This grant permits Drs. Gero and Conkey to convene a group of 18 established reseachers for a five day conference: "Women and Production in Prehistory." Fifteen of the participants will present substantive research papers and the remaining three will serve as discussants. The specific topics include: the allocation of gender roles in subsistence production; the organization of labor for commodity production; gender related factors in spatial differention of labor and the relationships in prehistory of gender and status. The conference will be held in a locale which allows for focused interaction among the participants. This conference is important because it should provide a new and more balanced insight into prehistoric social organization and how archaeologists can work to understand it. Traditionally, and probably because the majority of practicing archaeologists are men, women have been relatively invisible and there has been little consideration of the roles which they played in prehistory. This conference will not only help to right this bias but also try to plot out a future research agenda. This project is important not only for what it shall reveal about the past but also for what it will tell us about how archaeologists work. An examination of this kind teaches much about implicit, usually unconscious, assumptions which archaeologists hold when they conduct research. The contribution thus will be methodological as well as substantive.
