The Archaeology of Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa (2024)

  • 1. Margaret W. Conkey, and Joan M. Gero, “Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 411–437.

  • 2. Ian Watts, “Red Ochre, Body Painting, and Language: Interpreting the Blombos Ochre,” in The Cradle of Language, ed. Rudi Botha and Chris Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 62–92.

  • 3. Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, eds. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

  • 4. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., A Companion to Gender History (London: Blackwell, 2008).

  • 5. See Anne Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power in San Ethnography and Rock Art,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 11 (1992): 291–329; Eugenia W. Herbert, Iron, Gender and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Lyn Wadley, “The Invisible Meat Providers: Women in the Stone Age of South Africa,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 69–81; and Peter R. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 262–282.

  • 6. See Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power, 291; and Thomas Dowson, “hom*osexuality, Queer Theory and Archaeology,” in Interpretive Archaeology: A Reader, ed. Julian Thomas (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 2000), 283–289.

  • 7. Timothy Insoll, Material Explorations in African Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  • 8. Frans E. Prins and Sian Hall, “Expressions of Fertility in the Rock Art of Bantu-Speaking Agriculturists,” African Archaeological Review 12 (1994): 171–203.

  • 9. Prins and Hall, “Expressions of Fertility in the Rock Art of Bantu-Speaking Agriculturists,” 171.

  • 10. Peter J. Mitchell and Gavin Whitelaw, “The Archaeology of Southernmost Africa from c. 2000 BP to the Early 1800s: A Review of Recent Research,” Journal of African History 46 (2005): 209–418.

  • 11. Insoll, Material Explorations in African Archaeology, 15.

  • 12. Alan Morris, “Mtemankhokwe: Human Skeletal Remains from a Late Iron Age Cemetery in the Mangochi District of Southern Malawi,” Southern African Field Archaeology 2 (1993): 74–84.

  • 13. Ray R. Inskeep, Tim M. Inskeep, and Maggs O’Casey, “Unique Art Objects in the Iron Age of the Transvaal, South Africa,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 30 (1975): 114–138.

  • 14. David W. Phillipson, African Archaeology, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Insoll, Material Explorations in African Archaeology, 24.

  • 15. Phillipson, African Archaeology, 235.

  • 16. Peter J. Mitchell and Ina Plug, “Ritual Mutilation in Southern Africa: Gender and Ethnic Identities and the Possibilities of Archaeological Recognition,” in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, ed. Lyn Wadley (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 135–166.

  • 17. Mitchell and Plug, “Ritual Mutilation,” 147.

  • 18. Jan C. A. Boeyens and Maria M. van der Ryst, “The Cultural and Symbolic Significance of the African Rhinoceros: A Review of the Traditional Beliefs, Perceptions and Practices of Agropastoralist Societies in Southern Africa,” Southern African Humanities 26 (2014): 21–55.

  • 19. David W. Phillipson, African Archaeology, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 120.

  • 20. Johan A. van Schalkwyk, “Metaphors and Meanings: Conceptualising the Schroda Clay Figurines,” in Sculptured in Clay: Iron Age Figurines from Schroda, Limpopo Province, South Africa, eds. Johan A. van Schalkwyk and Edwin O. M. Hanisch (Pretoria, National Cultural History Museum, 2002), 69–79.

  • 21. Van Schalkwyk, “Metaphors and Meanings,” 71.

  • 22. Marilee Wood, “Poupée de Fertilité: An Interview Revisited,” in Sculptured in Clay: Iron Age Figurines from Schroda, Limpopo Province, South Africa, eds. Johan A. van Schalkwyk, and Edwin O. M. Hanisch (Pretoria, South Africa: National Cultural History Museum, 2002), 81–93.

  • 23. Juliet Armstrong, Gavin Whitelaw, and Dieter Reusch, “Pots That Talk, Izinkamba Ezikhulumayo,” Southern African Humanities 20 (2008): 513–548.

  • 24. Wood, “Poupée de Fertilité,” 92.

  • 25. Ghilraen B. Laue, “Taking a Stance: Posture and Meaning in the Rock Art of the Waterberg, Northern Province, South Africa (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2000).

  • 26. Benjamin, W. Smith, “Forbidden Images: Rock Paintings and the Nyau Secret Society of Central Malawi and Eastern Zambia,” African Archaeological Review 18 (2001): 187–212.

  • 27. Fidelis T. Masao, “The Rock Art of Lukaba Island in the Wider Context of the Rock Art of the Lake Victoria Basin,” in Proceedings of the Southern African Rock Art Research Association First International Conference, ed. Shirley Pager (Cathedral Peak, South Africa: South African Rock Art Research Association, 1991), 24–28.

  • 28. Insoll, Material Explorations in African Archaeology, 21.

  • 29. Barbara E. Barich, “Gender in North African Prehistory,” in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. Diane Bolger (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 291–312.

  • 30. Leslie F. Zubieta, “Learning Through Practise: Cheŵa Women’s Roles and the Use of Rock Art in Passing on Cultural Knowledge,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 43 (2016): 13–28.

  • 31. Zubieta, “Learning Through Practise,” 13.

  • 32. Benjamin W. Smith, Zambia’s Ancient Rock Art: The Paintings of Kasama (Livingstone, Zambia: National Heritage Conservation Commission, 1997), 26.

  • 33. Benjamin W. Smith, “Rock Art—Batwa/Pygmies (Central Africa),” in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. B. R. Taylor (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 1392–1393.

  • 34. Carolyn Thorp, “Rain’s Things and Girls’ Rain: Marriage, Potency and Frog Symbolism in |Xam and Ju|’oan Ethnography,” Southern African Humanities 27 (2015): 165–190.

  • 35. Catherine Namono and Edward B. Eastwood, “Art, Authorship and Female Issues in a Northern Sotho Rock Painting Site,” South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 9 (2005): 77–85.

  • 36. Gavin Anderson, “Fingers and Finelines: Paintings and Gender Identity in the South Western Cape,” in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, ed. Lyn Wadley (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 59.

  • 37. Prins and Hall, “Expressions of Fertility,” 171.

  • 38. G. van Wyk, “Fertile Flowers of Femininity: South Sotho Fertility Figures,” in Evocations of the Child: Fertility Figures of the Southern African Region, ed. E. Dell (Johannesburg: Human and Rousseau, 1998), 53–67.

  • 39. van Wyk, “Fertile Flowers of Femininity,” 52.

  • 40. Simon Hall, “A Consideration of Gender Relations in the Late Iron Age ‘Sotho’ Sequence of the Western Highveld, South Africa,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 252.

  • 41. Jan Boeyens, et al., “From Uterus to Jar: The Significance of an Infant Pot Burial from Melora Saddle, an Early Nineteenth-Century African Farmer Site on the Waterberg Plateau,” Southern African Humanities 21 (2009): 213–238; and Gavin Whitelaw, “Customs and Settlement Patterns in the First Millennium AD: Evidence from Nanda, an Early Iron Age Site in the Mngeni Valley, Natal,” Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 5 (1993): 47–81.

  • 42. Whitelaw, “Customs and Settlement Patterns in the First Millennium AD,” 30.

  • 43. Armstrong et al., “Pots That Talk,” 526.

  • 44. Kent D. Fowler, “Zulu Pottery Technology and Group Identity in the Phongolo Basin, South Africa,” Southern African Humanities 27 (2015): 81–111.

  • 45. Armstrong et al., “Pots That Talk,” 520.

  • 46. Whitelaw, “Customs and Settlement Patterns,” 6.

  • 47. Whitelaw, “Customs and Settlement Patterns,” 30, 32.

  • 48. Mitchell and Whitelaw, “The Archaeology of Southernmost Africa,” 225.

  • 49. Boeyens et al., “From Uterus to Jar,” 6.

  • 50. Boeyens et al., “From Uterus to Jar,” 14–15.

  • 51. John E. Parkington, “Resolving the Past: Gender in the Stone Age Archaeological Record of the Western Cape,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 25–38.

  • 52. Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power,” 295.

  • 53. Parkington, “Resolving the Past,” 30.

  • 54. Lorna Marshall, “Marriage Among !Kung Bushmen,” Africa 29 (1959): 335–365.

  • 55. Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power,” 291.

  • 56. J. David Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings (New York: Academic Press, 1981).

  • 57. Lara Mallen, “Linking Sex, Species and a Supernatural Snake at Lab X Rock Art Site,” South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 9 (2005): 3–10.

  • 58. Prins and Hall, “Expressions of Fertility,” 179.

  • 59. Edward B. Eastwood, “Animals Behaving Like People: San Rock Paintings of Kudu in the Central Limpopo Basin, Southern Africa,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 61 (2006): 26–39.

  • 60. Eastwood, “Animals Behaving Like People,” 35.

  • 61. John Kinahan, “The Dancing Kudu: Women’s Initiation in the Namib Desert During the Second Millennium AD,” Antiquity 91, no. 358 (2017): 1043–1057.

  • 62. John Kinahan, “The Use of Skeletal and Complementary Evidence to Estimate Human Stature and Identify the Presence of Women in the Recent Archaeological Record of the Namib Desert,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 68 (2013): 72–78; and Kinahan, “The Dancing Kudu,” 2017.

  • 63. Kinahan, “The Use of Skeletal and Complementary Evidence,” 72.

  • 64. Kinahan, “The Dancing Kudu,” 1051.

  • 65. Parkington, “Resolving the Past,” 30.

  • 66. Sven Ouzman, “Between Margin and Centre: the Archaeology of Southern African Bored Stones,” in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, ed. Lyn Wadley (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 71–106.

  • 67. Anne Solomon, “The Myth of Ritual Origins? Ethnography, Mythology and Interpretation of San Rock Art,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 52 (1997): 3–13; and Solomon, “Re-viewing the Sehonghong Rainmakers: Visual Interpretations and Copies of a Key South African Rock Art Motif,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 71 (2016): 27–35.

  • 68. Joseph M. Orpen, “A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen,” Cape Monthly Magazine 9 (1874): 1–13.

  • 69. Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing.

  • 70. Richard Katz, Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari !Kung (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  • 71. Pierre De Maret, “Recent Farming Communities and States in the Congo Basin and its Environs,” in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, eds. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 880.

  • 72. Simon Hall and Johan Binneman, “Later Stone Age Burial Variability in the Cape: A Social Interpretation,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 42 (1987), 140–152.

  • 73. Lyn Wadley, “Where Have All the Dead Men Gone? Stone Age Burial Practices in South Africa,” in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, ed. Lyn Wadley (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 132.

  • 74. Wadley, “Where Have All the Dead Men Gone?” 114–115.

  • 75. Paul J. Lane, “The Social Production of Cloth and Clothing among the Dogon of Mali.” Anthropos 103 (2008): 77–98.

  • 76. Lane, “The Social Production of Cloth,” 88.

  • 77. Lane, “The Social Production of Cloth,” 88.

  • 78. Whitelaw, “Customs and Settlement Patterns,” 30–32.

  • 79. Smith, “Forbidden Images,” 188.

  • 80. Smith, “Rock Art—Batwa/Pygmies,” 1393.

  • 81. J. P. Martin, African Empires: Your Guide to the Historical Record of Africa, vol. 2 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2017).

  • 82. Wadley, “The Invisible Meat Providers,” 70; Lyn Wadley, “Gender in the Prehistory of Sub-Saharan Africa,” in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. Diane Bolger (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 313–332; and Adrienne Zilman, “Engendering Human Evolution,” in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. Diane Bolger (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 23–44.

  • 83. Wadley, “The Invisible Meat Providers,” 75–76.

  • 84. Hilary J. Deacon, Where Hunters Gathered: A Study of Holocene Stone Age People in the Eastern Cape. (Claremont, South Africa: South African Archaeological Society, Monograph 1, 1976), 105.

  • 85. Judith C. Sealy, “Diet, Mobility and Settlement Pattern among Holocene Hunter-Gatherers in Southernmost Africa,” Current Anthropology 47 (2006): 569–595.

  • 86. Sealy, “Diet, Mobility and Settlement Pattern,” 583–584.

  • 87. Parkington, “Resolving the Past,” 31.

  • 88. Isabelle Parsons and Marlize Lombard, “The Power of Women in Dairying Communities of Eastern and Southern Africa,” Azania 51 (2017): 33–48.

  • 89. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, “Gender and Early Pastoralists in East Africa,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 115–137.

  • 90. Maria Schoeman, The Ndzundza Archaeology of the Steelpoort River Valley (master’s thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 1997).

  • 91. Karim Sadr, “Livestock First Reached Southern Africa in Two Separate Events.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 8 (2015): e0134215.

  • 92. Sadr, “Livestock First Reached Southern Africa,” 7.

  • 93. Sadr, “Livestock First Reached Southern Africa,” 14.

  • 94. John Kinahan, “Archaeological Evidence of Domestic Sheep in the Namib Desert During the First Millennium A.D.” Journal of African Archaeology 14, no.1 (2016): 7–17.

  • 95. S. Sadr, et al., “New Radiocarbon Dates and the Herder Occupation at Kasteelberg B, South Africa,” Antiquity 91 (2017): 1299–1313.

  • 96. Lita Webley, “Wives and Sisters: Changing Gender Relations among Khoe Pastoralists in Namaqualand,” in Our Gendered Past: Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa, ed. Lyn Wadley (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), 167–208, 181–182.

  • 97. Ann Stahl and Maria Das Dores Cruz, “Men and Women in a Market Economy: Gender and Craft Production in West Central Guinea ca. 1775–1995,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 205–226.

  • 98. Stahl and Cruz, “Men and Women in a Market Economy,” 222.

  • 99. Hall, “A Consideration of Gender Relations in the Late Iron Age,” 242–244.

  • 100. Hall, “A Consideration of Gender Relations in the Late Iron Age,” 245.

  • 101. Phillipson, African Archaeology, 171.

  • 102. Thomas N. Huffman, Phenyo C. Thebe, Michael K. Watkeys, and John A. Tarduno, “Ancient Metallurgy in the Tswapong Hills, Botswana: A Preliminary Report on Archaeological Context,” Southern African Humanities 28 (2016): 119–133.

  • 103. David P. Collett, “Metaphors and Representations Associated with Precolonial Iron-Smelting in Eastern and Southern Africa,” in The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns, eds. T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpoko (London: Routledge, 1993), 499–511.

  • 104. Rachel Maclean, “Gendered Technologies and Gendered Activities in the Interlacustrine Early Iron Age,” in Gender in African Prehistory, ed. Susan Kent (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998), 163–177.

  • 105. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment,” 263.

  • 106. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment,” 272.

  • 107. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment,” 268.

  • 108. Huffman, et al., “Ancient Metallurgy in the Tswapong Hills, Botswana,” 119.

  • 109. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment,” 269.

  • 110. Shadreck Chirikure, Simon Hall, and Thilo Rehren, “When Ceramic Sociology Meets Material Science: Sociological and Technological Aspects of Crucibles and Pottery from Mapungubwe, Southern Africa,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40, no. 1 (2015): 23–32.

  • 111. Chirikure, et al., “When Ceramic Sociology Meets Material Science,” 30.

  • 112. Gavin Whitelaw, “KwaGandaganda: Settlement Patterns in the Natal Early Iron Age,” Natal Museum Journal of Humanities 6 (1994): 1–64.

  • 113. Mitchell and Whitelaw, “The Archaeology of Southernmost Africa,” 224.

  • 114. Herbert, Iron, Gender and Power, 19.

  • 115. Thomas N. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996).

  • 116. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles, 71.

  • 117. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles, 71.

  • 118. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles, 66.

  • 119. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles, 64.

  • 120. Eileen Jensen Krige and Jack D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain Queen (Cape Town: Juta, 1980).

  • 121. Aukema, Jan. “Rain-Making: A Thousand Year-Old Ritual?,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 44 (1989): 70–72.

  • 122. Sharon E. Fraser, Timothy Insoll, Anu Thompson, and Bart E. van Dongen, “Organic Geochemical Analysis of Archaeological Medicine Pots from Northern Ghana. The Multi-Functionality of Pottery,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39 (2012): 2506–2514.

  • 123. Gavin Whitelaw, “’Only Fatness Will Bring Rain’: Agriculturist Rainmaking and Hunter-gatherers,” Southern African Humanities 30 (2017): 101–124.

  • 124. Gero and Conkey, eds. Engendering Archaeology, 1–412.; and Lori D. Hager, Women in Human Evolution (London: Routledge, 1997).

  • 125. Herbert, Iron, Gender and Power; Kent, Gender in African Prehistory; Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment”; Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power”; and Wadley, “Where Have All the Dead Men Gone?”

  • 126. Solomon, “Gender, Representation, and Power,” 291 ̶ 329.

  • 127. Schmidt, “Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment,” 262 ̶ 282; Herbert, Iron, Gender and Power.

  • 128. Diane Bolger, ed., A Companion to Gender Prehistory (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

  • 129. Bolger, A Companion to Gender Prehistory, 13.

The Archaeology of Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa (2024)

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