Example 1: The Iron Age man
The extensive traditional cultural historical study Danmarks Oldtid
(Brøndsted 1960) is a respected and much cited work where the purpose is to describe the whens and wheres of Danish prehistory, from the Mesolithic
until the end of the Viking age. Brøndsted presents immense
amounts of excavated sites and illustrated objects and the overall focus is to identify culture-groups, their contacts and development. As such it is a typical example and representative of a large body of culture historical archaeological research (Trigger 1989).
When reading the part on the Early Iron Age, the most striking aspect of Brøndsteds (1960) interpretations of sites, objects, monuments, and rituals, is the absence of gender, men as well as women. He discusses the function
and developments of objects, regional differences, religious beliefs, and social organisation but he never questions whether different artefacts, symbols or tasks were male or female. But by the use of male or female nouns (in
Danish nouns might be gendered) together with pronouns like ‘‘he/she’’, ‘‘him/her’’ and ‘‘his/hers’’ when writing about different activities, he gives the impression that farming, fishing, making of pottery, metal-work, horse
riding, house-building, road-construction, ditch-digging, or in the end, nearly all kinds of tasks were performed by men, with the exclusive exceptions of spinning, weaving and the wearing of jewellery. In addition words like ‘‘human’’, ‘‘people’’ or ‘‘Romans’’ are sometimes obviously used as synonymous with men. He also uses a lot more ink to account for objects like weapons, boats or even male clothing than to describe female clothing, jewellery, or tools for textile-working or food preparing. He even repeatedly comments upon the lack of specific types of weapons in different contexts
and areas (e.g. 35, 147, 152, 160, 190, 222). Such patterns may of course be interesting and relevant but no other group of artefacts is considered to such an extent when they are not even present. This way Brøndsted clearly commits
androcentrism at the previously mentioned first and second level.
One might say that if Brøndsted is right about textile-work being female, and that farming, pottery production or the building of boats were performed only by males, then his work contributes more to our knowledge about men than about women because it discusses these activities at a far greater length and with more details than explicitly presumed female activities. However, as he doesn’t question, discuss, or put up a single argument, but simply assumes, we still don’t know who did what. Brøndsted uncritically transfers modern gender stereotypes for example with regard to domestic and public spheres as he seems to take for granted that men were responsible for all outdoor activities. Another stereotype is the contrast between savage and aggressive men and peaceful women, for example in his interpretation and discussion of the
Dejbjerg finding (Brøndsted 1960:73, 116).
The warrior is the only male role Brøndsted (1960) explicitly identifies, and I consider this the closest he gets to Early Iron Age men. Warfare and weapons were probably essential for the understanding of masculinity at times, but Brøndsted mainly focuses on the mere presence of weapons; the objects and their forms, chronology and proveniences. Even though he notices that contexts, amounts and assortments vary, he never questions the warrior’s existence or even change of role or status in different periods or regions. The warrior is just the box into which weapons and related status objects are sorted. Thus the warrior becomes more a label or a tag than a role or a social category, because except for weapons it doesn’t have any content. He turns out to be an ahistorical silhouette without any contact
with his own community.
Brøndsted does not discuss what function or status a warrior had in society, whether all or just some men became warriors, what impact warfare and the presence of warriors had on society, if other roles were available to men by choice or birth, or in any other way explore it as a social phenomenon. He remarks that differences in the burials might reflect higher or lower status and he refers to different tasks, but then he lumps together the farmer, warrior and smith in one and the same person without any discussions. He doesn’t distinguish between different groups of men except along ethnic lines, as he stresses a distinction between Roman, Celtic and Teutonic men.
Even though Brøndsted is mainly concerned with what he considers to have been male activities, they are, as feminist critique repeatedly has pointed out, generally presented as representing society as a whole, and thus also the third level of androcentrism is present in Brøndsted’s study. Men are doing a lot of things, but they are usually not explicitly presented
as men but, as already said, as ‘‘humans’’ or ‘‘people’’. However, by generalizing from the manly to the humanly, what is specifically masculine becomes invisible (Ekenstam 1998:19; Holter and Aarseth 1993:243–44;Kimmel 2000:5). As men seem to carry out almost everything, it is impossible to see what they were really doing. They are everywhere and as such
not situated or located anywhere (see Haraway 1991).
It may seem out of place to show that Brøndsted doesn’t take into account social theory that did not exist at the time his study was published. My intention is, however, not to criticise this study in particular or to analyse the androcentrism carried out by cultural historical archaeologists in general. I will, on the other hand, consider the actual presentation
of men and masculinity in this kind of work and demonstrate that the assumption of feminist critique, that androcentric research informs us about men, is incorrect.