Actual archaeologist in the tumbl house!
So it is a very common misconception that you can tell the biological sex of a skeleton by their bone structure alone.
It is far more complicated than that.
The reality is that these biological markers are so subtle and so inconsequential that you will not be able to tell the sex of the skeleton by simply eyeballing the pelvis. We have numerous examples of skeletons that were initially thought to be women that were in reality men and vice versa.
We try to determine sex or gender presentation by grave goods. The type of items left with the deceased generally tell us so much more about who that person was than what the skeleton alone could. But this practice is also flawed.
From grave goods we can determine the deceased's:
- Class and occupation: if they carry ceremonial weaponry, generally we class them as warriors, nobles or kings, these usually intersect, particularly for ancient cultures that focused on warfare and expansion.
- Age and location: grave goods can place us at a rough date for the deceased. Typology, or dating an object by its physical characteristics can tell us when in history this person exists. Goods were often traded widely across cultures so a large collection of Cypriot pottery in say Ashkelon tells us that this person had access to a wide trade network and probably had the funds for the real deal.
What grave goods can't tell us definitively:
Sex and gender: we can get a rough idea of their societal role, but what we must remember is the ancient world did not have the same gender roles as we do in the modern day. I feel that it is reductive to try to stretch our modern understanding of the binary to the ancient world. Not when we often do not have enough context in ancient sources to back that up.
How do we determine the sex of a skeleton? The most helpful tool we have is writing. It's always writing. This brings me to the next major issue.
Writing is present, but it is currently undecipherable. A great example is Linear A or the Minoan writing system. Evidence points to women having a role in society that differs quite starkly from that of their later Classical counterparts. However, we can only extrapolate this based off of artifacts found mostly in one single area on one major site. We have writing but we have not found a translation key so we must treat these hypotheses, as likely as they may be, with a healthy dose of scepticism.
There is also DNA testing, this is often difficult on more ancient remains due to the relative decay rate. However, it is extremely helpful when we can get a decent sample.
What I'm trying to say here is that it isn't truly possible in most cases to determine the sex or gender of ancient remains. We can only really go on contextual clues that the archaeological evidence gives. We must treat all claims with scepticism. There is no smoking gun.
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