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Chapter Fifteen: The Probable Sexual Division of Labor in Magdalenian Hide: Working Ethnological Evidence
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227 Chapter Fifteen The Probable Sexual Division of Labor in Magdalenian Hide Working Ethnological Evidence Lawrence H. Keeley One of the most interesting discussions at the Goutelas Conference concerned the sexual division of labor in hide working. The issue can be reduced to the question of whether one can infer that women did the hide working during the Paris Basin Magdalenian or that it is impossible to make any such inference. That hide working took place on a site is signaled by the presence of used endscrapers recovered in situ, as microwear analysis has determined from numerous sites in many places and time periods that typical endscrapers had almost always been used for scraping hides. The association of endscrapers and hide working is especially strong for the Paris Basin Magdalenian because many independent microwear analyses by independent researchers on samples of endscrapers from several sites have found the characteristic polish created by scraping hide on the retouched bits of this tool type (Keeley 1981, 1988, 1991; Symens 1998; Beugnier 2000; Beyries et al. 2005; Rots 2002, 2005; Moss, Plisson, Christensen, and Valentin 2004). Alas, no method has yet been developed that allows direct inference of the sex of a stone tool’s user. (The “sexing” of human blood residues on a tool may be accomplished in the future. However, if a tool is made by one sex for use by the other, as was the case with the Ingalik of Alaska where women’s awls, skin scrapers, and ulus [women’s knives] are made by the men [Osgood 1970:61–64, 78–81, 89], then the blood may not be from the user but the maker.) Thus, the only possible source of indirect inference regarding this issue remains ethnographic analogy, which is the basis of this chapter. Despite its obvious difficulty, this issue is a very important one. Besides offering insights into prehistoric social mores, the symbolic facets of material culture, and perhaps gender dynamics (see below, however), it lies at the heart of more prosaic aspects of prehistoric archaeology, especially of hunter-gatherers. For almost 40 years, archaeologists have been concerned with reconstructing the annual movements, land-use modalities, and site 228 From Today to Yesterday: Ethnographic Comparisons functions of particular prehistoric foragers. Determining who was in occupation at particular sites is important to the above questions. Were all members of a social group, women, men, the children, and the elderly, present or was only some subset at a site? Indeed, some fine work by several French colleagues attempted to isolate the flintknapping debris of children/ beginners at several Magdalenian sites (Pigeot, Janny this volume). The precise issue in question here is: Were several of these sites single-purpose hunting camps/stations or were they band camps? If a good proportion of the occupants were women and children then the latter inference is most probable. Gender versus Sexual Roles This chapter is not a contribution to the archaeology of gender for several reasons. Gender is difficult to define even among living people. In my community (Oak Park, IL), which indeed prides itself on its tolerance and diversity, I count a minimum of six genders, with possibly two or three more. (For example, are heterosexual male transvestites who patronize our local transvestite dress shop a separate gender or just guys with somewhat unusual taste in clothes?) While I judge that there is considerable evidence that gender has a biological base even among our incredibly behaviorally-plastic species, it often is mutable, “negotiable” and can change in an individual’s lifetime. Gender is usually expressed by means of the material culture, and sex roles attributed to the postadolescent sexes by the traditions and modes of a particular “culture” and social group. Because sex roles and the sexual divisions of labor represent common collective behaviors and often endure for generations, they are far more archaeologically visible than gender, which is a characteristic of individuals. A story that illustrates all of these points, which took place among the Klamath tribe of southern Oregon in first third of the nineteenth century (Spier 1930:52–53; see also the many index references to Leleks in Spier 1930:336 or Lileks in Stern 1965:346–347). An older teenage boy named Leleks had for several years lived as a young woman (i.e., a berdache), wore women’s clothes and did women’s work. One day as he was asleep under a tree, a bow and arrow (men’s tools) was laid along...