Other Pasts. Feminist Archaeology, Maintenance Activities, and Reconceptualisation

This article contends that feminist archaeology goes far beyond the inclusion of women in established narratives and undertakes a deeper reconceptualisation of the cultural logics through which the past is represented. Simply demonstrating that women also participated in activities traditionally coded as masculine risks reinforcing the same framework that generated their exclusion. Instead, the article calls for a transformation of the categories used to think about history, one that recognises alternative subjectivities and dismantles Eurocentric assumptions about what counts as human action.Central to this proposal is the concept of maintenance activities—the everyday routine practices of caregiving that sustain social life. Through the Aberigua project in Guåhan/Mariana Islands, the chapter illustrates how Spanish colonial and Jesuit interventions targeted these activities to impose new patriarchal gender orders during early modern globalisation. By tracing how everyday materialities and routines were mobilised as technologies of domination, the article demonstrates the political power of the ordinary and the need to place cooperation, affective bonds, and relational identities at the centre of archaeological interpretation. Reconceptualising the past in this way opens the possibility of histories that challenge Eurocentric, neoliberal models of the human and contribute to the subversion of patriarchy in the present.