Someone expressed the sentiment a few days ago that feminist theory 
is “less relevant” to historical archaeology than military sites 
archaeology.  I expected a flurry of comments on this, but since no one 
else has mentioned it, I figured I’d go ahead and be the first to ask:

Since when is feminist theory less relevant to historical archaeology than 
military sites?  And how does one define relevance anyway?

It strikes me that feminist theory is actually more relevant to most 
archaeologists.  After all, gender is a social phenomenon that existed at 
all of the sites that we study (including military sites, even when they 
were occupied by single-sex populations), so all historical archaeologists 
should be (at least minimally) concerned with gender analysis.  On the 
other hand, knowledge of military sites archaeology is primarily relevant 
to those of us who deal with military sites—which is not all of us.  
Basically, I'm just saying that relevance is in the eye of the beholder.

But the proportional relevance of these two topics to historical 
archaeology is really beside the point.  Singling out the one session on 
feminist theory is a bit unfair (and seems, I might add, to have been 
intentionally provocative, since it was explicitly contrasted to the 
more “masculine” topic of military sites archaeology), since the problem 
is not that the feminist theory session was not scheduled for Sunday; the 
problem is that most of the military sites sessions were scheduled for 
Sunday.  It doesn’t make much sense that all of the sessions devoted to a 
particular topic would be scheduled at the same time, since it stands to 
reason that people interested in that topic would want to see all of those 
sessions (and would consider other sessions “less relevant” to their own 
scholarly interests).  So really, we should be complaining that the 
multiple military sites archaeology sessions were all scheduled for the 
same day/time block, instead of being spread out across the schedule.

I don’t want this post to be taken as a criticism of the planning 
committee, so I should note that this problem is not peculiar to the 
SHAs.  I’ve been to other conferences where, for instance, all of the 
public/community archaeology sessions were scheduled at the same time.  I 
don’t know why exactly this happens or what the solution is, since I’ve 
never been involved in planning the schedule for a large conference and 
therefore don’t know how the process actually works.  But it seems to me 
that this kind of problem could be avoided in the future.

Cheers,

Bob

-------------------
Robert C. Chidester
Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History
University of Michigan
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