Osteoarthritis and Activity at Roonka Flat : Finding Gender at a Hunter-gatherer Burial Site.

Abstract

Examining gender in Aboriginal Australia has often relied upon personal historical accounts and ethnographic observations of gender roles and rituals. Many of these are from a European and non-Aboriginal perspective from a post-contact Australia. Our current understandings of precolonial Aboriginal gender roles heavily rely on these early European perspectives. Gender, as a socially constructed binary, has a significant impact on the daily life of everybody within a society. This includes influencing what people eat, access to knowledge, and what tasks and activities are allotted to a person. The skeletal embodiment of these differences in activity has long been observed upon the skeleton, and osteoarthritis (OA) has been one of the more recurrent approaches to activity. OA is a commonly found pathology amongst skeletal collections. With the absence of large precolonial skeletal collections found in Australia, in order to examine the presence of gender-associated skeletal pathology, OA is appropriate to gain an initial understanding. In this thesis, a pathological examination of OA at the site of Roonka Flat (8,000 BP – 200 BP) is undertaken to understand if embodied indicators of activity can be used to understand precolonial divisions of gender. While early historical accounts and early ethnographies have suggested gender-specific roles, more recent work has suggested that Aboriginal gender roles were more flexible. First, the non-vertebral skeleton of each individual (n=90) was examined across age and sex categories to understand the overall distribution of OA and where differences between the sexes lay. Next, the vertebral column, divided by centra and facets, was examined for differences in Vertebral Osteophytosis (VO) and OA. This was examined in relation to non-vertebral OA to understand if gendered differences in joint degeneration could be understood, and if any individuals are unique in their degeneration in comparison to others of their age or sex. While patterns of OA cannot be definitively connected to differences in gender, evidence suggests that gender did not play as much of a role in labour as has been believed. Instead, while existing in a gendered society, labour itself was flexible and could be carried out with some variability.