Towards a Transgender Archaeology: A Queer Rampage Through Prehistory

The first step in creating a transgender archaeology is a destructive one: tearing off the layers of unsupported assumptions about sex and gender that encrust the archaeological record, and freeing the queerly formed bodies trapped underneath. This chapter summarizes the challenges currently facing archaeologists who study sex and gender. It surveys some of the work of archaeologists who have moved beyond the gender binary, and shows what an “ungendering” of the archaeological record can do. The goal of a transgender archaeology is not to re-populate the ancient past with modern trans men and trans women-that would be a blatant distortion of the archaeological record and of the goals of transgender studies. In Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender and Archaeology, Rosemary Joyce advocates an archaeology free from “the normative two-sex/two-gender model”. Archaeology can certainly contribute to transgender studies’ mission of “crosscultural and historical investigations of human gender diversity”.