Refiguring the body has recently
provided an important nexus for reconciling issues such as biological imperatives, cul-
tural markers, personal embodiment and experience, diachronic diversity, and social
difference. There have been numerous case studies from prehistoric contexts (Knapp
and Meskell 1997; Marcus 1993; Shanks 1995; Shanks and Tilley 1982; Thomas and
Tilley 1993; Yates 1993; Yates and Nordbladh 1990) to historically embedded examples
(Gilchrist 1997, 1999; Joyce 1993, 1998, 2001; Meskell 1998b, 1998c, 1999b; Meskell &
Joyce 2003; Montserrat 1998; Osborne 1998a, 1998b). These studies suggest that
i d e n t i t i e s
1 3 1 archaeology has much to offer other social sciences in being able to discuss the cultural
specificities of corporeality, as well as a long temporal trajectory. Many of the initial
studies drew heavily from Foucauldian notions of bodily inscription, namely the literal
marking of society upon the body of the individual. Social constructionism, largely
influenced by poststructuralist theorizing, conceives bodies and identities as being
constructed through various disciplines and discourses. These studies were followed in
the 1990s by more contextual readings of embodiment on both cultural and individual
levels, influenced by feminist and corporeal philosophies. Identity and experience are
now perceived as being deeply implicated and grounded in the materiality of the body
(Meskell & Joyce 2003). Yet this emphasis on materiality conjoins with the immaterial
dimensions of subjectivity, selfhood, agency, emotionality, and memory (Blake 1999;
Dobres 2000; Dobres and Robb 2000; Meskell 2003; Tarlow 2000; van Dyke and
Alcock 2003; Williams 2003).
Studies of the body in all its sexed specificity have prompted new discussions of
sexuality in archaeology (Hollimon 1998; Joyce 2000b; Koloski-Ostrow and Lyons
1997; McCafferty and McCafferty 1999; Meskell 2000; Robins 1996; Winter 1996).
Sexuality is embedded within deeply situated historical contexts that bring together a
host of different biological and psychical possibilities, such as gender identity, bodily
differences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires, and fantasies. These need not be
linked together and in other cultures have not been (Weeks 1997:15). It is variety, not
uniformity, that is the norm. Like the other strands of identity discussed, ‘‘sexuality
may be thought about, experienced and acted on differently according to age, class,
ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation and preference, religion, and region’’
(Vance 1984:17). Archaeologists have begun investigating how sexuality might be
shaped and iterated by economic, social, and political structures, and what the relation-
ship is between sex and power specifically in terms of class and race divisions.
Throughout much gendered archaeology heterosexuality was taken to be a normative
category that remained unquestioned, although the rise of queer theory, and the enor-
mous popularity of Judith Butler’s writings, exposed this position as untenable (Claas-
sen 1992b; Dowson 2000; Joyce 1996; Meskell 1996; Meskell & Joyce 2003). As
Gilchrist underscores, Butler has been influential in archaeology since the late 1990s
in part because of her explicit linkage between the body and the material world, a
connection that links in important ways to a social archaeology.
The Politics of Location
Any discussion of locatedness necessitates evaluating the historicity of our conceptual
frameworks and challenging their seemingly ‘‘natural’’ or foundational constitution.
Identity construction and maintenance may have always been salient in the past, yet
categories such as ‘‘ethnicity’’, ‘‘gender’’, or ‘‘sexuality,’’ for example, may not have
always existed as the discrete categories we find so familiar (Meskell 1999b, 2001).
Indeed, many of these domains are now being refigured in contemporary society
(Strathern 1999; Weston 2003; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995a). These contexts should
be carefully examined before their insights are applied to archaeological or historical
contexts. If we fail to push these questions further we risk an elision of difference,
1 3 2
l y n n m e s k e l l a n d r o b e r t w . p r e u c e l
conflating ancient and modern experience in the process. What makes questions of
identity so compelling is the ways in which specific societies evoked such different
responses, prompted by categorical differences in their understandings and construc-
tions of social domains. Much of this positioning works on at least two levels: first is
the commitment of the researcher and their own politics, second is their situated
understandings of those that they study and their particular identity configurations.
These two sets of ontologies are inseparable and mutually constitutive, especially when
one is constructing a narrative of the ancient past.