Yet Another Discovery Upends The Myth of Prehistoric Gender Roles

‘The silent past has been made to speak,’ wrote Irish archaeologist Hodder Michael Westropp in 1872, at the height of the Victorian era, enthralled by the developments in a brand new science: archaeology.

Yup, our vision of human prehistory — the time before written records, hence referred to by Westropp as ‘the silent past’— is relatively recent. Only our past wasn’t exactly freely allowed to speak back then. Or for another century or so. Instead, it was archaeologists’ and historians’ preconceived ideas about gender that shaped how we interpreted everything from ancient burials and clay sculptures to cave paintings.

This then resulted in androcentric (and largely kitschy) assumptions about prehistory. Here’s an example from a 1950s book, Looking at History: From Cavemen to Vikings, by British historian R.J. Unstead: