I will say off the bat: it's not an uncommon practice to sex burials (i.e. assign a sex to the remains) based on grave goods. Skeletons are often not well-preserved, which makes sexing on the basis of osteological measurements difficult if not impossible -- and those measurements are a matter of statistical probability, anyway, not clear-cut divisions. A pelvic notch that's on the wide side might be a woman who hasn't given birth, or it might be a man who just had kinda wide hips. Etc. Nowadays we have the option of higher-tech approaches . . . but those cost a fair bit of money, which means they aren't always used. Grave goods have the advantage of being easy.
And, of course, the disadvantage of being a self-reinforcing circle. Spear = man. How do we know this? Because men were buried with spears! So in that light, yes, absolutely, it's important to set the record straight here about the fact that the person with the lance was female and the one with the jewelry was male.
Having said that, the article kind of goes flying off into the deep end of "yay feminist history." The fact that the Greeks talked about how liberated and licentious Etruscan women were does not in fact mean that Etruscan society was wonderfully egalitarian. In fact, there's a time-honored tradition of talking about how liberated those foreign women are as a way of smearing the foreigners -- often in great exaggeration of reality. The art makes it likely that yes, Etruscan women had more freedom to hang out in public than Greek women did, but the rest of it? Much more dubious. As for Livy: it isn't like the Romans had a really high opinion of their early kings, so I wouldn't take him as an unbiased source when he tells us Tullia drove a chariot over her father.
I do think it's important to ask ourselves, "what's the significance of the arrangement of the grave goods?" Because it is unquestionably interesting that he had something that's usually coded as female, and she had something coded male. I find that fascinating. But leaping to the assumption that it was obviously her spear and that means she was a strong emancipated woman . . . that's going a bit far.
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I will say off the bat: it's not an uncommon practice to sex burials (i.e. assign a sex to the remains) based on grave goods. Skeletons are often not well-preserved, which makes sexing on the basis of osteological measurements difficult if not impossible -- and those measurements are a matter of statistical probability, anyway, not clear-cut divisions. A pelvic notch that's on the wide side might be a woman who hasn't given birth, or it might be a man who just had kinda wide hips. Etc. Nowadays we have the option of higher-tech approaches . . . but those cost a fair bit of money, which means they aren't always used. Grave goods have the advantage of being easy.
And, of course, the disadvantage of being a self-reinforcing circle. Spear = man. How do we know this? Because men were buried with spears! So in that light, yes, absolutely, it's important to set the record straight here about the fact that the person with the lance was female and the one with the jewelry was male.
Having said that, the article kind of goes flying off into the deep end of "yay feminist history." The fact that the Greeks talked about how liberated and licentious Etruscan women were does not in fact mean that Etruscan society was wonderfully egalitarian. In fact, there's a time-honored tradition of talking about how liberated those foreign women are as a way of smearing the foreigners -- often in great exaggeration of reality. The art makes it likely that yes, Etruscan women had more freedom to hang out in public than Greek women did, but the rest of it? Much more dubious. As for Livy: it isn't like the Romans had a really high opinion of their early kings, so I wouldn't take him as an unbiased source when he tells us Tullia drove a chariot over her father.
I do think it's important to ask ourselves, "what's the significance of the arrangement of the grave goods?" Because it is unquestionably interesting that he had something that's usually coded as female, and she had something coded male. I find that fascinating. But leaping to the assumption that it was obviously her spear and that means she was a strong emancipated woman . . . that's going a bit far.