This book is a collection of papers presented at a conference in Lima on the topic of gender in Peruvian archaeology. This topic has been of great interest in Latin American archaeology since Tatiana Proskouriakoff first published the call to action in 1961 with “Portraits of Women in Maya Art” in Essays in Precolumbian Art and Archaeology. It came to prominence in the 1980s when numerous symposia on gender that presented a more balanced view of human cultures in the past were held. Through the 1990s, there were more symposia and the publication of professional and popular papers, as well as book-length general syntheses on the topic. Many important works on females, ordinary and supernatural, in the ancient Andes were also published. The engendering of archaeology has not been a secret for a long time, so it was interesting that several decades later two Peruvian archaeologists decided to have a symposium on gender and to have its papers published in Peru as if this were a new and exceptional idea. Reading this book I experienced the bon mot attributed to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”

The book consists of 13 chapters, plus a prologue by a non-Andean archaeologist and a discussion of the chapters by Margarita Diaz-Andreau of the University of Barcelona. The authors are not all Peruvian; there are also contributions by archaeologists from Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil.

Part I, “Reconstructing Women of the Past,” begins with two chapters discussing reconstruction of the archaeology of gender and four based on data. The chapter identifying female musicians in Moche ceramics is interesting, although marred by too many, too small, and too out-of-focus illustrations. The chapter on Mama Huaco—the sister/wife of Manco Capac, the first Inca—traces the various interpretations of Mama Huaco as an historic or folkloric personage; it is entirely based on historic sources. The next chapter identifies a figure on the Bennet Monolith of Tiahuanaco as a censing female supernatural and discusses incensing in modern Bolivia. It unfortunately is again marred by extremely tiny illustrations and by the author's apparent ignorance of several essential works on identifying female deities in the Andes. The illustrations are far better in the chapter by a Mexican archaeologist on the Teotihuacan culture; it traces the spread of Teotihuacan influence by looking at the appearance of a specific garment—a woman's blouse—on female ceramic figurines. The final chapter in this first part addresses the need to identify women in the archaeological record: it discusses women's work in the author's family and then in Antofagasta de la Sierra, noting that the emphasis on women in the past solely as producers of the next generation (of boys) is sadly insufficient when considering human societies.

Part II presents experiences of foreign female archaeologists working in Peru and is very interesting. (I have had similar experiences, albeit in different countries.) The three chapters—two written by North American archaeologists and one by an Algerian/French archaeologist—discuss the problems women have, as well as their advantages, in conducting fieldwork in the Andes. Unfortunately, the experiences of Peruvian female archaeologists were not included.

The third part concerns women working in the promotion/protection of the archaeological patrimony today. Of these chapters, that of Lucy Salazar stands out. In the first section of her chapter, she discusses her training as an archaeologist in Peru and how she flourished when she started working under the guidance of Rosa Fung, a professor at the Universidad de San Marcos, who mentored several generations of women archaeologists in a larger, not very welcoming environment. The second part of her chapter, about the creation of the new Machu Picchu museum in Cuzco, really belongs elsewhere, although she does focus on the inclusion of women in its exhibits and signage. The final chapter in Part III, written by a Brazilian archaeologist, has little to do with gender, focusing instead on social memory and racism.

My first reaction to this book was that it must have been written 35 to 40 years ago. What could possibly have kept Peruvian archaeologists, a fair number of whom are women, from encountering the huge and highly publicized wave of gender studies in archaeology (and anthropology and history in general) that characterized much of the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s? The discussant promptly brings this up, noting that she too was surprised by this book that, when published, was already nearly a half-century out of date. She notes that there were many gender studies in Latin American archaeology, albeit mostly written by foreigners in English. I am not sure that the discussant's treatment of how foreign archaeologists take their work home is quite fair, because they do provide financing and fieldwork experience for Peruvian students—as to whether those students were male or female is another story. Then, there is the ingrained and historic machismo of Latin America societies. This did affect the spread of gender studies and the careers of women archaeologists, of course, but I doubt that machismo in Peru ever reached the heights of appalling androcentrism that North American archaeologists manifested. We North American women archaeologists have had similar distressing experiences, from the denial of participation in investigations to outright physical/sexual assault. Tavera and Santana do not touch on this aspect.

In sum, this book is an interesting artifact of the unequal spread of scientific wind changes. It is baffling how it took 40 years for new ideas to travel from, say, Joan Gero or any of the other feminist archaeologists working in Peru to the minds of their Peruvian friends and colleagues. Mujeres del Pasado y del Presente stands as a peculiar monument to delayed diffusion. This is not to say that it lacks value. It has alerted a large number of Peruvian archaeologists, female and male, to the need to include gender as a variable in archaeological research and reconstruction. That this need has already been recognized is clear from the data-rich chapters on Moche, Tiahuanaco, and Teotihuacan. The book is also published in Peru so presumably it will be easy for students to acquire—although with the internet and open-access databases, Latin American students are now presumably as well connected to current trends in archaeology as students are anywhere else in the world. And these trends include the incorporation of gender as an essential aspect of all human societies and most human endeavors.