”^[9] My work with the classification of ancient Maya pottery reminds me that all classifications are created to answer particular questions and that not every question can be addressed with a single classification. So the idea that there is one, transhistorical, all-purpose classification of bodies or gender or sexuality is no more reasonable than the belief that one really great way of classifying pottery could answer all our questions.

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. What is the primary focus of archaeology as a discipline?
A) The study of ancient languages
B) The study of living cultures
C) The study of the human past using material evidence
D) The study of modern politics

2.How did feminist and queer theory influence archaeology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
A) By reinforcing traditional binary gender roles
B) By challenging normative assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality
C) By focusing only on pottery classification
D) By ignoring issues of gender and sexuality

3. What is a key critique that queer theory brings to archaeological classification?
A) That binary oppositions like man/woman and homosexual/heterosexual are problematic
B) That all classifications are universally applicable
C) That classifications should only be based on written records
D) That essentialist views are necessary for understanding the past

4. Why is interpreting the meaning of artifacts challenging for archaeologists?
A) Artifacts are always found in perfect condition
B) Written records always provide clear explanations
C) Meanings can change across cultures and contexts, and original contexts may be unknown
D) Artifacts are only used for decorative purposes

5. What does a “truly queer archaeology” seek to do?
A) Reinforce present-day sexual categories
B) Focus only on the nuclear family
C) Question received categories and develop new methodologies not dependent on problematic taxonomies
D) Ignore issues of gender and sexuality

Discussion Questions

1. How does queer theory challenge traditional assumptions in archaeology about sex, gender, and sexuality? Give examples from the chapter.
2. Discuss the difficulties archaeologists face when interpreting artifacts related to gender and sexuality, especially when written records are absent or incomplete.
3. In what ways can the classification of artifacts, such as pottery, reflect or reinforce cultural assumptions about identity?
4. How have feminist and queer theories contributed to making archaeology more inclusive and critical of normative assumptions?
5. Reflect on the importance of context in interpreting archaeological finds. How might the meaning of an object change depending on its cultural or historical setting?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. C) The study of the human past using material evidence
2. B) By challenging normative assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality
3. A) That binary oppositions like man/woman and homosexual/heterosexual are problematic
4. C) Meanings can change across cultures and contexts, and original contexts may be unknown
5. C) Question received categories and develop new methodologies not dependent on problematic taxonomies