Ancient Peruvian Weapons and Evidence for Early Women Hunters

These projectile points were discovered in a 9,000 year-old grave at Wilamaya Patjxa in southern Peru. Archaeologists immediately diagnosed the burial items as part of a hunter’s toolkit and assumed that the person they were buried with was a high-status male from an ancient hunter-gatherer community. However, DNA analysis revealed that the hunter was actually a young woman. And the thing is, archaeologists are increasingly deciding that it was more common than not for hunter-gathering cultures to include and even expect women to hunt for animals.

In a paper published in PLOS ONE last month, authors Abigail Anderson, Sophia Chilczuk, et al., did a meta-analysis of 63 foraging societies around the world and found that 79% had documentation on women hunting. While some of these women were opportunistic hunters, others planned out their activities ahead of time. Many examples existed of women who hunted large game. This study supplements research which has also found that women in fact have hunted for animals across history.

This idea is quite a contrast from the 20th-century argument that in ancient cultures, women were the gatherers and men the hunters. In fact, this bias has led to numerous instances in which archaeologists presupposed the gender of humans buried with hunting equipment to be male. The recent advancements in DNA analysis have enabled us to check this assumption.