Maya Gender Roles

The gender roles present men and women in the iconography or particularly in the Maya region, their names appear as syllabically spelled glyphs. Clemency Coigns’ work revealed that particular women were famous throughout the dimension-span recorded and that some women undoubtedly had been of amazing political importance. Coggins’ work portrayed that, though it’s not really common, women in Classic Maya society could in fact have political roles or leadership. The semasiography and iconography on the stelae typically present men - or what are understood be regularly defined as muscular figures - as the main highlight of the iconography and these are usually defined based on costuming of the individual depicted. Nevertheless, women are frequently
In Mesoamerica, household archaeology is an essential method to be employed in the attempt to find gender roles within the archaeological record. Household archaeology focuses primarily on the artifacts and features which comprises the houselot; the houselot being the compounds, usually clustered around a small patio area, of wattle and daub buildings. However, it is important to note that household archaeology is useful in finding gender within the archaeological record not because “women are always associated with domestic labor (housework) but because households are places where we can reasonably assume that both males and females are present”. The household therefore should not be seen as delineated women’s space, but as a space where multiple gender roles are
A pan-Mesoamerican trend during the Classic Period to link direction and gender so that there was a “spatial dimension to their constructions of gender categories”. Julia Hendon, who conducted research at the Maya site of Copan, Honduras -- specifically in a sub-area of Copan known as Las Sepulturas -- notes that typically the most female gendered area of the houselot was the hearth, which is known mainly through ethnographic and ethnohistoric data. Hendon argues that because women’s duties included food preparation and the grinding of maize, that the hearth area would be primarily women’s space, though she also notes that this does not entail that women were largely restricted to this specific