NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES IN PAST POPULATIONS: SOME KEY ISSUES PRESENTED IN THE WOMENSOFAR ANR PROJECT
Résumé
The WomenSOFar ANR project (Individual life histories and WOMEN Status at the Onset of FARming. Bioarchaeological perspectives in the French and Mediterranean Prehistoric context) proposes to discuss the place of women in first farmers’ communities by using a multidisciplinary approach. It aims at deciphering how individuals move, eat, care for and work and combines previous and new dataset on bioanthropology, biogeochemistry, bioarchaeology and archaeology. The project focuses on specific questions as: 1- Does maternal/allomaternal investment and food transfers differ according to their own experience and local subsistence economy? 2- Does parental/alloparental investment lead to female vs. male social distinction as early as childhood? Does a timing/pattern exist to get the role of “female” or “male” into these communities? 3- Why do women migrate differently from men and how does it influences their diet and its diversity? 4- Are women involved in specific activities affecting their health and morphology? Does this exist in connection with their place of origin? Does it have an impact on their diet/the emergence of their childhood socialization? The project investigates human remains and their cultural contexts from several sites located in different natural environments in France and North Africa, mainly dated to the 5th millennium BCE. Skeletal and dental records, cross-sectional geometry of long bones, multi-element isotope ratios, funerary records, dental calculus micro-remains and microbiome and kinship data will be compared. Examples of previous researches using this multidisciplinary approach illustrates the risk/gain of such study; among other things, data allowed to identify female individuals with specific life history and mobility pattern and male individuals with possible “disadvantaged” status. WomenSOFar expects to provide a new vision of the diversity and mutability of women status in Prehistoric times at the onset of major societal disruptions.