Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, has been at the forefront of efforts to glean insights from ancient cloth, scouring archaeological sites and museum collections for textiles that could illuminate the lives of women in early North Atlantic societies. Her work has shown that the Vikings never would have expanded their known world without the women’s work of weaving.
Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting. Another reason is that early archaeologists were mostly men and more interested in men’s work than in women’s. As a result, our understanding of past cultures is woefully incomplete.
Except from Scientific American article “The Power of Viking Women”, October 2022. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/viking-textiles-show-women-had-tremendous-power/
The Applied Anthropologist 