Rachel Pope - Women in the present, women in the past

In case you missed it!

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.