Professor Gina Walker delivered this lecture as part of our recent 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity ​conference. In this lecture Professor Walker juxtaposed the stark reality of millennia of ignorance about earlier female figures and their authority as knowers in the context of sixty years of contemporary Feminist Historical Recovery that '‘Modern’ Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity' celebrates. Dr Walker described the New Historia initiative she directs at The New School with a global collaborative of researchers who are producing authoritative “female biographies” of attested female figures on various platforms for new audiences. She asked, does the avalanche of fresh data about women demand new knowledge-ordering systems that for the first time include a female dimension?

Dr Rachel Pope gave a rousing keynote lecture at our recent conference 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity. This lecture provides a perspective from the UK and Europe on how preventing women’s access to academia and the heritage sector, both historically, and in our contemporary workplace culture, has impacted our understanding of women in the past. We discovered the irony that, under the banner of objective practice, late twentieth century archaeologists actively erased past women, or wrote them specifically into domestic roles. We investigated the mechanism through which scholars sought to undermine women’s authority in the past, and in the writing too of disciplinary histories, in favour of patriarchal mythmaking, and how that practice lingers on today. We saw how a generation of young scholars had to fight to correct this inherited academic problem in archaeological practice, outside the mainstream, and how a new generation of scholars are now working beyond binary, developing applied method in gender archaeology, to discover the past more as it was, and less in our making.

We're writing to wish you all a very Happy International Women's Day. The theme this year is very fittingly 'Choose to Challenge' 

International Women's Day 2021
International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality. IWD has occurred for well over a century, with the first IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over a million people.

AWAWS celebrated International Women's Day this year by co-sponsoring an online conference "'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity' from 5-7 March.  
 
It was a truly international conference with 409 delegates and close to 140 institutions represented, from Australasia, Africa, India, the UK & Europe, the Middle East and North and South America. 
 
Brilliantly, we had 64 papers delivered by scholars from a dozen different countries around the world.  
 
We were also treated to two outstanding keynote lectures. The first, by the dynamic Dr Rachel Pope (@preshitorian) from the University of Liverpool and Founder and Director of British Women Archaeologists, was entitled "Women in the Present, Women in the Past". Rachel examined, in the context of the UK and Europe, how preventing women’s access to academia and the heritage sector, both in the past and in the contemporary workplace, has impacted our understanding of women in the past.
 
The other keynote delivered by Professor Gina Luria Walker, Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The Center for The New Historia (@TheNewHistoria), The New School, New York city, was entitled "Where are the Women in Eternity?" and juxtaposed the reality of millennia of ignorance about earlier female figures in the context of sixty years of Feminist Historical Recovery. 
 
If you were unable to listen to these two lectures, please stay tuned as links to the recordings will appear on the AWAWS website in the very near future! 
 
With warmest wishes and have a fabulous day!
 The AWAWS Executive Committee