On Engendering Monte Albán Tomb 7.

The article presents the authors' comments on a paper about the reexamination potential of previously excavated material with emphasis on human diversity with reference to the burials in Tomb 7 of the Monte Albén Site in Mexico. They assert the relation between the standards of reporting of original archaeologists, which can be treated as a suggestion about a social identity manifest in specific material traits, and possible error in assigning biological identity. This relation can lead to the treatment of "male" and "female" as terms for strongly marked dichotomous poles of a continuum of gender performance. According to the authors, burials are probably the only archaeological context in which biology and gender may be simultaneously identifiable. Genders, which are socially constructed through performance should be identified independently and their distributions over the biological population examined without insistence on a neat one-for-one correspondence. The analysis of these genders present suggests that the burials in Tomb 7 were primary interments that were later disturbed.