Richard Lesure

Assistant Professor

Anthropology Department

University Of California, Los Angeles

3207 Hershey Hall

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553

lesure@ucla.edu

Small, ceramic figurines are common in the household refuse of early sedentary villages in many different parts of the world. These traditions are tantalizing potential sources of evidence concerning household-level discourses on human agency and identity. A growing analytical literature seeks to use those figurines as windows on ancient gender concepts and relationships. Recent analyses focusing on particular assemblages, however, have tended to downplay the complexity of the link between representational systems and dimensions of social differentiation such as gender. A comparative perspective yields important insights into the variable nature of this link. Insights from ongoing comparative research on Formative or Neolithic figurines from North America, South America, the Near East, and southeastern Europe highlight patterns of structural variability among representational systems. Those results point the way towards a more sophisticated theory of the relationships between figurine representational systems and gender differentiation.