Archaeologists’ show-and-tell skills not up to scratch
It turns out that early archaeological interpretations were sometimes no more real than children finding dinosaur footprints in a sandpit. Based on DNA testing, a study showed that the sex and ethnic backgrounds of fourteen individuals buried in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii are different to what early archaeologists assumed. In one case, DNA samples showed an individual assumed to be a mother wearing a golden bracelet was actually male and unrelated to the group he was found with.
As a transgender woman, there’s a deeper issue buried in this story on the archaeology of archaeology, of ongoing tensions on the subject of not just trans people, but the representation of LGBTIQA+ people more generally throughout history. Any archaeological interpretations of early cultures, as clearly highlighted in the recent Pompeii findings, should of course be approached with caution, so as not to be viewed through, say, a contemporary colonialist lens. But there is still room for the field of archaeology to be open to more fluid interpretations of gender and sexuality.
In a Pink News article posted in 2022, regarding a Black Trowel Collective blog post, which PN describes as “drawing links across transphobia and archaeology”, archaeologist Brenna Hassett says “labelling skeletons is not always simple”, adding that “We [anthropologists] don’t even use male/female as categories in our notes… homo sapiens’ sexes really aren’t that different”.
But even when DNA testing reveals the sex of a subject, as in the case of the bracelet-clad Pompeian mother, how much does that actually tell us about them as a person?
Lauren E. Talalay, an Aegean prehistorian focused on the Neolithic period of Greece and the Mediterranean, says that “gender is not a fixed set of categories, nor is it determined by a universal understanding of biology... and within the social sciences there are lengthy debates about the definitions of gender and its relationship to sex”. Adding that “the sex : gender paradigm is, in fact, no longer well supported”.
Talalay says that even a superficial look at anthropological literature reveals how definitions of male and female, masculine and feminine, are a continuum historically and culturally susceptible to ongoing negotiation and alteration. Talalay cites historian and women's studies professor, Natalie Boymel Kampen, who observes that the border between sex and gender is blurred in ways that “may forever defy clarification”.
I remember going to a touring Pompeii exhibition while still at school, and being haunted by the contorted ashen casts of Pompeii’s citizenry. My mind instinctively created narratives about each person, what they were doing the second they were encased in time, what they were thinking, what they were like, what they were planning to do that day had they not died. Turns out that archaeologists of the day were doing (and still doing) exactly as I was – weaving stories.