Prehistoric ‘Taskscapes’: Representing Gender, Age and the Geography of Work

It is highly conceivable that prehistoric peoples richly narrated and celebrated their lives and relationship with their environment, but, with no written records available and limited artefacts, recent generations have created their own narratives of the lives of these peoples. This article examines visual representations of prehistoric (‘Stone Age’) societies in popular science published in Britain from 1960s to the present. Stereotyping of gender and division of labour, including its spatiality, is an obvious example of the projection of modern societies’ views onto the past and this is evident in the material examined in this study. Specific images often become ‘viral’ as uncritically repeated ‘schema’ (units of cultural transmission) that reinforce stereotypes; for example, the ‘cave woman’ as ‘drudge’, trapped in the domestic sphere. Such stereotypes remain prevalent in popular science books aimed at children as well as adults.