Even your fingerprints are gendered
I’ve spent all day at a Zoom prehistory conference. Again. Last one on my schedule.
One of the most interesting talks was a woman who studies finger prints and marks on Iron Age clay pots.
She started by taking fingerprints from 350 modern people to make a baseline. Turns out, fingerprints are sexually dimorphic. I mean, yes, the taller you are the bigger your prints regardless of gender, but apparently you can tell the difference between the fingerprints of a large woman and a small man: the man’s ridges are thicker.
Then she had to calculate average height, which was 4% shorter in the Bronze Age and 6% shorter in the Iron Age. Agriculture shortened people (and lives) – less variety in the diet.
Finally, she had to take off another 6% for clay shrinkage during firing.
She studied two kinds of pots. The first were large cooking and storage pots that were decorated with finger-pokes. Some random, some in patterns. The second were roughly made, utilitarian troughs squished together and fired on the spot for the purposes of evaporating salt water into salt.
Turns out, the big pots were made and decorated entirely by women and children, some as young as five, and the salt troughs were slammed together entirely by men and teenage boys (the youngest was 12).
I love the mental image of Iron Age tots being encouraged to poke pots, randomly.
I hope the highly gendered roles stuck in some craws. Academics (I follow a lot of these same people on Twitter) are woke as hell these days.
June 18, 2021 — 6:12 pm
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