Gay Cavemen and Gender in Archaeology

Googling the term "gay caveman" was not done without a degree of apprehension. As I typed in the words my mind was already filled with an idea of what I would find and I wasn't disappointed. The first headline that appeared was exactly as I suspected - "First homosexual caveman found" - no ifs, ends, or buts about it. If I had stopped reading at this point I would have not only gone through life misinformed but would probably have been an agent of dissemination, spreading this statement to others as "fact". However, delving further into the article I started to question a couple of points. First, there is no direct claim of homosexuality. The archaeologist uses words like "more likely" and "probably" but never states that this individual was indecisively homosexual. Second, the idea that this 'caveman' was of a different sexual orientation or was transgendered stems from his burial in a manner typically associated with females. I unfortunately immediately conjured to mind a stereotypical image of what this may have looked like and thankfully people with far better photoshop skills than mine have also jumped onto the that wagon.

"Gay Caveman"
Photo Source: Freerepublic.com

Archaeologists are limited in their understanding of the past by their understanding of the present.  Modern societies, especially our western one, usually view not only sex but gender as a dichotomy; we are male or we are female.  The idea of a third gender is slowly making its move to the front but we are still light years away from accepting that the true categorizations of gender are infinite. Archaeologists are by definition looking at material remains and trying to deduce ancient human history. Recognizing patterns is one way in which archaeologists have tried to give meaning to remains and while patterns provide great frames on which we can build they are far from absolute.  The idea that ancient humans had the same or similar ideologies to our own contemporary ones cannot be accepted at face value.  We may be able to study what they did but it is far more difficult to study how they thought.  And an understanding of how they thought is exactly what we need before we can go about making claims that any ancient human was transgendered or gay.

The Monumental Graves at St John the Baptist Heritage Church

Cemeteries have always been of interest to me.  Rather than seeing them as places of sadness and death I always felt that they were a source of stories and as a little girl I enjoyed taking grave rubbings and weaving stories of the people whose names were commemorated in stone. I was very happy when my group member Emily suggested we look at the graveyard at St. John the Baptist Heritage Church in Colwood.  I had never been, nor heard of, this cemetery and couldn't wait to explore.

St John the Baptist Heritage Church

Emily's eleven-year-old memory of St. John's was unfortunately skewed and while we had originally planned on looking at all the graves within the churchyard, they numbered 153 and we quickly realized we had to narrow our scope.  It seemed almost natural that as we stood amongst the graves pondering how to form our dataset, our answer was literally standing in front of us.  Upright grave markers!  While there were numerous graves, only 18 of their markers stood over a foot tall and those that did certainly stood out in the landscape.

View St John the Baptist Heritage Church Graveyard in a larger map

Once our dataset was defined it became more reasonable to develop our research question.  We decided that the most obvious question was why our graves had upright markers.  We could see through observation that they were in the minority and that amongst them there was significant variation but would we be able to discern a pattern that may explain their usage?  Was it simply graves from a single timeframe?  Or perhaps they were family stones rather than individual grave markers. With all these ideas and questions we set out to record each grave and get ourselves some answers.

Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that we probably weren't going to find any answers, at least not from the scope of this project.  The 18 graves shared many similarities but we were ultimately unable to find a correlation to explain their upright markers.  The graves varied between single plots measuring 8'x4' and double plots measuring 8'x10' (measurements based on concrete grave slabs). The sole exception being the Wilson grave which was a single plot measuring 9'x4'.  The upright markers themselves varied in size and style were used from 1919 AD to 1955 AD.  The markers also commemorated women and men of all ages as well as both families and individuals.  Overall it seemed to be quite a hodgepodge of graves.

There were a few graves that had distinct features or caught our eye in some way:

First we noticed that the markers of both the Wells grave and the Evans grave were seemingly missing toppers.  We thought that based on the shape and size of the broken areas and the Wells grave's similarity to the base of the Ruddle grave that these toppers had perhaps been large crosses (à la Ruddle grave style):

Wells Grave - Top View

Evans Grave - Top View

Ruddle Grave - Full View

Photo Credit: National Portrait
Gallery UK

Second was the grave of Hubert Wilberforce Wilson.  Hubert's grave was unique in that it was a foot longer than any other in the cemetery.  But what really caught our attention was the name of Wilberforce.  This grave quickly became our favourite and we somewhat bizarrely became enamoured with Mr. Wilson (Wilberforce to us) enough so to do some further research and discover more information on who could only have been an impressive man.   Suffice it to say that we were able to locate Wilberforce's history and learned much about the man. I won't go on but do read my group member Emily's blog on the esteemed gentleman for more information.  I will, however, mention that from our research we discovered that his grave marker listed a birth year (1857) that was inconsistent with the birth year listed by all online records (1867). 

Looking at the upright markers it was clear that though we were unable to find a pattern to explain their choosing they were clearly monuments meant to distinguish. Having done further research on only one individual and discovering him to me a man of higher rank it could be theorized that these relatively high-visibility monuments were used to mark the graves of those of higher status in a vertically differentiated or stratified society (Parker Pearson 1999, p.74).  Unfortunately to claim so definitively would require further research and many visits to the archival offices which is an endeavour that will have to be reserved for a less academically challenging time of year.

Reference List

National Portrait Gallery. Hubert Wilberforce Wilson. [online] Available at <http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp52822/hubert-wilberforce-wilson> [Accessed 17 February 2012].

Parker Pearson, M., 1999. The Archeaology of Death and Burial. Stroud: Sutton.