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132 Chapter Eight Modeling the “Amazon” Phenomenon Colonization Events and Gender Performances Timothy Taylor [P]eople don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another. —Terry Pratchett, Making Money Abstract Using the so-called Amazons as an example, I will argue that culture contact and rapid economic change may be acutely reflected in the gender subsystems of archaeological cultures. Arising quickly in the fifth century BC on the Russian and Ukrainian steppes, and traceable both historically/mythically and archaeologically through putative gynoid skeletons with “male” weaponry (aka “Amazon burials”), the Amazon phenomenon (or phenomena) is undertheorized. I will try to show that it may best be modeled in terms of inferred changes to elite-level status dynamics that warped gender relations; it therefore may have parallels with ethnographically documented cases of gender- and status shifts in the early period of the North American fur trade. In order to understand how this can be, the widespread underestimation of the scale and reach of the Mediterranean/Aegean classical economy has to be overcome. By referring to recent fieldwork at sites such as Belsk in eastern Ukraine (plausibly Herodotus’s “Gelonus”), coupled with quantitative work on the slave trade, I present a picture of females from the higher social strata being progressively cut out of new slavery-generated wealth in the Black Sea region. They may have chosen to gender cross in order more effectively to compete with predominantly male martial nomadic elites among whom wealth differences were becoming increasingly marked through Greek colonial contact. Issues of bias in the historical accounts and in the archaeological funerary record will also be examined. Modeling the “Amazon” Phenomenon 133 Introduction This chapter examines ancient, ethnographic, and modern contexts where changes in the expression of gender may be understood to have coincided with changes in the socioeconomic circumstances of, and thus opportunities presented to, the biological sexes in societies undergoing externally driven change. It is argued that the balance of pathways to power that gender typically mediates is easily upset in contact situations, or during periods of otherwise rapid economic change, and that this may be visible in the archaeological record. Rather than interpret evidence for “gender diversity” in past societies as some essentially timeless “way of the Other,” the moment at which outside observers record such phenomena is often in the moment at which players within the observed society are moving fastest to realign themselves with an altered balance of opportunities for success. In particular, this chapter examines the “Amazon” or warrior woman phenomenon, recorded for the fifth century BC in the south Russian steppes by ancient authors associated with the Greek Black Sea colonization, and correlated by several scholars with the identification of biological females given warrior-style burial at around the same time, especially in the Don River basin. Although there is a series of problems with both the textual and archaeological data, it nevertheless seems worthwhile to attempt to model the potential congruence of alterations in gender performance with historical events. The conventions that govern the performance of gender, which in public spaces typically focus on what is considered sex-appropriate dress, are both fixed and volatile, having at once to follow the dictates of fashion, which by its nature shifts, and to maintain coherence in terms of a cultural grammar generating a consistent meaning through the differentiation of signifiers. For a variety of reasons, including the way in which the socioeconomic roles of women have developed in the past century or so, it seems that the gendered grammar of clothing allows a subversion more in one direction that another. On November 27, 2009, the news site Japan Today reported under the headline “Nagoya policemen dress in drag to nab purse snatchers”: An all-male police squad dressed as women has been deployed in Nagoya with the goal of catching attempted purse snatchers.The policemen, dressed in short skirts, stockings, high heels, wigs and carrying designer bags, have been walking the streets of Nagoya since last month in a bid to lure bag snatchers. One 26-year-old officer said: “It’s cowardly to target women who are weak.” Another 25-year-old policeman admitted that he “panicked” when a male driver propositioned him from his car. The unit consists of four male officers who are at least 160 cm tall. They all have a black belt in judo, karate or some other martial art. The squad works out...

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