ARCHÆOLOGY: Biological Sex, Human Bones: A few thoughts.
This post summarises a thread I wrote on twitter in response to a tweet from Erik Wade regarding the assignment of biological sex to human remains. Erik’s thread contains a number of incorrect assumptions both about how archaeological assignment of biological sex works, and about how these results are interpreted. Also through use of particular terms it conflates a number of distinct issues. This 8 point summary contains a couple of corrections for minor errors which crept in due to the problems of using speech-to-text software. Speech to text software can’t always negotiate accents very well and in my case it often corrects ‘sex’ to ‘six / cepts / sepsis’ – which means I usually use gender as a placeholder and then correct by hand – occasionally I miss the odd one and it causes unintentional confusion. I’ve also included a brief summary of some additional points made due to a dialogue with one particular individual. All these points are within the bo...