In the four corners region of New Mexico, a population of ancestral Pueblo people settled for a few centuries around the first millennium CE and built magnificent structures and created beautiful pottery like this pitcher (dating between 1075-1150 CE), fostering a relatively large population in the arid region. Archaeologists call this the Chaco Canyon civilization, and a recent study challenges ideas about the work done there by men and women.
Because the Pueblo people whom Spanish Europeans encountered after 1500 considered the making of pottery a woman’s job, historians have tended to accept this gendered division of labor as the same back in 1000 CE. The fact that women and the domestic labor of cooking remain connected in modern culture added to this assumption.
However, a paper from 2019 proposes otherwise. A team of archaeologists examined 985 ceramic shards from a settlement associated with the Chaco civilization. They looked at fingerprint sizes in the pottery and applied statistical analysis to determine the gender of the ceramic artisans. The width between ridges on fingerprints tends to be larger in adult males than adult females. With such a large sample size, the authors propose that statistical probability of the genders of the potters can be known.
Chaco Canyon’s Pottery and Gendered Work
Sources: “Reconstructing sexual divisions of labor from fingerprints on Ancestral Puebloan Pottery,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America_, 116 no. 25, 2019, pp12220-12225
