Margaret Conkey

Margaret W. Conkey (born 1943) is an American archaeologist and academic, who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées. Her research focuses on cave art produced during this period. Conkey is noted as one of the first archaeologists to explore the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies, using feminist theory to reinterpret images and objects from the Paleolithic Era or the late Ice Age.

She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology (formerly, Class of 1960 Professor and Director of the Archaeological Research Facility) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the years she has continued her dedication to feminist perspectives in archaeology, having organized major conferences, editing books and numerous articles on the topic. and shortly got the chance to go to Jordan - in what is now the West Bank - to work in biblical archaeology. When she then submitted graduate applications to the anthropology departments at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, she was told she needed to take a year of undergraduate anthropology (which was not available at Mount Holyoke College) before they could grant her a final admission. She and a friend then spent a summer in New York, where she obtained a job with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as a librarian and eventually became a grant analyst. When accepted at the Oriental Institute, she went back to Chicago to attend and work a part-time job as an editorial assistant at Current Anthropology. She points out that the animals depicted in painting on the walls and the animal remains in food refuse pits nearby are often different species - this implies that their paintings likely carried more cultural or social meaning than just being about food.

The combined interests in prehistoric art, especially that of Paleolithic Europe, and gender and feminist archaeology, has also involved recent research and publication concerning "goddess" figurines, especially of ancient Europe, in collaboration with Berkeley colleague Ruth Tringham.These investigate how the archaeological stories about these figurines have been taken up (often problematically) by contemporary popular culture.

Research in the French Pyrénées Conkey has been carrying out the field research project titled “Between the Caves” in the French Pyrénées since 1993, focused on the Paleolithic era and on contextualizing the rich archaeological evidence of art and material culture found in the region's caves. one in which people in the Paleolithic seemed to just land in cave sites, and then suddenly showed up at some other site. Archaeologists acknowledged that these people obtained their food from out in the open and that they did not live in the caves year-round, but they also seemed to think that activity wasn't going to be interesting or archaeologically fruitful. Yet in the early 1970s, American archaeologists were using a new open-air method of surveying the outside landscape for archaeological artifacts. This method hadn't yet been used in Europe, so Conkey suggested a new project in which they would be looking for materials - for Paleolithic research, stone tools - out on the landscape as opposed to within caves. “They said, “You won’t find anything.” I said, “Why won’t I find anything?” They said, “Nobody’s really found anything or reported anything.” I said, “Has anybody looked systematically?” They said, “Well, no.” They thought I was nuts.” - Margaret Conkey Yet, evidence does exists that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past. For example, seasonal occupation evidence can sometimes be inferred from animal bones. Looking at found animal teeth, it can be, archaeologists can tell at what season of the year the animals were killed. Other animals are only available at certain times of the year - like fish who spawn in certain seasons. Overall, it's clear that people were in caves for maybe a couple of months a year at the most, and almost all of these caves are described by archaeologists as seasonal (occupied in the autumn or winter months).

Ultimately, she hopes that this will help them better understand the social geography and landscapes of Paleolithic art. It is also a project about fundamental archaeological survey, about survey methods, and about distributional archaeology. When in Jordan, for example, she wasn't able to do any digging in the field - because she was a young female, and all the hired workers were older men.

In 2009, she received the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence from Berkeley, for her work for diversity and equal opportunity. She has also won the Distinguished Teaching Award (1996) and the Award for Educational Initiatives (2001) and has leveraged the start-up funds for a Multi-Media Teaching Laboratory for the Department of Anthropology.

Publications "Archaeology and the Study of Gender" (1984) (With Janet D. Spector) Engendering Archaeology:Women and Prehistory (1991) (With Joan M. Gero) The Uses of Style in Archaeology (New Directions in Archaeology) (1993) (With Christine Ann Hastorf) Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology (Vol. 26: October 1997) (With Joan M. Gero) Symbolism and the Cultural Landscape (1980) (With Lester B Rowntree) Ancient Godesses: The Myths and Evidence (1998) (With Ruth Tringham, Lyn Meskell, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Karel van der Toorn, Fekri A. Hassan, Mary E. Voyatzis, Caroline Malone) Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol (1997) (As editor, with Olga Soffer, Deborah Stratmann, Nina G. Jablonski) Perspectives on Anthropological Collections from the American Southwest: Proceedings of a Symposium (Anthropological Research Papers) (As editor, with Ann Lane Hedlund)

Filmography Year Title Role Notes2002 Sex BC Herself TV Mini-Series documentary from Optomen Television