Women in Ancient America, and: The Women of Colonial Latin America (review)

Women in Ancient America. By Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen�E. Stothert. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. xvi�+ 343�pp., preface, figures, notes on references, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.)

The Women of Colonial Latin America . By Susan Migden Socolow. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 237 pp., introduction, illustrations, documents, suggested further readings, index. $49.95 cloth.)

Two recent books on women in Latin American prehistory and history demonstrate the extent to which a re-gendering of America’s past has taken place by the synthesizing of scholarship on women of the Americas produced over some twenty-plus years. Karen Olsen Bruhn and Karen E. Stothert’s Women in Ancient America and Susan Migden Socolow’s The Women of Colonial Latin America emphasize women’s history or prehistory over gender history. Both books tell complex, diverse stories about women’s pasts and their roles in creating those pasts that do justice to the variabilities of female experiences across time and space and the differences of ethnicity, race, and class that also shaped women’s lives. The authors also grapple with the complicated organizational and narrative issues raised by the large expanses of time and space they attempt to cover. Each book aims to achieve broad coverage in ways that are accessible not just to scholars and specialists but to students as well. Lofty goals indeed, but we can better assess how well the authors meet their goals after considering each book in some detail.

Bruhns and Stothert have managed to produce the first truly comprehensive work on women in precolumbian cultures of the Americas.¹ Each of the authors is a well-published scholar; Bruhns has produced a well-received synthesis of South American archaeology, and Stothert is the author of two books on the prehistory of the Americas.² Thus each brings real expertise, plus an obvious depth of reading, to the project. One of the real strengths and pleasures of their book is that while the authors always focus on their chosen subject, the prehistory of women of the Americas, they critique the androcentric biases of the discipline of archaeology in a measured yet forceful way. How do they tackle such a big subject?

After the introductory chapter, “Women and Gender,” in which Bruhns and Stothert define some basic terms, such as gender (“a social script designed arbitrarily on the basis of a biological fact” [3]), the authors then discuss how gender and male and female activities can be interpreted in terms of the archaeological record. The three chapters that follow are arranged chronologically and cover the first peoples of the Americas, women during the Archaic period, and the role of women in, and the impact upon them, of the shift in many regions toward food production, especially the cultivation of domesticated plants.

Five thematically organized chapters follow, discussing women in families and households, women and the economy, religion, political structures and conflict, and the rise and fall of empires. This is a formidable array of topics, and the authors do quite a thorough and comprehensive job of surveying them. Presented to the reader is a dizzying tour of New World archaeological sites and cultures. Though well illustrated, Women in Ancient America could benefit from the inclusion of more maps to help orient the reader, especially the student reader, to the great variety of places and peoples described in the texts.

Throughout the book Bruhns and Stothert only lightly touch upon theory, preferring instead to draw an empirical picture of the diversity of women’s roles within and across the indigenous cultures of ancient America. Repeatedly and effectively, they demonstrate the array of roles that both women and men played and the various levels of status women held across the Americas before the arrival of Europeans; along the way the authors argue against unlikely theories of matriarchy as well as goddess fixations. The role variations they discuss are especially well illustrated...