Gender in Pre-Hispanic America (review)

Studies of women and gender in the pre-Hispanic Americas have grown exponentially in number and sophistication over the past thirty years. This volume, which serves as an overview of both where this area of study stands right now and where it might be heading, is a welcome assessment of and addition to a voluminous literature. Readers should note that while the title refers to "America," it is the central and southern regions of Mesoamerica (seven articles) and the Andes (two articles) that constitute the book's focus. However, the book ranges more widely in time than the title indicates. Well-known scholars who span a variety of fields—archaeology, ethnohistory, art history, and ethnography—make up the contributors, though most are archaeologists. The book thus places a heavy emphasis on reinterpreting the massive material record to better understand pre-Hispanic gender configurations in labor, political systems and emerging forms of hierarchy, and belief systems and ideologies as these appeared in both hegemonic and resistive discourses about power relations.

Archaeologist Joan M. Gero opens the volume (after a brief introduction by Cecelia Klein), focusing on methodolgy in an essay about Queyash Alto, a site in the Callej�n de Huaylas region of the north-central highlands of Peru. Analyzing tupu pins (fasteners for closing garments) and pottery, all from the Early Intermediate period (roughly 200 BC to AD 600), Gero finds evidence of female power, high status, and subordination. She cautions that status and power are not easily read from the archaeological record, even when we may be able to learn a lot about the gender division of labor, ceremonies, and positions of authority. "Reading" gender off of the seemingly realistic images of the Recuay pottery, she warns, appears simpler than it actually is. Differentiating male from female does not tell us who holds power and authority and how power and the right and ability to use it might be perceived by others.

Also concerned with power, status, and authority, Mesoamerican archaeologists contributing articles include Elizabeth Brumfiel, Rosemary A. Joyce, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, and Joyce Marcus. In her typically concise and authoritative way, Brumfiel provides an overview of sources—material and textual—on Aztec gender relations, arguing that the rise of the Aztec empire had a strong impact on the gender division of labor. This development reorganized household activities, even pulling men into weaving, a type of work that may have been new for them.

Joyce's essay provides an overview of important points she has made elsewhere about the Mesoamerican, particularly Mayan, archaeological record as concerned with the body and the performance of gender roles signifying the emergence of gender and class hierarchies.¹ Interrogating various male and female images to analyze changing definitions of masculinity and femininity from the pre-Classic to the post-Classic, her wide-ranging essay reminds us that gender definitions are always relational, with sexual images providing an important component of portrayals of masculinity, but were not used as much in female imagery.

Serra Puche moves beyond the gendering of artifacts and images to discuss the gendering of place in an intriguing piece about the site of XochitÚcatl, near the better-known site of Cacaxtla, both in Tlaxcala. Several structures have been found at this little-known but undoubtedly important Classic and Epiclassic site (occupied from approximately AD 100 to 850), including the largest, the Pyramid of Flowers. Excavations of the latter uncovered, among other finds, numerous female figurines and spindle whorls, as well as thirty-two burials of mostly women and infants. Female symbolism abounds at the site, though whether this site was for female worshippers or was a place of devotion to female identities and powers by women and men, perhaps involving a specific goddess, remains to be seen. Serra Puche closes by hypothesizing that the site might have been ruled by a woman, even a group of women.

Marcus...