REASSESSING BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL SEX DETERMINATION AND RESEARCH INTO GENDER AT THE EARLY ANGLO-SAXON WORTHY PARK BURIAL GROUND IN HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND A Thesis submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario © Copyright by Abigail C. Górkiewicz Downer Anthropology M.A. Graduate Program May 2015 Abstract REASSESSING BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL SEX DETERMINATION AND RESEARCH INTO GENDER AT THE EARLY ANGLO-SAXON WORTHY PARK BURIAL GROUND IN HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND Abigail C. Górkiewicz Downer When bioarchaeologists investigate past gender identity, they typically place skeletal remains into one of six sex assessment categories: male, female, possible male, possible female, ambiguous, and indeterminate. However, the study samples are often reduced to male/female reproducing a male/female gender/sex binary prevalent in the “Western” cultural milieu and bioarchaeology when inferences are made about gender in the past. In order to allow for the existence of non-binary cultural genders/biological sexes, this thesis: 1) demonstrates the multitude of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and medical evidence relating to non-binary sex/gender expression; 2) tests a method inspired by Whelan (1991) that looks at gender as an identity not fully inspired by biological sex; 3) keeps all sex assessment categories used by bioarchaeologists separate in analysis and interpretation; and 4) analyses patterns relating to all available material culture and biological attributes in a mortuary sample to investigate gender identity. This thesis used the Early Anglo-Saxon (470-600 AD) burial ground at Worthy Park, Hampshire to achieve these objectives. This thesis found that when examining all sex assessment categories among all mortuary variables, only the male sex was clearly defined by its mortuary assemblage. This suggests a one gender structure corresponding to linguistic evidence for one gender in Old English. Keywords: Bioarchaeology, Gender identity, Third gender, Anglo-Saxon, Sex assessment ii Acknowledgements I would like to give a special thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Jocelyn Williams, for her continued guidance, encouragement, and support with research design, as well as her perseverance in revising my many drafts. I thank my committee members: Dr. Marit Munson, Dr. James Conolly (first year), and Dr. Anne Keenleyside (second year) for their support, patience, and guidance in this journey. I give acknowledgement and thanks to Dr. James Conolly for aiding me with correspondence and hierarchical cluster analysis in archaeological research, and his time and aid with Canoco 5 (on his own laptop) and Trent University’s WebStatistica statistics software in my analysis. I would also not have been able to beautify the final draft’s Appendices tables without the help of the “Excel Guru” Elmer Horst at Hewlitt-Packard who helped me master Microsoft Excel’s many functions, and Debbie Harriet at Hewlitt-Packard who reviewed my Appendices’ tables, and Daniel Martin at Microsoft who aided me in formatting the final product. I also thank Dana Capell for reviewing parts of this thesis. I would not be where I am today without the care and support of my parents, Wayne and Debbie Downer, and family who encouraged me financially and emotionally to pursue my passion in Anthropology. And I would not be where I am without the guidance of Jesus Christ, and the support of my friends and colleagues at Trent University’s Anthropology Department and beyond. I would finally like to thank that steamy-hot beverage, tea, which has kept me invigorated during Grad school. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables .................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review ............................................................................................. 13 2.1 Pre-feminist Understandings of Gender ................................................................... 15 2.2 Feminism .................................................................................................................. 17 2.3 Queer Theory ............................................................................................................ 19 2.4 Contributions of Feminism and Queer theory to Archaeology and Bioarchaeology ........................................................................................................................................ 23 2.5 Evidence Challenging the Cultural Gender Binary .................................................. 29 2.6 Performance Theory and Marxism and their Importance in Understanding Gender ........................................................................................................................................ 34 Chapter 3: Assessing Sex in Bioarchaeology .................................................................... 38 3.1 Historical Development of Sexing in Bioarchaeology ............................................. 39 3.2 Skeletal Sex Assessment in Bioarchaeology ............................................................ 42 3.2.1 Osteological Sexing Categories ......................................................................... 43 3.3 Contemporary Bioarchaeological Research Patterns in dealing with Sex ............... 44 3.4 Whelan’s (1991) Research on the Santee Siouan Blackdog burial ground .............. 48 Chapter 4: Research Design, Sample, and Methods .......................................................... 53 4.1 Mortuary analysis ..................................................................................................... 54 4.2 Research Design ....................................................................................................... 56 4.3 The Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Worthy Park, Hampshire .................................. 57 4.5 Worthy Park Sample ................................................................................................ 61 4.5 Correspondence Analysis, De-trended Correspondence Analysis, and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis ............................................................................................................. 64 4.7 Summary .................................................................................................................. 73 Chapter 5: Analysis and Discussion .................................................................................. 74 5.1 Analysis 1: All Variables Intact ............................................................................... 74 iv 5.2 Analysis 2: Sexing categories removed.................................................................... 78 5.3 Analysis 3: All biological variables removed .......................................................... 82 5.4 Analysis 4: Material Culture variables only ............................................................. 86 5.5 Analysis 5: Age variables removed .......................................................................... 90 5.6 Discussion ................................................................................................................ 94 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 105 References Cited .............................................................................................................. 112 Appendix A ...................................................................................................................... 143 A.1 Grave description .................................................................................................. 143 A.2 Biological description ............................................................................................ 146 A.3 Artefact classes ...................................................................................................... 148 Appendix B ...................................................................................................................... 150 Appendix C ...................................................................................................................... 161 v List of Figures Figure 1 Location of Hampshire County in England ........................................................ 58 Figure 2 Location of Kingsworthy within Hampshire ...................................................... 59 Figure 3 Map of the Worthy Park burial ground............................................................... 60 Figure 4 CA scatterplot graph of Table 1 ......................................................................... 66 Figure 5 Example of unmodified DCA scatterplot ........................................................... 70 Figure 6 Example of modified DCA scatterplot ............................................................... 71 Figure 7 DCA with all variables