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Straight down the line? A queer

consideration of hunter-gatherer studies in
north-west Europe
a
Hannah Cobb
a
School of Arts, Histories & Cultures , University of Manchester ,
Manchester , M13 9PL
Published online: 15 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Hannah Cobb (2005) Straight down the line? A queer consideration of hunter-gatherer
studies in north-west Europe, World Archaeology, 37:4, 630-636, DOI: 10.1080/00438240500395862

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438240500395862

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 Straight down the line? A queer
consideration of hunter-gatherer studies
in north-west Europe

Hannah Cobb
Downloaded by [The Aga Khan University] at 03:30 26 November 2014

Abstract

Hunter-gatherer studies have often been at the forefront of feminist critiques in archaeology, and
have remained a clear front on which feminist issues are still regularly raised. While these approaches
have challenged the androcentric stereotypes upon which archaeological interpretations of hunter-
gatherers have been based, current accounts continue to construct their interpretations based around
modern Western heteronormative concepts of identity. By presenting an alternative interpretation of
the construction of hunter-gatherer identity from the west coast of Scotland, this paper will
demonstrate that, through the application of queer theory to hunter-gatherer studies, we may finally
move away from the pervasive heteronormative stereotypes upon which they have been constructed.

Keywords

Hunter-gatherers; Mesolithic; western Scotland; endogamy; exogamy.

During the second part of the twentieth century, studies of the Mesolithic of north-west
Europe were predominantly subject to research agendas whose theoretical basis was
situated very firmly within the processual paradigm. In recent years however, a growing
number of critiques of these studies have been embarked upon from more interpretative
perspectives, and new issues are beginning to be addressed. The experience of being in the
Mesolithic world and the Mesolithic understanding of concepts such as personhood, place
and identity have begun to be considered (Cobb 2004, 2005, forthcoming; Cummings
2001, 2003; Finlay 2003; Fowler 2004; Pollard 2000). Now, more than ever before, studies
of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers are becoming increasingly self-reflexive, explicitly challen-
ging and questioning the influence of our own modern Western world-views upon our
perspectives on the past. There is however one crucial aspect, which remains central to
interpretations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and yet where there is much scope for

World Archaeology Vol. 37(4): 630–636 Debates in World Archaeology

ª 2005 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240500395862
 Straight down the line? 631

further consideration – the assumption of the existence in the past of the hetero-
normativity which dominates present Western culture. By drawing on examples from the
Mesolithic of north-west Europe, this paper will demonstrate how hunter-gatherer studies
are insidiously imbued with such heteronormative assumptions, and will suggest why we
should challenge these.
By providing a queer critique of hunter-gatherer studies this paper hopes to raise
fundamental questions regarding how archaeologists interpret prehistoric hunter-
gatherers. However, it is important to stress at the outset that this will not be a queer
perspective constructed around the simple premise that queer translates unproblematically
as gay. Indeed, it is this assumption, both in popular culture and in academia, which
has diluted the radical political implications of queer theory. Rather than taking
stereotypically straight interpretations of the past and trying to find modern Western
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stereotypes of homosexuality within them, this paper will seek to re-align queer theory
with its original intentions, to advocate the explicit political challenge of heteronormative
world views in the present and to explore and reassess the implications of such
heteronormativity within archaeological interpretations and narratives of the past. By
drawing briefly on various examples and some of my own research, it is the intention of
this paper to explore how we might challenge such heteronormativity in our
interpretations of the past and how, ultimately, a queer approach can serve only to
benefit our understanding of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherer studies have provided a fertile ground for feminist critiques over the
last few decades. In reaction to Lee and Devore’s 1968 volume Man the Hunter, the 1981
collection of papers Woman the Gatherer drew upon numerous ethnographies to illustrate
that women were not simply an immobile, background component in hunter-gatherer
societies. Instead, it demonstrated that in many ethnographic examples women often
contributed over half of the subsistence needs for foraging groups (see Dahlberg 1981).
Following the lead of this volume, archaeology’s uncritical acceptance of the ‘man the
hunter’ model formed the core of one of the first specifically feminist archaeological
critiques, Conkey and Spector’s (1984) ‘Archaeology and the study of gender’. In the two
decades since the publication of this article feminist approaches have evolved rapidly from
simply seeking to identify the visibility of women in the past, and ensuring the rights of
female archaeologists in the present, to developing a theoretically informed dialogue
regarding the construction of gender categories and their role in past societies.
Yet in reality, for many, this critique of androcentrism in archaeology, and in hunter-
gather studies in particular, is only just beginning to filter through explicitly to
interpretations and narratives of these past groups. In Western Scotland, the Mesolithic
hunter-gatherer populations that inhabited the area have been studied for over 120 years.
However, only in the late 1990s has any explicit reference to gender been made in such
studies, and even this is open to ample critique. For example by drawing on an arbitrarily
selected and filtered review of ethnographies regarding shell-fish gathering, Clive Bonsall
has surmised that:

. . . it is likely that women and children played a dominant role in this economic activity
[shell fish gathering] and at some sites, perhaps, an exclusive one. The age/sex
composition of the task group occupying a site is likely to have some influence on the
 632 Hannah Cobb

character of the resulting artefact assemblage. The incidence of bipolar debitage is likely
to be greater where women and children were more actively involved than men in the
use of the site, on the assumption that they were generally less skilled flint knappers.
(Bonsall 1997: 32)

It is clearly a result of the influence of feminist debates that Bonsall considers the role of
women and children at all in this account, and yet by doing so he also reveals both the
inherent androcentrism in his interpretation and the inaccuracies and contradictions of
such androcentrism. Thus Bonsall’s assumption that women and children were less skilled
flint knappers is founded in the assumption that they had less physical strength, yet he also
maintains that women and children may have exclusively collected shell-fish, while men
went off and hunted. Herein lies the contradiction because, in order to collect shell-fish
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from islands such as Oronsay, where huge shell middens attest to their intensive collection,
potentially wide stretches of open sea would have to have been crossed. However, it has
been demonstrated that there were no deer populations on Mesolithic Oronsay (Grigson
and Mellars 1987: 262). Using Bonsall’s logic, this gave men very little reason to visit the
island, and as a result the physically weak women and children would themselves have had
to undertake the physically demanding task of rowing across the open sea.
There is obviously lots of room for the well-rehearsed feminist critiques that have been
applied to similar accounts of hunter-gatherers to be applied to both Bonsall’s
interpretation and the many others that exist in the same vein as this. However the
concern of this paper is to address something much more deeply rooted, and in my opinion
fundamentally more problematic, than simply the androcentrism in accounts of past
hunter-gatherers. What bothers me is not what is said in accounts such as Bonsall’s. Of
course I would not deny the importance of the debate as to whether women were weak or
strong enough to knap flint well, or row wide distances, or hunt, and what their
contribution was towards subsistence. But I believe that there is a crucially more
important underlying, unspoken issue, an issue which feminist perspectives are simply not
equipped to address and consequently which has not received nearly enough attention –
the innate assumption that these populations engaged only in the same heterosexual
relations that remain the societal norm in the modern West.
Of course this assumption is never explicitly voiced in written articles, yet there are a
number of ways in which such heteronormativity is all pervasive in hunter-gatherer
accounts. The first is a semantic issue – that of the use of the generic masculine. Recent
research has demonstrated that more than simply being a grammatical form that
perpetuates androcentrism, the generic masculine is a grammatical rule that was born out
of a period in English-speaking nations in which homosexuality was regarded as so deviant
that it was highly legislated against and punishable by death or long-term incarceration
(Cobb 2003). As such then, the use of the generic masculine does not simply give
epistemological privilege to men, but to the heterosexual man alone.
Such heteronormative assumptions are, however, even more telling when archaeologists
begin to discuss social relations and organization in hunter-gatherer groups in north-west
Europe. All too often, while little is explicitly laid out, it is clear that when many accounts
refer to men, women and children they are envisaging groups comprised of modern
Western nuclear family units. The presence of such assumptions is explicitly revealed in a
 Straight down the line? 633

variety of works that have examined differentiation between the treatment of Mesolithic
men and of Mesolithic women in mortuary contexts and the results of recent stable
isotopic analysis in north-west France, Southern Scandinavia and on the Danube, in the
Iron Gates area. In all of these areas differentiation between the sexes has been interpreted
as resulting from exogamous marriage practices and the presence of matrilocal descent-
based social organization (Zvelebil 2003). Schulting and Richards, for example, have
undertaken an extensive programme of stable isotope analysis on individuals buried at the
Mesolithic middens of Teviec and Hoedic. In this they have shown that males of all ages
consistently acquired a high proportion of their dietary protein from marine resources,
throughout their lives. Young females, on the other hand, consumed less marine-derived
protein compared to older females (Schulting and Richards 2001). Although Schulting and
Richards play with the idea of food taboos, they come to conclude that the most likely
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reason for such trends must be that they result from exogamous, partilocal marriage
patterns in which females were marrying in from inland communities (ibid.).
Yet I argue that in themselves notions of endogamy and exogamy are, like the generic
masculine, little more than products of modern Western heterocentrism. All are based on
the fundamental assumptions of the existence of heterosexual family units. Exogamy, the
notion of marrying outside the group, and endogamy, the notion of marrying inside the
group, both in essence rest on one fundamental assumption – that of marriage, and by
implication the existence of formalized heterosexual relations as the societal norm.
Consequently, by discussing patterns of exogamy and endogamy, archaeologists are
unquestioningly accepting that in Mesolithic north-west Europe men and women existed
in the sense understood in the modern West and that it was the norm for them to engage in
relations that established familial units founded upon sexual and emotional relations
between these gender categories.
This unspoken acceptance among archaeologists that heterosexual relationships were
the norm in Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies becomes even clearer when depictions of
hunter-gatherer groups are considered. Thomas Dowson, for example, has illustrated the
prevalence of the heterosexual family group in depictions of all ages from the Mesolithic to
the Anglo-Saxon period that were originally used for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and
are now in the Jewry Wall Museum in Leicester, England (Dowson 2006).
So what should we do? How should we challenge and disrupt the heteronormative
assumptions that litter archaeological narratives and interpretations of the Mesolithic of
north-west Europe? Clearly the answer is not to go looking for homosexuality in the past.
As I said at the very start, this is not the intention of a queer approach, and in itself
suggests there exists and existed simply another normative and false dualism of
heterosexual/homosexual, rather than allowing for the distinct possibility that wide-
ranging and totally different conceptions of sexual relations and gender types existed,
which may not have been subject to the fixed and rigid definitions that academia typically
requires.
One of the few approaches to have employed a queer perspective to address postglacial
hunter-gatherers in north-west Europe has been that by Jimmy Strassburg. In this
Strasburg has more specifically applied queer theory to southern Scandinavia, in order not
to disrupt assumptions of sexuality in life, but to explore the role of the undead as a queer
force which themselves disrupted the sexualities of the living, unless they were afforded
 634 Hannah Cobb

correct treatment upon death (Strassburg 2000). However, while Strassburg’s account is
fascinating, and raises very different interpretations of human relations, in several senses it
is open to critique. Most importantly, for Strassburg’s undead to disrupt the living, his
account still relies upon the existence in the Mesolithic of notions of sexual relations,
gender differentiation and the body that are prevalent in the modern West.
My own research also takes an explicitly queer perspective, but in a very different, and
perhaps less esoteric, sense. By exploring the points raised by ethnographies that have
examined the formation of personhood, and considering the formation of personal
identity in the Mesolithic of Western Scotland, my research seeks explicitly to deconstruct
the rigidly heteronormative and dualistic interpretations that have so far dominated
narratives of the period. By examining experience from Mesolithic sites in conjunction
with a reinterpretation of the symbolic nature of materials from these sites, my work is
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demonstrating that the Mesolithic populations of the area may have constructed their
understandings of themselves, and consequently of gender, sexuality and bodies, in a much
more fluid sense, defined more by contexts and substances, than by the categories we
recognize today (Cobb 2004; and a further discussion can be found in Cobb forthcoming).
Similarly, while the scope of this paper does not allow for a discussion of such aspects
here, significant research regarding such issues in other chronological periods in both the
UK and north-west Europe is also beginning to demonstrate that, in these periods too,
understanding of bodies, objects and identities were not simply those to which we adhere
in the modern West (Brück 2001; Cummings 2001, 2002; Fowler 2004; Fowler and
Cummings 2003; Thomas 2000).
I suggest, then, that the key to approaching hunter-gatherer studies in Mesolithic north-
west Europe from a queer perspective is to begin by simply acknowledging the complicity
of our own implicit assumptions regarding gender and sexual relations in the present, and
the impact that this has had in providing heteronormative narratives of past hunter-
gatherer groups. In turn, and by its very nature, I have briefly demonstrated that such an
approach cannot be isolated from considerations of other aspects of societies, but rather
needs to accompany reassessments of other modern Western norms that penetrate hunter-
gatherer accounts, and which themselves are intimately tied up with understandings of
gender and sexual relationships, such as approaches to the body and personal identity, and
the relation of material culture, plants, tress and animals to these.
The current television programme A Queer Eye for the Straight Guy suggests that a
queer makeover can only alter largely superficial aspects of individual identity in the
modern West. Yet, while I hope to have provided a queer makeover of hunter-gatherer
studies, this is not a perspective I wish to emulate here. To suggest that queer is something
superficial is at best inaccurate and at worst entirely undermines the radical possibilities
queer theory provides by disrupting normative ideas and practices. While the scope of this
paper is somewhat limited, I hope that, by casting a queer eye over hunter-gatherer
studies, I have provided the beginnings of a radical political queer makeover which has
demonstrated the extent of heteronormativity within studies of the late post-glacial
hunter-gatherer populations of north-west Europe. I have focused specifically on issues of
gender and sexuality in this queer critique, which is not to imply that the methodology of
Mesolithic research is not also immune to a ‘queer makeover’, but again I am restrained by
time from going further into this. However, what I hope is that this paper represents only
 Straight down the line? 635

the beginning of what will become a broader, more concerted ‘makeover’ of the
Mesolithic: one which will draw upon themes such as queer theory and very different
understandings of aspects such as the body, identity and the land and the sea in order to
add to and expand our understanding of prehistoric hunter-gatherers more generally.

School of Arts, Histories & Cultures, University of Manchester,

Manchester, M13 9PL

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Hannah Cobb is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her research centres on
the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations of the Northern Irish Sea Basin and questions
how we may consider the Mesolithic understanding of the world through exploring
alternative conceptions of place, experience and identity.