Studying Pre-colonial Gendered Use of Space in the Arctic: Spatial Analysis of Ceramics in Northwestern Alaska
Sponsor
This research was supported by the Office of Polar Programs, Division of Arctic Social Sciences, at the National Science Foundation. Our thanks to Anna Kerttula de Echave for her dedication to this project and to Arctic research in general. Field work in 2009–11 was supported by a grant to J.F. Hoffecker, O.K. Mason, C.M. Darwent, and N.H. Bigelow (ARC-0755725). Field work in 2016–17 was supported by a collaborative grant to C. Alix and N.H. Bigelow (ARC-1523160), O.K. Mason (ARC-1523205), S. Anderson (ARC-1523059), and D.H. O’Rourke (ARC-1523059). Field research was also funded by a grant from the Archaeology Commission of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by a chaire CNRS/University to C. Alix, and by grants from the UC Davis Committee on Research to C.M. Darwent.
Published In
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
Document Type
Citation
Publication Date
6-1-2020
Abstract
Activities and production among Iñupiaq peoples were primarily divided by gender. This gendered division of labor also extended to a spatial segregated pattern of the household in some Arctic cultures, while others had a gender-integrated spatial pattern. There are very few archaeological studies of gender, or studies of gendered space, in the Arctic. We study gendered use of space in pre-colonial Northwest Alaska through a spatial analysis of ceramic, and other gendered artifact, distributions in Thule-era houses from Cape Espenberg, Alaska. We used the HDBSCAN (Hierarchical Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm in Python to analyze and compare distributions of gendered artifacts. We found no clear evidence for gender-segregated use of space, or for specific activity areas. This does not mean that gender-segregated use of space or activity areas did not exist, we simply found little evidence supporting these practices due, at least in part, to issues of sample size, house size, and the role of secondary and post-deposition processes in shaping the ceramic assemblage and distribution. Our analysis identified several interesting patterns of behavior, particularly related to site-formation processes. Further, this study illustrates the potential of Python for conducting archaeological spatial analysis.
Rights
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101165
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/33412
Citation Details
Braymer-Hayes, K., Anderson, S. L., Alix, C., Darwent, C. M., Darwent, J., Mason, O. K., & Norman, L. Y. (2020). Studying pre-colonial gendered use of space in the Arctic: Spatial analysis of ceramics in Northwestern Alaska. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 58, 101165. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Volume 58, 2020,