Basic Biographical Information
Joan Gero is one of the leaders in the sociopolitics of archaeology, feminist archaeology, and Andean archaeology. She was born on 26 May 1944 in New York City and grew up in the city’s suburbs. The countercultural movement served as historic backdrop for her undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania. Social activism and the seeds of feminist thinking were planted at this time. Gero graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in English Literature. In 1970, she received a M.Ed. from Boston College and then worked for Teacher Corps, a domestic program that educated the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Enamored with the Corps’s commitment to equality, the experience offered an important anthropological lesson about cultural differences in the classroom and community. After two years of teaching, Gero revisited the role of student. During a summer exchange program at Oxford, she enrolled in an archaeology course that involved excavation of an Iron Age site in...
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References
Gero, J. M. 1983. Gender bias in archaeology: a cross-cultural perspective, in J. M. Gero, D. M. Lacy & M. L. Blakey (ed.) The socio-politics of archaeology: 51-57. Amherst: Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts.
- 1985. Socio-politics and the woman-at-home ideology. American Antiquity 50(2): 342-50.
- 1991. Genderlithics: women’s roles in stone tool production, in J. M. Gero & M. W. Conkey (ed.) Engendering archaeology: women and prehistory: 163-93. Oxford: Blackwell.
- 2004. Sex pots of ancient Peru, in T. Oestigaard, N. Anfinset & T. Saetersdal (ed.) Combining the past and the present: archaeological perspectives on society (BAR International series 1210): 3-22. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Gero, J. M. & M. W. Conkey. (ed.) 1991. Engendering archaeology: women and prehistory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gero, J. M., D. M. Lacey & M. L. Blakey. (ed.) 1983. The socio-politics of archaeology (Research Reports 23). Amherst: Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts.
Gero, J. M. & D. Root. 1990. Public presentations and private concerns: archaeology in the pages of National Geographic, in P. Gathercole & D. Lowenthal (ed.) The politics of the past: 19-37. New York: Routledge.
Gero, J. M. & M. C. Scattolin. 2002. Beyond complementarity and hierarchy: new definitions for archaeological gender relations, in S. Nelson & M. Rosen-Ayalon (ed.) In pursuit of gender: worldwide archaeological perspectives: 155-71. Walnut Creek (CA): Altamira Press.
Further Reading
Conkey, M. W. & J. M. Gero. 1997. Programme to practice: gender and feminism in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 411-37.
Gero, J. M. 1993. The social world of prehistoric facts: gender and power in Paleoindian research, in H. du Cros & L. Smith (ed.) Women in archaeology. A feminist critique (Occasional Papers in Prehistory series 23): 31-40. Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.
- 1996. Archaeological practice and gendered encounters with field data, in R. Wright (ed.) Gender and archaeology: 251-80. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- 2007. Honoring ambiguity/problematizing certitude. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14: 311-27.
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Geller, P. (2014). Gero, Joan. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1290
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