Power and Gender in Aegean Archaeology (and Beyond)

Erny and Godsey's compelling analysis clearly demonstrates that survey archaeology and excavation in the Aegean are—in terms of the directorship of individual projects—male-dominated. Sober reflection on the field of Aegean prehistory and Aegean-centered classical archaeology would probably lead one to intuit this state of affairs in any case. Erny and Godsey's empirically grounded study, however—a response to Loy's (2020) observations regarding mentor-mentee networks—underscores just how egregious is this lop-sidedness toward male scholars, often male scholars with clear intellectual-genealogical connections. From a number of perspectives, this cannot be healthy: whether considering issues of basic equity and justice in how power is distributed in the academy, or the desirability of building diverse voices and knowledges into how survey (and excavation, although I will focus on survey archaeology in this response) is conducted. Here I offer some reflections on Erny and Godsey's findings. These reflections are inevitably personal, not least as I am keenly aware that—as a former doctoral student of one half of the Cherry-Davis dyad and co-editor of that scholar's Festschrift (Knodell and Leppard 2018; see Gori 2020)—I am implicated in the male-dominated, mentor-structured networks in question (although, unlike some of the other respondents, I have never directed a project in the Aegean area).

Anglophone Aegean survey archaeology is, at the directorial level, biased in terms of gender in that men occupy a disproportionate number of directorial positions (usually white, cisgender men, as per Erny and Godsey's analysis; although one might have concerns regarding a method in which public self-identification is used as a means to group individuals; cf. Heath-Stout 2020: 410–11). This reflects wider gender bias in how power is distributed and exercised, both within Aegean archaeology (noted earlier by Cullen 2005) and across the wider discipline (e.g., Gero 1983; Gero and Conkey 1991; Conkey and Gero 1997). The overrepresentation of white, cisgender males at the apices of the discipline can be seen in a range of dimensions—whether in the greater 'survival rate' of white cisgender males through academic career trajectories or in the greater representation of the same group in higher-impact journals (Bardolph 2014; Heath-Stout 2020; Cullen 2005). Metrics such as these capture differing aspects of a unified phenomenon: inequitable accumulation of disciplinary power based on factors divorced from pure intellectual capacity.

Erny and Godsey's key contribution is to stress that mentorship dynamics drive and iterate inequity. Mentorship as a structuring factor in how archaeology militates against women (and indigenous scholars, scholars of color, queer scholars, transgender scholars, subaltern scholars) has previously been an object of study (e.g., Brown 2018), but Erny and Godsey chart in detail how male mentor-mentee networks can come to exercise undue influence in subdisciplines. In my view this is a structurally sexist process (sensu Homan 2019), rather than one that necessarily implicates individual decisions regarding mentorship (although I will suggest that these latter could provide a useful locus for meaningful change; and, evidently, archaeology has its fair share of bad actors and cultures of harassment [Voss 2021]). The situation is obviously complex, but I suggest that individual decisions, innocuous enough at that scale, in amalgamation ultimately pattern at larger scales to introduce bias into how academic power structures are built.

In explaining how this might happen, I wish to turn to another, subsidiary point made by Erny and Godsey that relates to gender, research focus, and how the field places value on certain types of research output. Erny and Godsey highlight patterns in how research orientation can reflect gender, at least in the context of Aegean survey. To take their example, they show that male directors tend to contribute expertise on survey methods; female non-directors, by contrast, are overrepresented in terms of the authorship of finds chapters. This pattern probably recurs across much of world archaeology. For example, Dempsey (2019) shows how certain themes exhibit structural bias within medieval archaeology. The most obvious source of this bias is the institutionalized assumption that past activities were gendered in ways comparable...