Gender roles and cultural difference

Floor 1, Room 14, Showcase 14.15. Pectoral with dancing figures

The decoration on this plaque is interpreted as a representation of a group dance of people holding hands. There is no obvious visual marker of the gender or sex of the participants in this dance. This might be due to the nature of the material used or the stylistic conventions for representing humans, but it also points to a society in which distinguishing between men and women in this context was probably not particularly relevant.

Strabo (64 BCE- 20 AD), a classical writer who in his "Geography" speaks about the pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, indicates that "while they drink, the men dance to the sound of flutes and trumpets, leaping high and falling in genuflection" and that "in Bastetania the women also dance mixed with the men, joined together by their hands". Thus, while in many ancient Mediterranean societies dancers were separated or differentiated by gender, Strabo describes an activity where these gender lines were blurred. The study of different peoples in Protohistory shows how gender constructions within the same historical period can vary strongly from one social context to another.

Next QR. Floor 2, Room 36. Apollo and Showcases 36.2 y 36.4 >