Dissertation
FEMINIST APPROACHES TO ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE AND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PAST: CASE STUDIES FROM WESTERN NORTH AMERICA AND BEYOND
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2020
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/112932
Abstract
The sociopolitical conditions that entrench professional engagement influence not only the production and dissemination of knowledge in the sciences, but also the lived experiences of the practitioners who participate in scientific inquiry. This is certainly the case for archaeology, where professional practice informs the way that we think about and communicate the human past. This dissertation examines how one critical aspect of sociopolitics and human identity—gender—and its intersections with other forms of status and identity reflexively influence and are influenced by: 1) engagement with archaeological practice and the communication of knowledge, and 2) the societies and lifeways that archaeologists interpret in the archaeological record. It focuses on case studies from western North America and North America at large, bridging feminist epistemologies with the evidential constraints of empirical data. It begins with a critical evaluation of feminist and gender approaches to archaeology in the Pacific Northwest, from which numerous research gaps in the archaeological study of gender are identified and taken to task in subsequent case studies. Next, this dissertation examines gender and occupational affiliation equity issues and their impacts on multivocality and the dissemination of knowledge in archaeological publishing in both western North America and greater North America. Finally, this dissertation turns to the critical roles that women, family cooperation, and childcare considerations played in hunter-gatherer plant and storage economies and settlement patterns in the Late Holocene on the Southern Plateau. These three independent, yet connected studies provide a framework for exploring gender in the archaeological past and present in western North America and elsewhere, and demonstrate the importance of considering the critical variable of gender and its intersections with other forms of identity, including age, status, and professional occupation, through feminist approaches and scientific data.
Metrics
31 File views/ downloads
92 Record Views
Details
- Title
- FEMINIST APPROACHES TO ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE AND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PAST: CASE STUDIES FROM WESTERN NORTH AMERICA AND BEYOND
- Creators
- Tiffany Jessica Fulkerson
- Contributors
- Shannon Tushingham (Advisor)Andrew I. Duff (Committee Member)Nancy P. McKee (Committee Member)Anna Marie Prentiss (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Anthropology
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 218
- Identifiers
- 99900581701901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation