Recital the role of women as hunters in foraging societies with the help of ethnographic research and archaeological findings
Subject Areas : Archaeology
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Keywords: Hunting, Women, Division of labor, Hunter-gatherer, Paleolithic, Archaeology,
Abstract :
The idea that early humans divided their labor on the basis of gender is so influential that some believe that lineage of humans can be defined by a unique division between "Hunter men" and "Gatherer women." Although feminist anthropologists have seriously questioned the Man the Hunter paradigm, "men and hunting" remains a familiar explanatory concept for the exclusion of women from certain aspects of evolution. Archaeological studies that relied heavily on stereotypical gender roles have historically classified women as domestic and opposed to the "non-domestic" world of men. Undoubtedly, explanatory constructs such as "Man the hunter" fail to explain the true nature of our ancestors' way of life because they do not take women into account. Indeed, some prehistoric women were mothers, but they were also capable hunters, warriors, toolmakers, leaders, and grandmothers. The purpose of such studies is to change the gender stereotypes of the work and activities of the past and to confront the Woman the Gatherer/ Man the Hunter paradigm as the only explanation of the activities of women and men in the past. The research method in this paper is documentary. First, we will study the work in the Paleolithic period, and then we will discuss about the division of labor. In the following, we will examine women's hunting and then mention some of its examples based on ethnographic studies. Based on ethnographic studies as well as findings in archaeological sites, it appears that some female foragers have been hunting now and in the recent
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