April 2026
April 2026
What Archaeology Tells Us About Ancient Women
What Archaeology Tells Us About Ancient Women
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The archaeology of womanhood explores what material evidence can tell us about the lives of women in the past, through traces such as tools, textiles, pottery, burials, figurines, buildings, and the marks left by everyday work on the body. For teachers, this is also a chance to bring fresh research into the classroom and move beyond older narratives that often reduce women to passive or secondary roles.
Archaeology now shows that women were central to economic life, technological innovation, ritual practice, family networks, and the shaping of communities. It also reminds us that there has never been a single, universal way of being a woman. Ideas about gender, labour, identity, motherhood, status, and power have changed across time and cultures.
This month, we will explore how archaeology can help us update the stories we tell about the past, and how this evidence can open up richer, more inclusive conversations with pupils about whose lives matter in history and how we know about them.
Weaving Identity: What Archaeology Tells Us About Early Anglo-Saxon Women
Weaving Identity: What Archaeology Tells Us About Early Anglo-Saxon Women
What did it mean to be a woman in Early Anglo-Saxon England (5th–7th centuries CE)? Unlike later periods, where written sources offer more direct insight, much of what we know comes from cemeteries, particularly those excavated in regions such as East Kent. These burial grounds provide a powerful, if carefully constructed, perspective on how identity, status, and gender were expressed and commemorated.
One of the most striking patterns is the association between textile production tools and female graves. Across large cemetery datasets, these are the only utilitarian objects regularly included, and they are overwhelmingly—though not absolutely exclusively—found with women. This suggests that textile production was not simply an everyday task but a key component of how female identity was represented in burial. Yet the archaeological record complicates this picture. Spinning tools, such as spindle whorls, and weaving tools are rarely found together in the same grave, which may point to a degree of specialisation. However, this pattern could also reflect selective deposition practices rather than a strict division of labour, so it is best treated cautiously.
Some objects carried even greater interpretive weight. The so-called weaving sword, found in a number of female burials, likely signals technical expertise and may be associated with higher-status individuals. Suggestions that such items reflect ethnic identity are plausible in some contexts but remain debated and should not be generalised. These objects invite comparison with weapons found in male graves. Just as swords are often taken to signal masculine roles, textile tools may have functioned as important markers of feminine identity. In this sense, objects were not simply possessions but elements in the social construction of identity.
Burial practices, therefore, were not neutral reflections of life but selective and symbolic representations. The inclusion of textile tools, particularly in well-furnished graves, suggests that cloth production could be socially valued and potentially prestigious. At the same time, we should avoid assuming a direct equivalence between grave goods and lived roles; what is represented in death may emphasise ideals rather than everyday practice.
Occasionally, archaeologists identify female-associated burials that include weapons, prompting discussion of a possible Anglo-Saxon “warrior maiden” phenomenon. These cases are rare and remain difficult to interpret. They may represent exceptional individuals, symbolic associations, or even misidentifications in earlier osteological analyses. What they do demonstrate is the need to avoid equating weapons automatically with male identity.
For much of the modern period, interpretations of early societies have been shaped by assumptions about domesticity, often projecting the image of the “stay-at-home” woman onto the past. The Anglo-Saxon evidence invites a reassessment. Through osteoarchaeology and contextual analysis, a more complex picture emerges, in which women were skilled producers and active participants in social and economic life, even if the precise nature of their roles remains partially obscured.
Ultimately, these burials remind us that identity in the past was not simply lived but carefully constructed and displayed. In Early Anglo-Saxon England, textile production was not just work. It was one of the key languages through which gender, status, and belonging could be expressed, while also reminding us that what we see archaeologically is always a selective and culturally mediated representation of past lives.
30/04/2026
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Reclaiming a Voice: Roman Female Poets and the Case of Sulpicia
Reclaiming a Voice: Roman Female Poets and the Case of Sulpicia
When we think of Roman poetry, the names that usually come to mind are those of men such as Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. Their works define the literary culture of the late Republic and early Empire. Yet within this overwhelmingly male tradition, one female voice survives in a form that is both rare and revealing: Sulpicia.
Sulpicia is the only Roman woman whose poetry has come down to us in a non-fragmentary form. Her poems, preserved within the Appendix Tibulliana, provide an exceptional opportunity to consider what happens when a woman speaks within a genre that had long been shaped by male perspectives. More importantly, they allow us to question how women were represented, and how they might represent themselves.
Roman love elegy is a genre deeply concerned with women, yet paradoxically it rarely allows them a voice. Male poets constructed elaborate figures of the puella, the beloved woman who is desired, pursued, and described in detail. These figures are not individuals but literary creations, carefully shaped to serve the poet’s narrative. In this sense, the female presence in Roman poetry is often less a reflection of real women than a projection of male imagination.
Sulpicia disrupts this system from within. Rather than being the object of poetic description, she becomes its subject. Her poems centre on her own experiences, her own body, and her own emotional life. This shift may appear subtle, but it represents a fundamental reconfiguration of the genre. The female figure is no longer something to be described; she is the one who speaks.
One of the most striking aspects of Sulpicia’s poetry is her openness in expressing desire. Roman social norms placed a strong emphasis on female modesty, particularly among elite women, whose reputation depended on restraint and discretion. Sulpicia rejects this expectation. She writes openly about her relationship with Cerinthus, presenting her feelings without concealment or apology. In doing so, she challenges the assumption that women should remain silent or passive in matters of love.
Her challenge to Roman gender norms becomes even clearer in her treatment of domestic virtue, particularly the ideal of wool-working. In Roman society, lanificium was not simply a practical task but a powerful symbol of female identity. Figures such as Penelope and Lucretia embodied the ideal of the industrious, faithful woman, whose place was firmly rooted in the domestic sphere. The wool basket, or quasillum, became a visual shorthand for these values, appearing in literature, funerary monuments, and social discourse.
Sulpicia’s response to this ideal is both direct and subversive. In one of her poems, she attributes the wool basket not to herself but to a rival whom she labels a scortum. This deliberate inversion destabilises the traditional association between wool-working and virtue. By linking the symbol of domestic morality with a figure of low social status, she exposes its constructed nature and rejects the constraints it imposes. She refuses to define herself through the labour and expectations traditionally assigned to women.
At the same time, Sulpicia asserts her own social and familial identity. By identifying herself as Servi filia, she situates her voice within an elite Roman context. This declaration is not merely biographical. It is a claim to authority. She speaks not as an anonymous figure but as a woman with status, lineage, and a place within Roman society. Yet this assertion is not without ambiguity. By entering the public literary sphere and openly articulating her desires, she also exposes herself to scrutiny, occupying a space that could be seen as transgressive for a woman of her rank.
The very survival of Sulpicia’s poetry has prompted debates about its authorship. Some later scholars questioned whether a woman could have written such works, often dismissing them as too refined or, conversely, too unpolished to fit expectations of female writing. These doubts reflect long-standing biases within the study of classical literature, where female voices have frequently been marginalised or reinterpreted through a male lens. Reaffirming Sulpicia’s authorship is therefore not simply a matter of literary attribution, but part of a broader effort to recognise and recover women’s contributions to the ancient world.
Sulpicia’s poetry offers a rare and valuable perspective. It does not provide a comprehensive account of women’s lives in Rome, nor does it escape the conventions of the genre in which it operates. Yet it reveals the possibility of a different kind of voice, one that challenges established norms and redefines the boundaries of expression. Through her work, we gain insight not only into the constraints placed on women, but also into the ways those constraints could be negotiated, resisted, and transformed. In a literary tradition dominated by male authors, Sulpicia stands out not simply because she is a woman, but because she speaks as one. Her poetry reminds us that the past contains voices that have long been overlooked, and that recovering them can change the way we understand both literature and society.
Source: Celotto, G., L. Fulkerson (eds), 2025. Sulpicia: A Woman’s Voice from Ancient Rome, Oxford University Press.
Amazons: Myth, Reality, and the Archaeology of Women Warriors
Amazons: Myth, Reality, and the Archaeology of Women Warriors
Few figures from the ancient world have captured the imagination quite like the Amazons. Described by Greek authors as fierce female warriors who lived beyond the edges of the known world, they have long been treated as creatures of myth rather than history. Yet archaeology is increasingly revealing that behind these stories lies a more complex reality. The Amazons were not simply inventions of Greek imagination. They were, at least in part, reflections of real women who lived, rode, fought, and held positions of power across the Eurasian steppe.
For the ancient Greeks, the Amazons served an important cultural purpose. They were not just exotic figures, but a way of defining what Greek society was not. In Athens, the ideal woman was expected to remain within the household, under male control, and largely invisible in public life. The Amazons, by contrast, were imagined as women who lived without male authority, who fought in battle, and who rejected the norms of Greek gender roles. In this sense, they functioned as a powerful “other,” a symbolic inversion of the social order.
This symbolic role is particularly clear in Greek myth and art. In stories such as the war between Theseus and the Amazons, these women are portrayed as a threat to civilisation itself, invading Attica and challenging the foundations of the state. On Greek pottery, they appear in dynamic combat scenes, often on horseback, embodying both fascination and anxiety. Even in later periods, their imagery remained potent. The tomb of Eumachia at Pompeii, for example, was decorated with scenes of Amazon battles, a striking and unusual choice for a woman’s funerary monument.
Ancient texts also contributed to shaping the Amazon image. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described them as formidable fighters and suggested that they became the ancestors of the Sarmatians after intermarrying with Scythian men. For centuries, such accounts were read as legend. Today, however, archaeology has begun to take them more seriously.
Excavations across the Eurasian steppe, particularly in regions stretching from the North Pontic area to the Urals and Western Siberia, have uncovered compelling evidence for female warriors. In these areas, associated with cultures such as the Scythians, Sauromatians, and Sarmatians, a significant number of female burials contain weapons. These include swords, daggers, spears, archery equipment, and even elements of armour.
At sites like Pokrovka in the southern Urals, researchers have identified that around fifteen percent of burials belonged to women equipped as warriors. These were not symbolic inclusions of a single object, but full assemblages of weapons, often accompanied by items that indicated skill or status. Historical sources and archaeological evidence together suggest that in these societies, the ability to fight was not strictly limited by gender.
Further discoveries have added new layers to this picture. In the Altai Mountains, burials associated with the Pazyryk culture have revealed women interred with complete weapon sets, dressed in clothing similar to that of male riders. One particularly striking burial, that of the so-called Ak-Alakha woman, included not only weapons but also tattoos, seeds, and a mirror. These elements suggest that her identity may have combined martial ability with ritual or specialist knowledge.
Similarly, at Tillya Tepe in modern Afghanistan, an elite burial of an older woman contained weapons not found in the male graves at the site. This raises the possibility that such women occupied unique positions of authority, perhaps as leaders, ritual specialists, or figures who combined multiple roles.
These discoveries have prompted important debates within archaeology. One key question is whether the presence of weapons in female graves should be interpreted as evidence of actual combat roles or as symbolic markers of status and identity. The answer may vary from case to case. In some contexts, the equipment clearly reflects lived experience, while in others it may represent power, prestige, or ritual significance.
Another important issue concerns how earlier scholarship approached these finds. For much of the twentieth century, graves containing weapons were automatically assumed to be male. When skeletons were later identified as female, they were often reinterpreted as “exceptions” or described as “honorary males.” Modern archaeology has largely moved beyond this framework. Instead, it recognises that such burials provide direct evidence of women’s agency, skill, and participation in spheres once thought to be exclusively male.
There is also growing awareness that female warriors may have been underrepresented in earlier research. The physical demands of a highly active lifestyle can affect bone development in ways that complicate sex identification, meaning that some women may have been misclassified in the past. As methods improve, the number of recognised female warriors continues to grow.
Taken together, the archaeological evidence does not simply “prove” the existence of Amazons as described in Greek myth. Rather, it shows that the Greeks were responding, however imperfectly, to real societies in which women could ride, hunt, fight, and hold positions of influence. The Amazon, then, is best understood not as a fantasy, but as a distorted reflection of these encounters.
The story of the Amazons is therefore not just about warriors. It is about how societies construct difference, how myths encode cultural anxieties, and how archaeology can help us recover the realities that lie behind them. By bringing together myth and material evidence, we begin to see that the ancient world was far more diverse than traditional narratives have allowed, and that women’s roles within it were equally varied, dynamic, and significant.
12/04/2026
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Why not explore the life of Stone Age Women in your classroom? Take a look at our ArchaeoTrek sessions Life as ... a Woman in the Palaeolithic (open link) and Life as ... a Woman in the Neolithic (open link).
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Being a Woman in the Neolithic
Being a Woman in the Neolithic
The Neolithic is often described as one of the great turning points in human history. Between roughly 10,000 and 4,000 years ago, communities in different parts of the world began to adopt agriculture, settle more permanently, and build enduring architecture. Older accounts often presented this shift as a sudden and universal “revolution”, but archaeology now paints a far more varied picture. Farming did not appear everywhere in the same way, nor did all technological innovations depend directly on it. Pottery, weaving, and other crucial skills often developed along their own paths. Looking at women in the Neolithic is one of the clearest ways to see just how complex these societies really were.
For a long time, women in the Neolithic were cast in a narrow and passive role, usually imagined as domestic workers operating in the background while men drove change. That view no longer holds. Archaeology increasingly shows that women were central to the economic, technological, and social life of early farming communities. Their labour sustained households, their knowledge shaped new ways of working with plants and materials, and their roles within kinship and ritual could be far more significant than older narratives allowed.
The evidence for this often comes quite literally from the body. At Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria, the skeletons of Neolithic women preserve the marks of repeated and demanding physical labour. Many show severe arthritis in the big toes, probably caused by hours spent each day kneeling to grind grain on saddle querns. This is a stark reminder that the transition to farming was not an abstract development but a physically exhausting way of life, built on repetitive daily work. Yet this labour was not necessarily divided along the rigid lines once imagined. In the Levant, studies of musculoskeletal stress suggest that as communities adopted domestic plants and animals, male and female bodies began to show increasingly similar patterns of strain. This points to shared workloads and interdependent labour rather than a simple opposition between male and female tasks.
Some scholars have gone further and argued that women may have played an important part in the very beginnings of cultivation. Drawing on long experience as gatherers, they would have possessed detailed knowledge of plant lifecycles, seasonal rhythms, and local ecologies. In this view, the origins of cultivation did not emerge from a single moment of invention, but from generations of close engagement with plants and landscapes, knowledge in which women may have been particularly influential.
Women were also deeply involved in the technological practices that underpinned Neolithic life. Activities such as pottery-making and textile production were once dismissed as merely “domestic”, as though they were somehow secondary to the supposedly more important technologies associated with men. Archaeology now makes clear that this is a serious distortion. These were foundational technologies, essential to storage, cooking, transport, clothing, and the structuring of household economies.
Textile production was equally transformative. The making of cloth demanded immense labour, with even a single square metre requiring hundreds of hours of spinning, preparation, and weaving. These were not minor background tasks but major investments of time and skill. In many Neolithic communities, women seem to have been the principal managers of this work, partly because spinning and weaving could be combined with childcare and other household responsibilities. Yet these activities were anything but trivial. They were central to the production of clothing, containers, furnishings, and social identity itself.
When we turn to social standing and kinship, the Neolithic again resists simple generalisation. At Çatalhöyük, in present-day Türkiye, both women and men were buried beneath the floors of houses. This suggests that ancestry, belonging, and social memory were not traced exclusively through male lines. Both sexes were firmly connected to the symbolic and physical core of the household. Burial evidence also suggests that status at the site was shaped more by maturity and life stage than by sex alone. Older attempts to interpret Çatalhöyük either as a patriarchy or as a matriarchal “Mother Goddess” society now seem far too crude. What emerges instead is a more subtle picture in which women and men both participated in domestic ancestry and social continuity.
The same need to rethink old assumptions applies to Neolithic imagery. Twentieth-century scholarship often imagined a universal “Mother Goddess” presiding over Neolithic religion, supported by the widespread presence of female figurines. This interpretation is now widely questioned. Many figurines are not clearly female at all. In fact, a large number are sexless or gender-ambiguous, suggesting that the human body was not always being represented in narrowly binary or fertility-centred ways. At Çatalhöyük, features such as breasts and bellies are now often interpreted less as straightforward symbols of fertility than as signs of maturity, abundance, and ancestral significance.
All of this matters because women in the Neolithic have too often been reduced to stereotypes. They were presented either as anonymous domestic labourers or as symbols of fertility, with little attention paid to the real complexity of their work, knowledge, and social roles. Archaeology now allows us to move beyond both extremes. It shows women as agricultural workers, craft specialists, innovators, ritual actors, and key participants in kinship systems. It also reminds us that the Neolithic was not a single story of progress, but a patchwork of local experiments, adaptations, and social arrangements.
To study women in the Neolithic is therefore not to add a missing footnote to an otherwise complete history. It is to rethink the period itself. Once women’s labour, knowledge, and status are brought back into the picture, the Neolithic no longer appears simply as the moment when farming began. It becomes a far richer story about how communities reorganised work, technology, identity, and social life, and about how much of that transformation rested on forms of labour and expertise that older narratives chose not to see.
Source: Bolger, D. ed., 2012. A companion to gender prehistory. John Wiley & Sons.
30/03/2026
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