This paper explores what Neolithic Near Eastern art tells us about gender and the body in the Near Eastern Neolithic.  The discussion centres on works of art, personal decoration and dress (beads), and the technologies of manufacture of both. A special focus is the representation of age categories and stages in the individual’s life cycle.  Recent work by Hodder and others suggests that Neolithic societies were increasingly ‘entangled’ by material culture – an emphasis of material goods and the use of such goods in forming and maintaining social roles. The paper draws on an analysis of themes in Neolithic representational art and also the technologies involved in making Neolithic art. Study of art items from a technical viewpoint leads to some unexpected conclusions about women, men and the Neolithic.

Although Old World archaeologists had addressed aspects of gender differences throughout the 20^th century, their interpretations are being re-examined as evolutionary and biologically based views are replaced by those more firmly grounded in cultural and historical contingencies. Gender issues are now viewed in broad social contexts, among other axes of social difference, including class, ethnicity and age.  This reframing of gender issues is forcing reconsiderations of the internal dynamics of early societies and our understandings of states and civilizations.  In this paper, early “Big Picture” conceptions of early states are reviewed, and infrastructural dynamics of the Ur III state are examined.  Drawing on written documents, it is possible to “read against the grain” and investigate the anonymous masses of people recorded in its workshop accounts. Previous failures to probe beneath the elaborate bureaucratic arrangements to the anonymous workers that lay beneath it has distorted the history of early states.  Ur III, the iconic example of a centralized state, falls short of these earlier models still prevalent in the archaeological literature.  With respect to gender, although there are many differences between the economic conditions of women and men in the Ur III weaving workshops, there also are disparities involving class, ethnicity, age and legal statuses.  In fact, the state was more sophisticated than earlier researchers could have imagined, as it established different arrangements depending upon the task and level of expertise required.  It also was mindful of long-held customs and implemented policies that did not challenge them. 

When we think of gender we often immediately impose binary oppositions onto the material, assessing male/female characteristics and subsequent chores, labour divisions, roles and identities. However, recent ethnographic and archaeological studies have disputed the universality of such binary categorisation. It is clear that in many cases our modern expectations are unquestioningly projected back into the past (as works in the early 1990s by Gero, Tringham, Gatens and others have demonstrated). When we examine the archaeological evidence in closer detail, it becomes clear that ambiguities in the portrayal of gender often exist and that the situation is apparently more complex than interpretations of binary oppositions allow. By examining particular case studies (including Sabi Abyad, ‘Ain Ghazal, Domuztepe, Çayönü and Yarim Tepe) and investigating mortuary and figurine evidence, alternative interpretations of identities are offered. It is clear that gender is just one aspect of identity and experience, altering throughout individual lifecycles and through time and place.

Gender provides a productive area of research in that later Neolithic of northern Mesopotamia and there are good reasons to suspect it plays a key part in various aspects of society. However, a focus on gender is partly a social construct of archaeologists in recent years which has perhaps tended to concentrate on gendered individuals in isolation of a wider range of socially constructed roles that may obscure as well as emphasise both gender and individuality. On the other hand, there is some evidence to suggest that gender, along with a broader but possibly more diffuse range of concepts, may have been integrated into a much wider symbolic world. In particular, it is possible to argue that even objects such as pots decorated with apparently abstract patterns may have encoded specific gendered concepts.

Human figurines have primarily been used as essential aids in elucidating problems with which ritual activities were concerned during the later prehistory of the Near East. Only recently have they been studied to gain insights into issues of gender and how gender identities may have operated in the past. By assessing the large corpus of human figurines from Neolithic to mid-Chalcolithic sites of Mesopotamia and Iran, we can get an idea of the prevalence of gender categories that were primarily portrayed –female and sexless- and how their morphology changed or evolved over time. Why then exactly characteristics of some figurine industries altered in time is often much harder to evaluate. Although realistic female and stylised sexless figurines dominate the figurine record studied here, other gender categories (such as male and dual-sexed examples) were nevertheless also portrayed. The systematic neglect of these gender categories in the literature has influenced our understanding of the past; perhaps the best example is the firmly-rooted ‘myth’ of the mother-goddess. By sexing figurines according to strict criteria and reviewing their archaeological contexts and associated material, it is hoped that new conclusions can be drawn in terms of meaning, function and use of gender on some of the mesmerizing figurine industries of part of the later prehistoric Near East.

That the ancient Mesopotamian had distinct ideas about gender, I have shown in two articles, but the earliest written evidence dates to the second half of the third millennium and visual imagery – the major source for the Late Uruk period – does not provide the data needed for investigation of most aspects associated with gender difference. However, changes in glyptic art indicate that gender regimes changed along with the development of writing and complex social organization in the urban environment because the one-form body for representing humans in few contexts was substituted in the Late Uruk period by multiple bodies representing different men and women in a large variety of contexts. Thus the impact urbanization, social change, and writing had on gender regimes and the emergence or consolidation of masculine hegemony becomes evident in seal imagery.

The dedication of votive materials was the ubiquitous gesture of offering in Iron Age sanctuaries throughout Cyprus. The gift itself says something about the relationship between dedicant and deity, and the ability of both male and female worshipers to honor the gods by material offerings, which were primarily generic in type, has always been assumed. In the case of two terracotta heads excavated at the Cypro-Archaic site of Marion, the specificity of ethnic type, the atypical size of the restored statues, and the distinctive details of attributes goes well beyond the commonality present in the majority of religious votives. The heads present critical information about the latitude assumed by at least some female dedicants to express idiosyncratic features that reflect cultural heritage and social class in a religious environment far from their homeland.

Many complex societies employ visual markers of socio-cultural difference to denote gender, ethnic, and/or status differences. Such visual markers include aspects of dress, body techniques (such as a style/manner of walking), and body modifications (both temporary and permanent), and may be theorised as forms of physical capital. This paper explores aspects of sex and gender within the context of modifications performed on the human body. In particular, the practice of headshaping, occurring widely in the Near East throughout prehistory and continuing into historical periods, is focused on. Headshaping and its connection to gender lends itself to archaeological analysis since the type and extent of head modification can be analysed through sexed human skeletal remains, while careful analysis of the accompanying contextual burial data allows insights into other material aspects of gender. Only scant attention has previously been devoted to questions of headshaping and gender, and the place of headshaping in (re)negotiations of identity. This paper examines headshaping and its possible connection to gender from two angles. (1) A critical exploration of the osteological work of Schwartz (Bronze Age Cyprus), and Ozbek (Chalcolithic Byblos), and their arguments for female-only headshaping in the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean addresses the question of whether single-gender, differential headshaping occurs in the area. (2) Examination of current evidence for headshaping in the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Neolithic to the Iron Age is used to consider if, and how, this form of body modification was used for gender-differentiation in this region.

This paper addresses the dynamics of gender, age and social identity during the 3rd millennium (Early Bronze Age) of Syro-Anatolia by drawing upon evidence of funerary practices at recently excavated sites in the Middle Euphrates Valley.  Particular attention is given to mortuary remains from Jerablus Tahtani near Carchemish where excavations by the University of Edinburgh since 1992 have yielded evidence from more than sixty graves and tombs.  Following a brief overview of funerary evidence at Jerablus and other sites in the region, data on age and sex of the deceased at are correlated with variations in mortuary practices in order to explore the changing relationships between gender, age and social identity during the EBA, and to understand the ways in which the identities of the deceased were constructed— and deconstructed— by the living.  The variable and often contradictory nature of this evidence may have resulted from heterarchical modes of social organization emerging in the region during the second half of the 3^rd millennium B.C.  It is suggested that social categories such as age and gender were dynamic and flexible since they were constructed locally rather than being strictly prescribed by an overarching centralized authority.

Specialists of Mesopotamian culture, whether philologists or archaeologists, have traditionally approached their texts and material evidence with a tacit and self-evident premise: Mesopotamian kings were men.  Artifacts and texts incompatible with this premise have been interpreted as intrusions, offerings, aberrations, or scribal errors.  This paper revisits the gender assumptions employed by scholars over the past seventy years in their analyses of the most important excavation from the heartland of Sumer; namely, the mass graves of Ur excavated by C. Leonard Woolley in the 1920s.  The on-going debate has been framed in terms of whether the “royal tombs” really belonged to kings.  Skeptics have pointed, in particular, to the incongruity that several primary occupants were women.  Royal tomb PG/1054, for instance, offered the most explicit evidence of royalty – a king's seal in a brick chamber immediately above a stone tomb – but, as Woolley put it, "as the principal occupant of the domed tomb is a woman that seal cannot be hers."  This same gender logic led Woolley and later analysts to assign masculine artifacts within the tomb to retainers. This paper compares the evidence of the tombs with the Sumerian textual record and offers an alternative interpretation: Sumerian kingship may have been associated with a male gender role, but the office was not restricted to biological males.