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I know at least in my family in the 1700 and 1800s women had to take over primary ownership and labor on farmers whenever their husbands died of any of the numerous dangers of farm life. So presumably they'd have already been doing related work before hand to be able to take over. Not nearly as ancient as the examples given, but it's still a part of that narrative of female labor.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:49
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physeter posted:For all we know, statues of ancient fertility goddesses were straight up porn and dudes jacked off in front of them, which I consider much more likely than those statues reflecting a 4,000 year old spiritual and political commitment to gender equality which happens to mirror the anti-war/-patriarchy positions of her time. Yeah, like in Gimbutas' wiki article: Peter Ucko and Andrew Fleming were two early critics of the "Goddess" theory, with which Gimbutas later came to be associated. Ucko, in his 1968 monograph Anthropomorphic figurines of predynastic Egypt warned against unwarranted inferences about the meanings of statues. He notes, for example, that early Egyptian figurines of women holding their breasts had been taken as "obviously" significant of maternity or fertility, but the Pyramid Texts revealed that in Egypt this was the female gesture of grief.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:54
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I mean, even in the US conquest of the inland west you see the same thing: states that we now know as sparsely populated reactionary backwaters were the first to pass women's suffrage. Because on the "frontier" everyone had to do everything. It was impossible to pretend that women couldn't wrangle cattle or drive a plow team or fire a gun or build a house.
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Dec 3, 2020 19:25
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physeter posted:And who knows, maybe Gimbutas was right. I look at something like Gobekle Tepe and my brain just melts, and I'm open to just about anything from that period. Yeah, she hit the nail on the head so well with her kurgan stuff (as I understand) that sometimes I think she'll be proven right about the Danubian culture but I just can't see the evidence. Even if those are goddess statues, I presume Athens was full of goddess statues and they were, uh, hardly egalitarian between upper class genders. ChubbyChecker posted:Not really. Horses were domesticated for their meat, and it took ages before they were useful for warfare. And it took until the invention of the horse collar before they were useful for farmyard work. The last point seems just obviously wrong even if you limit it to plowing and there's a whole heap of stuff you can use a horse for on a farm that's just carrying stuff. The wikipedia article on the horse collar suggests while cattle were more popular for plowing, horses were still used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar Bit of a silly question but talking about the krypteia earlier got me doing some reading and I was wondering, does ephebophilia technically translate to an interest strictly in boys?
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Dec 4, 2020 01:20
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Koramei posted:I don't know about it in the case of European venus figures and such; who knows, you might be right. But in ancient Manchuria/Korea/Japan (and this continues in some traditions to this day), there's plenty of evidence to suggest that women had high status spiritually, and in some cultures, in some respects, possibly actually higher than men (as much as it's possible to know from 1500 year old evidence). This is one of those things where it becomes an issue of trying to map ancient cultures 1/1 onto modern ones. We tend to think think of Patriarchy and Sexism as being like upper class Victorian England, where women were supposed to do literally nothing and hold no positions whatsoever. But the forms of patriarchy are as varied historically as anything else. In reference to your talk about spiritual status, we often think about patriarchy in this sense of how Christianity in the West during the Middle Ages and then especially in the early modern period attempted to remove Women from any kind of participation in religion. But that doesn't mean that other times and places were the exact opposite and full of powerful female Pope equivalents. Take Rome for instance. You had the Vestal Virgins and lots of other female priesthoods, but far from being a sign of women's liberation they just as much part of the patriarchal system as anything else.
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Dec 4, 2020 01:23
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Koramei posted:Oh yeah, there was a talk a few weeks ago on representations of ancient history in games* where that got brought up a bit; like you'd get a board game about making the wonders of the world where you have to direct your economy towards it but every single role shown would be e.g. men mining in a quarry, men making tools, men doing construction etc, kind of implying women had no part in them getting built. Ancient queens get glamorized a fair bit, but more mundane roles are often forgotten. Age of Empires II comes to mind as at least having male and female workers, though everything else is exclusively male. Discworld is a lot better on this, pointing out that women are working just as hard in agricultural industries, and 'entire economies have been built on the backs of little old ladies working in fields'. galagazombie posted:This is one of those things where it becomes an issue of trying to map ancient cultures 1/1 onto modern ones. We tend to think think of Patriarchy and Sexism as being like upper class Victorian England, where women were supposed to do literally nothing and hold no positions whatsoever. But the forms of patriarchy are as varied historically as anything else. In reference to your talk about spiritual status, we often think about patriarchy in this sense of how Christianity in the West during the Middle Ages and then especially in the early modern period attempted to remove Women from any kind of participation in religion. But that doesn't mean that other times and places were the exact opposite and full of powerful female Pope equivalents. Take Rome for instance. You had the Vestal Virgins and lots of other female priesthoods, but far from being a sign of women's liberation they just as much part of the patriarchal system as anything else. Kinda get the feeling that early industrial periods tended to cause patriarchy to double and triple down on oppressing women when they previously couldn't afford to, while retroactively rewriting history to make that the expected default. Also reminded that Joseon Korea apparently made even Victorian English sailors think their women had it rough.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:52
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Age of Empires II comes to mind as at least having male and female workers, though everything else is exclusively male. There are actually female warriors as well now, the Malian unique unit is the Gbeto, inspired by the female regiment of the Dahomey kingdom (the Malian civ is kind of a stand-in for all Subsaharan West Africa  )
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Dec 4, 2020 07:03
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Kinda get the feeling that early industrial periods tended to cause patriarchy to double and triple down on oppressing women when they previously couldn't afford to, while retroactively rewriting history to make that the expected default. Also reminded that Joseon Korea apparently made even Victorian English sailors think their women had it rough.
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Dec 4, 2020 12:34
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Kinda get the feeling that early industrial periods tended to cause patriarchy to double and triple down on oppressing women when they previously couldn't afford to, while retroactively rewriting history to make that the expected default.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:52
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physeter posted:Maybe one of the reasons patriarchy is so widespread across cultures is because those early cultures that didn't employ patriarchal organization are gone. They got outbred and bottlenecked by their patriarchal neighbors, now they're extinct. That is exactly the story of the Kurgan hypothesis, absent the biology. No need for historical redactions or social theories when biology will see you through. Patriarchy as politically defined is a system of oppression, but it is also a reproductive strategy which worked so well that humans either covered the planet using it ab initio, or replaced all the other people that weren't using it, and then covered the planet. If anyone is looking to draw a lesson from Gimbutas' hypotheses, it's that if someone favors some sort of gender equality they'd best have a breeding strategy that can keep up, or it's the extinction pile for them. This type of activity continues today. Lookup quiverfull families and such. Religious conservatives today are just focused on outnumbering people in the future by having millions of kids while people like me voluntarily are not having any children because i don't want to have children that are going to suffer and struggle through the oncoming climate wars.
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Dec 4, 2020 15:08
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On the other hand it’s very plausible according to r/K selection theory that in some environments, having small numbers of offspring that you can devote lots of resources to is a more successful strategy that having a greater quantity of offspring. Rabbits have many offspring; lions have fewer.
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Dec 4, 2020 15:57
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Lions are endangered. Rabbits are legion.
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Dec 4, 2020 16:08
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FreudianSlippers posted:Lions are endangered. True, but the rabbit’s offspring don’t have to compete with the lion’s for jobs.
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Dec 4, 2020 16:22
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Perhaps but modern economies need more than just lots of dudes, and I doubt evangelist cults are very good at turning out the kind of people who can outcompete modern society. They're great at ruling the roost in a lovely local town, but can they design a jet that can (one day, we can dream) wipe out dozens of prepper nazi compounds in a single flight
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Dec 4, 2020 16:23
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Archimedes of Syracuse posted:They're great at ruling the roost in a lovely local town, but can they design a giant gantry crane that can (one day, we can dream) wipe out dozens of triremes in a single swoop...for the love of Athena, who is that at the door? Get out this instant, you're stepping on my equations, do you know who I am...? Do you? Edit: just bringing it full circle. Bam!
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Dec 4, 2020 17:51
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Nessus posted:The way this got expressed in, of all things, an RPG supplement I read is that when things are rough and there's not much surplus wealth, there is usually a rough egalitarianism in practice to some extent - if nothing else, you need the people at the bottom of the totem pole to be able to do work. It's when you start having surplus wealth that you can really start doing things like having complex systems of oppression or forbidding large classes of society from economic activity. (Which is not always bad: for instance, children.) I mean, this is why, for example, the first US states and canadian provinces to allow female suffrage were in the inland west. It was impossible to ignore that women were contributing on the frontier, whereas in say, NYC, the rich and influential could afford to cloister women into subservient housewife status. Working class women didn't have that "privilege" and never have, of course, but the working class didn't make the rules.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:08
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physeter posted:Edit: just bringing it full circle. Bam! Joke's on you I already bricked up my door to keep out covid. Praise Athena!  No, I don't smell smoke... Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Dec 4, 2020 |
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Dec 4, 2020 18:20
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Strategic Tea posted:Joke's on you I already bricked up my door to keep out covid. This made me think about what the Romans would have called COVID-19. I think we should just call it the Plague of Trump.
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Dec 4, 2020 19:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:I do feel like people tend to forget about a lot of the labor that women did throughout history. Especially when they're focusing on wars and ignoring the bulk of the work of running society. I've been burning through all of Time Team lately and they seem to dig up bronze and iron age women buried like warriors with weapons on a fairly regular basis, like it isnt even unusual, any given warrior burial they find seems as likely to be female as male.
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Dec 4, 2020 19:47
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According to my recent wiki dig, western PIE groups, in particular the yamnaya culture who were the big source of the migrations into Europe, had pretty gender equal burials in terms of quality of rave goods and the major source of evidence for their society being patriarchal is linguistic artifacts.
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Dec 4, 2020 21:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I've been burning through all of Time Team lately and they seem to dig up bronze and iron age women buried like warriors with weapons on a fairly regular basis, like it isnt even unusual, any given warrior burial they find seems as likely to be female as male. It would be way more reliable to actually look at academic papers discussing the distribution then relying on a tv show. Archaeology tv shows are notoriously fucky. That being said I do imagine it's more common then previously thought, given the past and modern issue's archaeology has had with sexism and people just not really bothering to look. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Dec 4, 2020 |
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Dec 4, 2020 21:26
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Telsa Cola posted:It would be way more reliable to actually look at academic papers discussing the distribution then relying on a tv show. Yes that would be best practice but, as a shitposter on the internet, I don't have jstor access. Personally, I blame capitalism.
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Dec 4, 2020 21:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes that would be best practice but, as a shitposter on the internet, I don't have jstor access. Personally, I blame capitalism. Yeah that's fair, just uh, be cautious with how shows present things.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes that would be best practice but, as a shitposter on the internet, I don't have jstor access. Personally, I blame capitalism. The relevant publication for the female viking warrior burial site that I imagine that show was talking about can be found here without jstor or any other access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...905D27E049FADCD
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Dec 5, 2020 05:43
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Weka posted:quality of rave goods 
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Dec 5, 2020 06:00
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I didn't realize the glowstick was an ancient design.
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Dec 5, 2020 07:12
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Fuschia tude posted:I didn't realize the glowstick was an ancient design. What do you think the baghdad batteries were for?
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Dec 5, 2020 07:26
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CrypticFox posted:The relevant publication for the female viking warrior burial site that I imagine that show was talking about can be found here without jstor or any other access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...905D27E049FADCD Thanks that's neat but no, it was sites Time Team excavated themselves in Britain. Has everyone in this channel not watched Time Team? It was a british show that ran from like 1990 to 2010 or so. They'd take a team of archaeologists to a site and spend three days digging it up and finding things and getting excited about whatever they dug up, then they'd all go to the pub afterwards and serve, like, re-created Saxon ale or whatever. The whole series is on youtube. One of the episodes I'm thinking of is this one: "Saxon Burials on the Ridge" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfNFDgZb8E. They find a Saxon woman buried with a shield and a dagger; there's a bit of discussion over whether the skeleton is female or not because it's unusually large for a woman. There have been some others I think but I'd have to re-watch the first ten seasons to find them all. My suspicion is that a lot of warrior graves with with female skeletons over the years have gotten classified as male because the bones are decayed and thus ambiguous but, hey, there's a sword, must be male. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Dec 5, 2020 |
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Dec 5, 2020 12:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:there's a bit of discussion over whether the skeleton is female or not because it's unusually large for a woman. I watched a Korean history show a bit back where they talked about a number of graves of noblewomen in the Gaya Confederacy that seem to have been warriors; one of the reasons they gave for them being warriors and not just buried with weapons was actually explicitly because their skeletons (or was it just joints?) were bigger than normal, apparently meaning they must have been exercising a lot. Does that actually happen with skeletons of warriors? The idea they must have much more visible signs of exercise is kinda weird to me considering most people would have spent all day toiling away farming. I should probably try to dig up what academic source (if there was one) they based it off of and see what it actually says I guess.
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Dec 5, 2020 14:31
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Exercise absolutely impacts the skeleton. You can tell the skeleton of a medieval longbowman because it gets warped by exercising one side of the body so much more, etc.
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Dec 5, 2020 15:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My suspicion is that a lot of warrior graves with with female skeletons over the years have gotten classified as male because the bones are decayed and thus ambiguous but, hey, there's a sword, must be male. I'm sure that was the case in earlier archeology, but I'm fairly certain modern practice doesn't put down male or female unless they have skeletal evidence. It would be an interesting project to go back into like the British Museum collection and re-sex all the skeletons to look for more instances of this though. Dunno, maybe someone's already done that. From a more academic source, re gendered burials in general: quote:In the case of Mokrin, a Maros culture Bronze Age cemetery in the Banat region of Serbia, 94% of the biologically sexed adult individuals fit into the division of females being buried with their heads to the south or south-east on their right sides and males on their left with their heads towards the north or northwest (Rega 1997, 230). As the discrepancies fall within the expected error range for anthropological sexing, Elizabeth Rega suggests that the society was highly gendered based on biological sex. Skeleton buried with goods of the other gender is definitely a thing that happens, but I don't think it's a thing where the biased old archaeologists 100 years ago were ignoring lots of instances of it. Heck, when you go back to the victorians they were ignoring a lot of burials in general. If you weren't buried with wondrous things or in a monumental tomb, they didn't care about you. Overall, for most of human history, it's pretty rare. We're finding more instances now because we're finding more everything. When they find burials on a site they look at all of them. Koramei posted:I watched a Korean history show a bit back where they talked about a number of graves of noblewomen in the Gaya Confederacy that seem to have been warriors; one of the reasons they gave for them being warriors and not just buried with weapons was actually explicitly because their skeletons (or was it just joints?) were bigger than normal, apparently meaning they must have been exercising a lot. You can tell who was an english bowman in the middle ages because continual exercise with a 150 pound bow leaves very distinct marks on the shoulder blades and back. That's a pretty unique case though, because drawing a bow is such a weird action compared to anything else. But I don't think you can point to just bigger bones or joints and say 'warrior'. The skeleton as a whole doesn't get bigger, and enlarged joints is more a thing that happens from RSI or diseases. Bone density is better for saying that someone is getting lots of exercise and in good health. Even that doesn't necessarily say warrior though, you'd want way more detailed evidence to say for sure.
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Dec 5, 2020 15:22
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Yeah big skeleton says “social elite with good/consistent nutrition from childhood” not “warrior” except insofar as these overlap. Similarly, being buried with a sword, or even a lot of them, does not mean you were using that sword day to day.
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Dec 5, 2020 17:19
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skasion posted:Yeah big skeleton says “social elite with good/consistent nutrition from childhood” not “warrior” except insofar as these overlap. Similarly, being buried with a sword, or even a lot of them, does not mean you were using that sword day to day. It's probably mostly spear-work, true.
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Dec 5, 2020 17:21
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Klyith posted:But I don't think you can point to just bigger bones or joints and say 'warrior'. The skeleton as a whole doesn't get bigger, and enlarged joints is more a thing that happens from RSI or diseases. Bone density is better for saying that someone is getting lots of exercise and in good health. Even that doesn't necessarily say warrior though, you'd want way more detailed evidence to say for sure. But yeah my question was how you'd actually differentiate that as exercise for fighting vs just... the kinds of manual labor lots of people were doing. Although thinking about it, later noblewomen in Korea would not have been doing much of any manual labor, so them being fit definitely says something. e: so I went and looked it up rather than just spouting stuff I'd only half-remembered. Turns out they likely weren't noblewomen at all! Not sure how I mixed that up. And the evidence on the bones seems to be mostly visible on the legs; their soleus (?) in particular is apparently markedly more developed than normal, which according to the program anyway is consistent with other graves of presumed-warriors. I might try and dig up the actual source they were using later to see if it goes into any more detail. Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Dec 5, 2020 |
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Dec 5, 2020 17:34
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skasion posted:Yeah big skeleton says “social elite with good/consistent nutrition from childhood” not “warrior” except insofar as these overlap. Similarly, being buried with a sword, or even a lot of them, does not mean you were using that sword day to day. It depends on what actually you mean by "Big skeleton" and what you are looking at. There is a very interesting study of burials at a Maya coastal city which used to be a salt harvesting center but later turned into admin center and the impact of this labor change can be observed in skeletal remains. Also yeah, we don't really further identify/assign sex to human remains unless an osteo is present and they have enough of the individual present that they are confident in their call. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Dec 5, 2020 |
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Dec 5, 2020 18:47
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My favorite skeleton is the Lombard dude with the knifehand. I wanna be knifehand when I grow up. I still have both my hands (like an absolute chump) but I still have time to lose it somehow and when I do I'm getting a knifehand.
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Dec 5, 2020 19:51
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FreudianSlippers posted:My favorite skeleton is the Lombard dude with the knifehand. my fav is that narwhal they unearthed a few years back that got full formal burial rites
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Dec 5, 2020 20:04
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FreudianSlippers posted:My favorite skeleton is the Lombard dude with the knifehand. Post/av combo.
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Dec 5, 2020 20:11
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The av is from a lovely film noir short film I did 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UavK0hIrNf0 in which I break the 180 law about 300 times. The film itself is pretty bad because I had no real idea what I was doing and ended up cutting 90% of what I shot but the shot of the dickgun still holds up.
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Dec 5, 2020 20:27
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Koramei posted:
Isn't the soleus just the walking around muscle
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Dec 5, 2020 21:41
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