Coda: “Oh, the Places We’ll Go”: Reflections on Engendered Archaeology Moving Forward

I quite clearly remember being in a discussion group in Santa Cruz, California in 1969 or so, fortunate to be with some of the pioneering scholars who subsequently published a key edited volume in the history of feminist-inspired anthropology, Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). In the serendipity of life, I happened to be in a great place at a pivotal moment, where issues of the androcentric bias of anthropological and ethnographic accounts and the supposed universality of patriarchy were being debated and questioned. As I sat there in Santa Cruz, I remember reflecting on how I had felt unease a few years before, having another serendipitous experience of being a Current Anthropology staff member sitting in on the conference, Man the Hunter (in Chicago in 1965), an unease that then came into focus as some of the scholars in this group (especially Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner, see Tanner and Zihlman 1976; Zihlman 2013) debated and challenged the androcentrism of our accounts of human evolution. Given my interest as an archaeologist of the Paleolithic period, beginning an anthropology teaching career in that and related subjects, this exposure to alternative or at least expanded accounts of the human past, accounts that took seriously the agency, actions and contributions of women, was transformative. Although I am not quite sure how it came to be (memory is a strange phenomenon), but I turned some of these new ideas into offering a course, “Women in Evolutionary Perspective” in 1972. I am not presenting these incidents from some 50 years ago to make some historic claims but to primarily set the stage for presenting here some thoughts and observations as to where we are and where we might be going in what I will here call the engendering (and sometimes the necessary ungendering!) of archaeology, now on an international and global scale, directions that the editors here have not only urged forward but have, simultaneously, drawn from to call into question the very state not only of engendering work but the theoretical—and thus the very knowledge production—situation of archaeology overall.