Quote from: tekla on April 07, 2011, 02:47:51 PM
An archeologist is not a scientist in the true sense.
Probably not, I seen other of the scientists do those 'slight errors' as well. Transgender people were known from the Native American cultures and their cousins the central Asian tribes such as the Kirghiz, probably from all of the way back to the end of the last ice age. I was given a text of that history to read by my therapist back in the late '70s. It described how a transwoman comes of age through the rites to be accepted as a woman. The decision by the transgender MtoF was made during the early teens. The person took herbs known to have feminizing effects (phytoestrogens) and involved a rite that included that person abrading the area behind the scrotum with a sharp twig until it bled, indicating menses, thus the start of womanhood.
The early European trappers observed the phenomenon of the feminized "squaw men" doing the women's chores and in some cases wet nursing the tribe's babies. Some of those were even married to a male warrior.
A speaker was at my club meeting last fall and he discussed the crescent shaped mounds found in the northern tier of states and southern Canada (c 800-3000 BCE). He said that the tribal shamens were considered and was usually women, even the males. Some of those males did dress as women as well. The speaker mentioned the word "transgender" in that vein. Hollywood cinema used the European bias and had the old men with a few screws missing as the tribal shamans. The fat crescent symbol represents the Moon (menstral period roughly follows the phases of the Moon, in most cultures menses is tied to the Moon) and the sow bear. The bear going in her den in fall, then emerging with cubs in the spring as a symbol of fertility. The speaker showed a slide of a bear browsing. It had a fat crescent shape with all fours on the ground, head down and the back had a high arc. A lot of those artifacts found had the bear carvings shaped as a fat crescent Moon. Some of those existing tribes in that area today have the cultural memory of that.
There will be more of these findings as the biases of the past (which I call "Holy Roman") gives way to other explanations of the past cultures, a lot of those will probably be as inaccurate as those given in the past. Egyptology is one of those in which those biases reign. 20 years ago you can tell what nationality the archaelogical survey camp was, not by the languages, but by the theories those people spell out while they were digging. The French, British and German camp theories were all different and the main ones at that time.
We must be careful with our own transgender biases as well.
Joelene
