Gender identity isn’t always based on the binary model of biological sex, new research published at Cambridge Archaeological Journal indicates that this fluidity may have existed since prehistoric times.
After seeing the manifesto of the fight against gender discrimination, a team of researchers analyzed the contents of more than 1,200 graves from seven different sites in Central Europe. The results demonstrate that up to 10% could belong to non-binary individuals.
“Research into the prehistoric genre has sparked a lively debate over the last few decades, with one main point of contention being that whether or not the prehistoric genre respected a binary model and to what extent“, write the researchers. To try to solve this conundrum, they looked for correlations between gender and biological sex among 1,252 people who lived between the Early Neolithic and the Late Bronze Age, or in the historical period from 5,500 to 1,200 BC
“We found that in six out of seven burial sites there is a persistent minority of individuals whose determined sex does not coincide with gender that the respective kits should report”, report the researchers. But how were gender and sex identified?
Sex was determined on the basis of osteological analyzes made publicwhile the genre was established on the basis of the typology of the grave goods present in the same tombs.
Specifically, the case of a biological male from a site in Germany who was buried with is described a headdress made of snail shells and other objects associated with the female gender. In contrast at another site, a biologically female skeleton was buried with male grave goods such as a stone axe, fish hook, boar tusks and flint blades.
Commenting on these findings, Dr Eleonore Pape, lead author of the study, explained that “historically, we can no longer frame non-binary people as ‘exceptions’ to a rulebut rather as ‘minorities’, which could have been formally recognised, protected and even revered”.
Overall, sex and gender matched for 26.5% of the skeletons, but they were contradictory in 2.9% of cases. The remaining 70.6% of individuals were ultimately excluded from the analysis as their sex or gender could not be determined. So as the skeletons found in Pompeii teach us, our past is just waiting to be discovered.
“We conclude that the available data, despite potential biases, support the hypothesis that some degree of gender variation was formally accepted in the burial rite of central European prehistoric societies,” say the researchers.