Sabina Cveček. "Enthrone, dethrone, rethrone? The multiple lives of matrilineal kinship in Aegean prehistory." Archaeological Dialogues (2023), 30, pp. 102–122.

The archaeologist Anna Roosevelt sent me this article, which aggravated both of us (now that I've also read it). I've posted a pdf of it below, along with my audio commentary analyzing some of the omissions, distortions and misrepresentations.

But first I'll summarize some of my objections to this article: Cveček is dead set against the concept of "female rule" (or gynaecocracy, as Bachofen formulated it, calling it an evolutionary stage). She accuses a broad swath of feminist scholars of adhering to his definitions (and those of other 19th century male scholars), while ignoring what we actually say about matricultural societies—which is that most of them are egalitarian and should not be conceptualized as a reverse of patriarchal domination.

Cveček appears unable to distinguish between "female rule" and female authority (in cultures that do not foreclose male spheres or offices). She is keen, as she openly and explicitly states, to "dethrone" this idea (the one she repeatedly conflates with Bachofen's) and to prevent it from being "rethroned." She uses stigmatizing language throughout, and fails to give an honest account of the work of the feminist scholars she criticizes. She mentions a handful, but only in passing, and with the most shallow analysis—if any.

Worse, she reserves the use of "feminist" only for scholars / archaeologists who challenge the idea that matricultural societies exist, or have existed in the past. In fact, at one point she speaks of the need to deconstruct "quasi-feminist ideology."

There is no mention of Jacquetta Hawkes, one of the most prominent early female archaeologists, who looked at the prominence of women in the iconography of the neolithic and of bronze age Crete. It goes without saying that the very early work of Zelia Nuttal in Mexico is omitted. Cveček mentions Peggy Sanday, one of the first prominent women anthropologists to support the idea of matriarchies, but gives her work short shrift. She does not describe Kathleen Gough's perspective at all (while citing her co-authored book). She cites Heide Göttner-Abendroth and myself once each, but does not engage with our ideas, which are ignored in her broadbrush claim that matriarchy must mean "female rule." She does not mention at all Joan Marler, the leading exponent of Gimbutas' work, not even in the bibliography.

Cveček ridicules "female rule" and "matriarchy" (despite the embrace of that term by many Indigenous people) and "Mother Goddess." (In this she closely follows Cynthia Eller, though she has some inkling that Eller went off the rails in claiming transhistorical mail domination. (That's where she cites my critical review.) And follows an entire cohort of scoffing men, like Lawrence Osborne, who penned gems like this: ‘False Goddess: Despite what believers in prehistoric matriarchy proclaim, women never ruled the Earth.’ [Accessed June 28, 2000; alas, no longer online.]

Cveček characterizes the repudiation of matriarchy as the position of "feminist archaeologists of the 60s and 70s," without recognizing, except in a brief allusion to sexism, how difficult women's position in archaeology was, nor how conditional, even stigmatized, it remains in the academy. And this has always gone to the hostile reception of matricultural interpretations.

Cveček charges her targets with insufficient familiarity with anthropology and ethnography (an astounding claim in relation to Gimbutas, who was far more versed in folk tradition than most archaeologists). Yet Cveček herself uncritically cites problematic anthropological works, like G. P. Murdock's database, which Peggy Sanday described as flawed and "discredited." At the Matriarchal Studies conference in Luxembourg in 2004 Sanday explained that its “data” was collected before 1956 by white men “who had no idea what was going on” in the cultures they were studying. Much of it was collected in the 30’s, when ethnology was riddled with racial and gender bias. Sanday told me (at this same conference) that no anthropologist would take seriously conclusions based on this bad information. Even its creator, George Peter Murdock, "later came to recognize that it was problematic." Sanday had direct knowledge of this, as she worked with him for decades. There's a special irony in Sanday herself being given short shrift, while at the same time airing complaints about proponents of "matriarchy," as Sanday was then calling it, being unfamiliar with anthropology.

Other errors pop up in Cveček's portrayal of the roots of matriarchal theory. She credits Tylor with introducing the word "matriarchy" in 1896; but Matilda Joslyn Gage had already published a book about the historical importance of the "matriarchate" in 1890. Looking further, I find that the Online Etymological Dictionary shows that "matriarchy" is attested from 1881, while the OED gives it as 1885.

It's curious, too, that Cveček hews to an "all genders" framing, but is way behind the times in using the offensive term "berdache" in a footnote about gender variance in North America.

As for Gimbutas, Cveček insists she was influenced by those pesky 19th century scholars, ignoring her own clear account of observing the contrast of the bronze age sites she studied early in her career, with the neolithic villages of a much earlier era. Gimbutas noticed that those cultural horizons were dramatically different, in their implications for women, and what they showed about militarized societies versus peaceful and unfortified villages. She did not come in, as has been frequently charged, with a feminist agenda to prove female power, but drew conclusions based on her observations that the very ancient societies differed markedly from the violent bronze age polities, in multiple ways—but especially in the pervasive female representations.

And here we come to iconography, a bugbear for Cveček, who is suspicious of interpreting female symbolism as having any significance. She questions that that it predominates (following Meskell and others, she refers to "supposedly female figurines"). She calls into question whether cultural patterns of representation can have any significance as a reflection of social organization or values. So what if ceremonial artifacts are primarily female effigy vessels and altar stands? Apparently, we are not to infer that they could represent ancestral women or matrilineages formed around them.

Contra the wall of denial that the figurines are predominantly female (by Meskell, Tringham, Conkey, and others), the Pilling figurines from Creek Canyon, Utah, offer a perspective on the actual situation. The is one male in a loincloth (small, possibly a son) and another figure with no sexed attributes whatsoever. The largest and most elaborately arrayed figurines are definitely all females. In Southwest Asia the preponderance of females is even greater than in North America, and again nearly all the most elaborate figures are of women.

(I just looked up Meskell's article on the figurines, and find in this one that she fails to even tabulate sex (just using "human" or "anthropomorphic" in her tables). In one case she describes "two very small unsexed human clay figurines with protruding stomachs and buttocks," that have no penis, and most likely represented girls.

There's no need to argue against Cveček's idea that anthropological insights should be brought to bear on archaeology. Of course; and that is what we've been doing. I'd add that ethnographic literature (as opposed to the more theoretical approach of anthropology) can shed light on ancient finds, though that requires reading through male and European biases. Even more important is direct testimony from Indigenous societies, which can suggest connections that might not occur to archaeologists.

The problem with what Cveček is saying is that anthropology all too often lacks a historical perspective, without which its categorizations can end up projecting a static picture of human society.

I observe patriarchalization as a historical process, a set of overlays that accumulate across time, in a variety of ways. This is not an evolutionary schema, because patriarchy is not an advance, and because it happens in different ways in different places and times. (Cveček admits this possibility when she momentarily refers to societies that were once matrilineal but are no longer.)

The main element in the process is the colonization of women's procreative power, sexuality (male sexual access) and labor. (The favored term has been "reproductive labor," but that implies too narrow a scope, since women's work encompasses work outside the home, involving provision as well as preparation of food, clothing, and in many cases shelter, as well as manufacturing—in its original sense—ceramics, baskets, leather containers, bedding and furniture.)

Here I'll just emphasize that there is no formula, no sequence, no single explanation for the cultural transformations of patriarchalization. There are convergent factors, not all of them always present. The rise of class systems, social hierarchies, does correlate with patriarchy, but cannot be a first or sole cause, since some Indigenous societies do exhibit a sexual double standard. More to the point, it is men directly colonizing women's bodies (including by capture) that forms the core of pariarchy.

But we'll talk about that in the May discussion sessions.

One last thought about what Cveček has done in this contradictory and often misleading article: she has made visible how, still, the imperative to derogate feminist scholarship and thought about social models other than patriarchy—matricultures in particular—remains entrenched in academia. It flies under several banners:

Feminists made up a golden age that they wanted to believe in, but is not supported by the facts;

These outmoded ways of thinking start and end with 19th century white men (Bachofen, Morgan, Engels) and their evolutionary schemes;

The real feminists were postmodernist archaeologists who contested any and all models of Mother Law society;

Gimbutas, benighted by a feminist agenda, projected a matristic interpretation on the egalitarian societies she studied, but nothing to see there, the iconography means nothing (even though the genomic vindication of her theory of IE origins warrants a reluctant acknowledgement of... something, but this author won't say what);

The agenda is still to call a halt to thinking about matricultures, or oppression of the female sex: let's talk about "all genders" and gender-egalitarian societies, bypassing both social organization by motherhoods and material exploitation of women's procreative power and labor.

Cveček will just pretend that Gimbutas changed her mind about "gender-egalitarianism," instead of that being what her model of matristic societies said all along. Her attempts to explain them to an audience hostile to "matriarchy" are misinterpreted, because their context is misunderstood.

There's a whiff of embarassment in this article, whose author knows that Gimbutas was treated with such contempt, but alludes only briefly to the sexist ridicule that she endured, with determination and grace. Cveček actually perpetuates that ridicule, calling the work of Gimbutas "infamous."

It's not enough to call for a reconsideration of her work, at the very end of the article, after such a cavalier misrepresentation of it. The forcefield of structural bias is still holding, still in force. Adhere to it, or pay the cost.

All right. Here is my more detailed critique of the article, in three audio parts.