Shared Spaces and Divided Places: Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American Historical Landscape

Deborah Rotman and Ellen-Rose Savulis’s Shared Spaces and Divided Places: Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American Historical Landscape is an indispensable collection of essays that is among the first to seriously link gender and landscape research, two major emerging topics in historical archaeology, and to explore the relationship between the two.

The essays contained in this volume represent a range of human response to nature and space from historical to modern examples, from industrial to recreational sites, and from secular to religious purposes. Plantation slave communities discussed by Amy Young, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial analyzed by Patricia McGirr, a tin worker’s shop studied by Kenneth Lewis, Boston’s playgrounds discussed by Suzanne Spencer-Wood, a Massachusetts municipal water system examined by Susan Hautaniemi and Deborah Rotman, and a Shaker community assessed by Ellen-Rose Savulis—these studies all affirm the importance of gender in landscape research.

Landscapes represent unique as well as collective experiences, so it is not without cultural significance that landscapes have historically been codified as female. Landscape study is a relatively new focus of anthropological research: it seeks to explore the link between human behavior, the construction of gender, historical evidence, and the formation of the archaeological record. Shared Spaces and Divided Places represents an intersection of the study of landscape archaeology and space with the study of gender. By expanding the definition of landscape to include interior spaces, by challenging the equivocation of gendered space with feminized space, and by approaching the subject matter dialectically, the book promotes an in-depth understanding of the issues that arise when scholars apply gender issues to the study of space manipulation.

Deborah L. Rotman received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Purdue University. Her articles have been published in Historical Archaeology, the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and the African-American Archaeology Newsletter. Ellen-Rose Savulis received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act compliance coordinator for the Springfield Science Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous technical reports on various aspects of historical archaeology in the northeastern United States.