Why does the past convoke us as a collective of women?

Abstract

The academic development of archaeology in Argentina has a significant history and has been affected by political, ideological, and public policy ups and downs. The times demand that women re-think gender equity and their working conditions. In the last fifty years of the twentieth century, only a few women archaeologists reached high management positions or trained female students. We need to know what their conditions of production were like in the beginning and asking ourselves how knowledge was transmitted from woman to woman in order to construct not only historiographies and genealogies, but also to understand our own constructions as female scientists and academics. We present the genesis of the meetings of women archaeologists working in northwestern Argentina, tied together by a genealogy of learning that started with three pioneers in the 1960s: Ana María Lorandi, Myriam N. Tarragó, and Marta Ottonello, in order to record this history as a chronological, analytical, and evaluative account, resulting from the sum of a series of narratives of the experiences of the protagonists.