Gender and Social Inequality

This chapter provides a critical overview of archaeological approaches to gender and social inequality, and suggests future perspectives and approaches. We argue that considering gender as a central framework through which to analyse past social inequality is long overdue in archaeology. Surprisingly, even under Processualism, which focused on the origins and development of social inequality, the issues of gender inequality were rarely raised. Today, in spite of the fact that feminist and gender perspectives have repeatedly demonstrated the significance of gender for the construction of social differences and identities in the past, we identify a continuation of earlier approaches. Much work remains to be done by archaeologists, both addressing gender inequality and placing it within the social context of change in different periods. We identify positive steps in this direction, and propose that multi-proxy approaches are a promising way to address these complex questions and bring social inequality into focus.