Marie Louise Stig Sorensen

Dept. of Archaeology

Downing St.,

Cambridge CB2 3DZ

England

mlss@cam.ac.uk

In my paper I shall pursuit the argument that the 'traditional' focus of gender archaeology upon the recovery and location of women's role and importance in past societies has furthered an understanding of gender as an essential identity. One consequences of this has been a curious lack of correspondence between the argued importance of the negotiation of gender and serious attempts at making such negotiation central to the investigation of gender. This tends to mean that the practices through which gender is constructed, maintained and given physical reality, i.e. the continuous bringing into being of agreed understandings of gender that are made relevant to peoples lives, have been downplayed or even ignored in our analyses. In response, this paper will focus upon the concept of negotiation arguing that it refers to processes through which agreed/accepted understandings of the world are reached. Furthermore, I shall point to how these agreements are based on, and performed in relationship to, the allocations of rights and responsibilities, and how these in turn are reached and understood in relationship to material things. Material things are in this context resources (in the widest sense) and subject of desire and needs claims. In addition, material culture's central roles in such processes are furthered due to their very materiality as they become the physical means, and the social expression, of such agreements. My paper will therefore attempt to bring greater attention to this crucial relationship between negotiation as a constitutive practice and material things.