I'd like to explain my approach to recovering cultural memory of women's history and heritages. This is a process of searching, digging under surfaces, sorting, sifting, examining, sometimes tossing, and comparing. Looking for detailed and specific knowledge is one side of it, but pattern recognition is important: seeing connections and commonalities, as well as differences.

It is crucial to evaluate our sources (for accuracy, bias, or what might be missing from them). What we were taught as History is loaded with bias, not only male bias against women and acknowledging female spheres of power, or 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 variant people, fat people, disabled or old people.

Over the decades, many times I would find a nugget, not much information, or maybe even bad quality information as 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, can turn things around, or they can illuminate patterns we have already observed, and deepen understanding.

In recent decades, Indigenous voices have become far more accessible, carrying a rich load of important knowledge and commentary that questions assumptions (as well as misrepresentations of facts, and omissions) that have been baked in to "Western Civ" accounts. 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 also living traditions, which often shed light on cultures long gone. The manuscript shown above is from the Dongba script of the Naxi people in SW China: not something you ordinarily see.

What I post here may seem to jump around a lot, because this course is based on my ongoing research, and that includes what comes over the digital transom. But what I plan to do here is share images from the Archives with explanatory text (and sometimes links), and also excerpts from my forthcoming book Pythias, Melissae and Pharmakides: Women in Hellenic Religion.

I try to make the language as accessible as possible (often a translation process from the academese specialized lit), but if you don't understand something, please feel free to ask. Others probably have the same question. Comments are 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, central California, land that has been occupied but never ceded, and I pay respects to the custodians of these lands, ancestral and current.