Session: #1173

Content:

In the Mediterranean, the end of the Early Iron Age was characterized by profound social and economic changes. Among these, increases in population numbers, social competition and widespread mobility led to the creation of a more interconnected world, new forms of political institutions and new local identities. Yet while it has been widely recognized that these transformations had a deep impact on Mediterranean communities, the ways in which they affected local gender organization remains largely unexamined. This is unfortunate, because gender is one of the main axes around which the production, distribution and consumption of resources is structured, and thus one critical arena in which social and economic changes are negotiated.

In this session, we would like to zoom in on the relationship between the economic and the gendered organization of Early Iron Age Mediterranean communities, and how these shifted as the Mediterranean world became more complex and interconnected. More specifically, we would like to explore:

(1) Changes to production modes (from domestic to specialized) and their impact on labor division and task differentiation.
(2) Changes to access and distribution of resources, both locally produced and acquired through exchange or migration.
(3) Related to this last point, changes to consumption: whether resources these were used differently by different groups across time.

In this way, we hope to illuminate how gender roles and ideologies were implicated in shaping local agency and responses to global changes in the Mediterranean. Authors are encouraged to think wholistically about gender relationships, and about their intersection with other important social axes such as age and status. We welcome a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches that may speak to this issue, from material cultural studies to osteological and archaeometric analyses.

Session: #1173

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