Did Prehistoric Women Have the Right to Roam? Penny Bickle, Jennifer French and Rachel Pope
Event details
It’s easy to see moving around from place to place as a modern invention that came with trains, planes and the daily commute. Yet through history, adventurers and merchants have always travelled.
Often this can appear to be the domain of men, discovering new lands, waging war and trading exotic goods. However, our expert speakers, archaeologists Penny Bickle of the University of York and, Jennifer French and Rachel Pope of Liverpool University, will put forward an alternative view. Examining case studies of women who travelled through prehistory, they will focus on new archaeological evidence for understanding who moved and why.
Join Penny, Jennifer and Rachel as they reveal how, from hunting to trading, prehistoric women were also the ones who led and discovered the way.
Image credit: The Met Museum
About the speakers
Dr Penny Bickle is a Senior Lecturer with the University of York’s Department of Archaeology where the main focus of her research is the earliest farmers in central Europe. Working at the intersection of science and social archaeology, she applies biological and chemical methods to various sites from Ukraine to France. Penny is particularly interested in how we can use burial practices to uncover the kinship and lifeways of the earliest farmers in Europe. This year she holds a British Academy mid-career fellowship to research the lives of prehistoric women. She is regularly found travelling throughout Europe to carry out sampling of human and animal remains, artefacts, and the local cuisines.
Dr Jennifer French is a Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. She specialises in the European Palaeolithic, with a particular focus on the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic (when Neanderthals, then Homo sapiens, lived on the continent), and on social and demographic approaches to these early human populations. Jennifer’s research is currently funded by the John Templeton Foundation, where she is exploring the technological concept of 'containment' and the role of containment technologies in our evolutionary past. She is currently excavating the early prehistoric site of Wogan Cavern in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Dr Rachel Pope is a Reader in European Prehistory at the University of Liverpool, specialising in the European Iron Age. Her research has demonstrated that before Rome, Iron Age societies often saw female leadership. Rachel has directed major research excavations and is particularly known for her research on hillfort origins. Her excavations at Penycloddiau Hillfort (Flintshire), in partnership with Cadw (Welsh Assembly Government), Denbighshire County Council, and the Global Institute for Field Research (California), have featured on BBC's Digging for Britain. Her advocacy work focuses on equality issues, as co-founder of British Women Archaeologists.
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