The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory

by Adovasio,J. M.

• ISBN13: 9781598743906
• ISBN10: 1598743902
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2009-02-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. Recent archaeological research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer, two of the world's leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving, present an exciting new look at prehistory. With science writer Jake Page, they argue that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.

Author Biography

J. M. Adovasio is the founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The First Americans (with Jake Page) and excavator of Meadowcroft Rockshelter, an archaeological site in Pennsylvania that revolutionized ideas of human settlement in the Americas. Olga Soffer is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a world-renowned specialist on the prehistory of Russia and Eastern Europe and on the origins of art. Jake Pace was the founding editor of Doubleday's Natural History Press, as well as editorial director of Natural History magazine and science editor of Smithsonian magazine and author of over 40 books.

Table of Contents

Authors' Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The Beginnings	p. 5
The Stories We Have Been Told	p. 7
Origins	p. 27
The Importance of Being Upright	p. 52
Who Brought Home the Bacon?	p. 72
Gray Matter and Language	p. 89
The Road to Thoroughly Modern Millie	p. 115
Leaving the African Cradle	p. 117
Almost Altogether Truly Modern Humans	p. 142
The Fashioning of Women	p. 169
Peopling the World	p. 193
Cakes, Fish, and Matrilineality	p. 195
Seamstresses of the Far North	p. 210
Settling Down in America	p. 219
The Agricultural Evolution	p. 243
Conclusion: Not Invisible After All	p. 277
Acknowledgments	p. 280
Selected Bibliography	p. 283
Index	p. 291
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