18th December 2005, 03:05 PM
osteological analysis will provide an indication of biological sex, but can say nothing about gender. They are two entirely different things, sex is biological, while gender is cultural, and it annoys me when they are conflated because people think that gender is simply a PC way of saying sex. A person may be biologically male (and this also has its own problems, skeletally they may be male, but genetically they could be female, or the other way round, or even somewhere in between), but they could be masculine, feminine, somewhere in between or something that is neither in terms of their gender. The hijra of India and the berdache of North America are biologically male individuals, who superficially appear to be female gendered, but are actually somewhere in between or neither.
In any study of grave goods from cemeteries, we should avoid falling into the trap of assuming that there are only two sexes (male and female) and two genders (masculine and feminine). Just because that is the accepted current western view, it is certainly not the case in other parts of the world, and therefore may not have been in the past. Males buried with "female" grave goods, and vice versa, and those individuals buried with unusual collections of objects, may actually be examples of alternative sexes and genders (one North American berdache was buried in their mixture of male and female costume, but on the male side of the cemetery), or the sex and gender of the interred may only partly determine the nature of the grave goods, or not at all.
It is certainly a lot more complicated that simply male and female.
++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++
In any study of grave goods from cemeteries, we should avoid falling into the trap of assuming that there are only two sexes (male and female) and two genders (masculine and feminine). Just because that is the accepted current western view, it is certainly not the case in other parts of the world, and therefore may not have been in the past. Males buried with "female" grave goods, and vice versa, and those individuals buried with unusual collections of objects, may actually be examples of alternative sexes and genders (one North American berdache was buried in their mixture of male and female costume, but on the male side of the cemetery), or the sex and gender of the interred may only partly determine the nature of the grave goods, or not at all.
It is certainly a lot more complicated that simply male and female.
++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++