Already in the 1990s, John Robb provided a comprehensive overview of the development of gender symbolism and ideology in Prehistory. During the Neolithic gender representation seems to be much more ambiguous and blurred. With the Copper-Bronze Age and more distinctively with the Iron Age and Archaic Period, a binary ideology seems to emerge, especially from the funerary evidence, between ‘martial warriors' and ‘beautiful weavers' (Robb-Harris 2017).

While Robb-Harris' model partially still holds today, many scholars have challenged this binary conception. The recent paper Gender or not Gender by Gaydarska et al. is the most up-to-date discussion on the topic and presents the state of the art (2023). In addition, several studies have showed that the intersectionality between indicators of personhood and identity aspects, such as age, status, class and even ethnicity and gender and sex is much more complex than previously thought.

I present a contextual analysis of some Etruscan cemeteries during the 1st Millennium BC (Veio, Tarquinia, Ferrone etc.), which show mostly gendered individuals. However, there is also a significant number of ungendered individuals, burials with both female and male elements and some burials anthropologically determined as female with male objects, and viceversa. In some cases anthropological analyses are ambiguous or absent, especially in the case of cremations, or the odd objects could be votive offerings, but the study highlights some complex patterns that deserve further investigation. In future, thanks to a British Academy Small Grant, together with Janet Montgomery (Duhram University), we plan to use peptides analyses to sex these individuals scientifically to disentangle objectively the complex relation between sex, gender, and identity in past populations.