My approach to recovering cultural memory of women's history and heritages: it's a process of searching, digging under surfaces, sorting, sifting, examining (sometimes tossing), comparing and discovery. Looking for detailed and specific knowledge is part of it, but pattern recognition is important: seeing connections and commonalities, as well as differences.

It's crucial to evaluate our sources (for accuracy, bias, or missing pieces and perspectives). What they teach as History has been loaded with bias, not only male bias against women, against acknowledging female spheres of power, or systemic oppression of the female sex, but also Eurocentrism, white supremacy, and colonial attitudes; class bias, ethnic and religious bias, homophobia, and negative attitudes toward gender non-compliant people, fat people, disabled or old people.

Over the decades, many times I'd find a nugget, not much information, or maybe even bad quality information, as emerged when more knowledge became available. Sometimes those nuggets were the tip of a very large iceberg, with information withheld because the authors, editors, or other gatekeepers felt threatened or challenged by it. Or they ignored it because their own prejudices led them to dismiss it as unimportant, insignificant under the shadow of Great (White) Men.

This is why what I uncover in the Suppressed Histories Archives is provisional, subject to revision and correction. New stories, or new context, better translations, recent archaeological or genome discoveries, often turns things around. They can also illuminate patterns we have already observed, and deepen understanding.

Sculpted shell from the Hohokam culture ("those who have gone" in Tohono O'odham, the Pima and Papago language of southern Arizon)

In recent decades, Indigenous voices have become far more accessible, carrying a rich lode of important knowledge and commentary that questions assumptions (as well as misrepresentations of facts, and omissions) that have been baked into accounts from "Western Civ." The investigation of Black history has been going on since the 1800s, and brings to bear critiques of talking about "the slaves" as if a people's oppressed status defined them.

So here we look at many forms of the cultural record: rock art as well as inscriptions of rulers, Indigenous orature and not only historic literature, archaeology and living traditions which often shed light on cultures long gone.

What I post here may seem to jump around a lot, because this course is based on my ongoing research, including what comes over the digital transom. I share images from the Archives with explanatory text (and sometimes links), and also excerpts from my books and digital media

I try to make the language as accessible as possible (often a process of translation from specialized lit writen in academese). If you don't understand something, please feel free to ask. Others probably have the same question. Comments are always welcome (and I'll try to remember to enable them on all pages).

This is coming to you from Chochenyo Ohlone country, in the northeastern reaches of San Francisco Bay, west-central California, land that has been occupied but never ceded, and I pay respects to the custodians of these lands, ancestral and current.