Warrior women : an archaeologist's search for history's hidden heroines

Interesting topic and I definitely gained knowledge from reading it. But don't believe the promotional material. Its a fairly dry and direct account of a series of archeological digs. Very much like any number of other monographs written by any number of other archeologists it just happens that

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this one is about burials of some high status women which include weapons. It still reads like a dig report. Pretty interesting report, and like I say I enjoyed it once I got past expecting to see anything even vaguely resembling what the blurb lead me to expect.

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I enjoyed Warrior Women, but it was also frustrating in some ways - she only talks about areas that she's had personal experience with, such as the Chinese mummies, which didn't really fit with the "Hidden Heroine" topic. The title also lead me to believe that the book was mainly about, well,

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warrior women. In reality, they only made up one chapter, maybe two if you count the chapter on the Amazons, whom have no evidence of actually existing but were probably made up based on stories of foreign women to keep Greek women in line.

The book also only covers Eurasia. In the second to last page, she mentions that an ancient North African kingdom trained women as bodyguards. Why not more information?

I think part of the brevity is the lack of information on general. Really, all we know about the ancient warrior women in the steppes was that they existed. Their nomadic tribes didn't have any written language, so all the evidence comes from burial goods. Plus, the presence of women buried with weapons was ignored for many years by the archaeological establishment.

Still, the book did contain some fascinating tidbits and was easy to read. I would recommend it as an introduction to the topic. It gave me other avenues to explore in my reading.

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The title doesn't do this book justice and although one can't say it's totally misleading, it was misleading enough to make me hesitate reading it. A better title would have been "Musings by a Female Field Archaeologist" as it is an interesting journal of how the same discoveries can be interpreted

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through the different eyes of their discoverers. Hence the famous "Gold Man" discovered near the village of Issyk in southern Kazakstan in 1969, muses Dr. Davis Kimball, is more likely to have been a high priestess or a "Gold Woman"--a consideration not voiced by the early male archaeologist who worked the dig deciding that it had to be a high-born male, ignoring its size and accompanying artefacts associated with female sorceresses. Another possible title might have been "Ancient Motifs across Cultures" as another theme is tracking the migration of various ancient motifs as they were introduced across geographies with migrating populations. Here she hit a bull's eye for me as I, too, have long been fascinated by the frequency one encounters distinctly similar ancient "animal motifs" (those wonderful leaping felines and stags with enormous horns) -- in Irish museums, in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, in steppe excavations, etc. not to mention all those tales of one-breasted Amazons and human-sacrifice-demanding goddesses.

Assuming that the book's audience was targeting the general public (not art historians or archaeologists) and especially those interested in 'Women's Studies', one can not fault it as being too generalist. However, given Dr. Davis Kimball's experience, I would have preferred she had not dumbed down the topic because she has amassed a good deal of information on female shamans, earth goddesses and their related myths and legends from the fabled Amazons to Irish women warriors. For anyone who has wondered why witches are always depicted with those amazingly large, broad-brimmed, tall hats--Dr. Davis-Kimball has the answer...and even though I have seen the same famous Silk Road mummies with their tall hats our author saw, I never made the connection, as she does, with the way most witches are depicted...so my hat is off to her. Well observed, and very cleverly connected.

So in many ways this book was disappointing, but at the same time, immensely interesting--so a 2 and a 4 = 3 stars. In the meantime, I hope the author is reworking and expanding the material into a more focused tome, concentrating on just one or two of the many themes she picks up in this volume because just as the conversations would begin to get interesting, off we'd be on a new topic. That said, I'm going to recommend it to several friends interested in steppe symbolism.

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