Engendering Ambiguity in Minoan Crete: It’s a Drag to be a King

Abstract

At the 1993 meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, a discussant accused me of essentialism for reifying the dualistic categories of Male/Female in my study of Minoan bronze figurines. I very much would have liked to have presented a trendy Lacanian post-structuralist account of a multiplicity of hitherto neglected genders. However, as Shanks, Tilley, and Hodder tell us: in a post-processual and a post-structural archaeology, an anything-goes relativism is resisted by the evidence which constrains our interpretations.¹ ‘Post-processual’ archaeology began as a critique of the scientific paradigms and the anthropological orientation favoured by ‘New’ or processual archaeology, and the empiricist practices of traditional archaeology. It has sought to re-insert a historical content into archaeology, open up debate about the practice of archaeology, and accept theoretical diversity that has often paralleled post-structuralist critique.²