Perceiving the Women of the Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK). ; Percevoir les femmes de la culture rubanée ; Perceiving the Women of the Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK).: Contributions and Limits of a Gender Approach in Neolithic Archaeology ; Percevoir les femmes de la culture rubanée: Apports et limites d’une approche de genre en archéologie néolithique

International audience ; The invisibility of women in history and archaeology is frequently emphasised. Studying gender is one of the ways to go beyond this observation as social sciences regularly state that gender systems shape the entire social body. Indeed, roles and gender relations between men and women and social groups are regulated by norms transmitted by educative systems and religious doctrines. These norms and rules permit the functioning of the political systems and are transcribed in institutions and deployed in social organisation. Thus, the study of gender leads to the study of society as a whole. Moreover, the existence of gender is mainly material. The differences between women and men are substantiated by clothing and jewellery, division of labour, places and spaces, bodily postures, technical tools and process, etc. Based on this framework, a methodology is proposed to investigate gender in archaeology and, in particular, Neolithic women from the Linearbandkeramik culture. It consists in defining the aspects of gender perceptible in the archaeological data, then to confront them with the manifestations of gender reported by the social sciences and thus to evaluate the gaps between the “living” gender and the gender as it appears in the archaeological data. The results allow us to highlight several women groups, by comparing with other social groups, notably the group of men with adze. The latter is the most cohesive with its own traits in terms of diet, local origin and roles. Women are more diverse and further study is needed to identify the diversity of the LBK women. In addition, this study shows that archaeology gives only a very incomplete picture of gender. In terms of the division of labour by sex, only a few tasks have been highlighted. Many other aspects, such as sexual rights and lineage systems, the gender of spaces, religion, cult, myths, narratives and cosmogony, which are central elements of gender regimes, will likely remain unknown. However, there is room for improvement as ...