Penny Bickle

Archaeological scientific methodologies, such as ancient DNA and isotopic analysis, have over the last fifteen years demonstrated that women moved more than men in European Prehistory. This has been interpreted as demonstrating wide-spread practices of patrilocality, on which models of social inequality are increasingly based. We thus identify a wide gap between recent models of prehistoric social organisation and the accounts of kinship and the diversity of motivations behind gendered mobility practices recorded in the anthropological literature. This workshop aims to stimulate new discussion and widen the interpretive possibilities for women?s movement in Prehistory, by considering how biological and social relatedness were experienced and materialized in prehistory. In doing so, it will explore how data from biological evidence and archaeological material culture can be combined; a major debate across the field of Anthropology, with relevance to issues of gender, identity, and reproduction. To be held at the Norwegian Institute in Rome, the workshop will bring together leading scholars from across the world researching kinship and gendered mobility in Archaeology, Bioarchaeology, Social Anthropology and Economics. Through targeted discussion focusing on the rich material culture and bioarchaeological datasets from European Prehistory, we will debate the conditions in which gendered mobility arose and work towards developing new frameworks for interpreting kinship from ancient DNA and isotopic analysis.