Margaret (meg) W. Conkey PhD

Margaret W. Conkey joined the Berkeley Department of Anthropology in 1987. Since that time, she has continued research and publication in several interrelated areas. First, she has continued my interest in understanding the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies. By the spring of 1998, she will have co-organized two major conferences to address such issues, and published numerous articles including a 1997 review article (co-authored with Joan Gero) on the topic in the Annual Reviews of Archaeology.

Second, I have continued an interest in the interpretation and study of what is loosely called "Paleolithic art." I have continued work on the intellectual history of how this corpus of images and artifacts has been interpreted, and on bringing together various kinds of observations and research that have been ongoing in the field under different theoretical umbrellas, including practice theory and feminist theory. I have published nearly a dozen essays in this area and have recently negotiated a new book contract with the University of California Press for a book that probes the very processes of interpretation as much as the extant and historic interpretations themselves of and for this art. Because of this research interest, I have been active in the field that is called "rock art research," and have participated in numerous conferences, often internationally, specifically those concerned with the theory and social contexts of the rock art research. The combined interests in prehistoric art, especially that of Paleolithic Europe, and gender and feminist archaeology, have involved recent research and publication concerning the so-called "goddess" figurines, especially of ancient Europe, in collaboration with Berkeley colleague, Ruth Tringham. We have been particularly concerned to show how the archaeological stories about these figurines have been taken up, often problematically, by contemporary popular culture.