Margaret W. Conkey (born 1943)[1] is an American archaeologist and academic,[2] who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées.
[4] Over the years she has continued her dedication to feminist perspectives in archaeology, having organized major conferences, editing books and numerous articles on the topic.
[6] She and a friend then spent a summer in New York, where she obtained a job with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as a librarian and eventually became a grant analyst.
When accepted at the Oriental Institute, she went back to Chicago to attend and work a part-time job as an editorial assistant at Current Anthropology.
The combined interests in prehistoric art, especially that of Paleolithic Europe, and gender and feminist archaeology, has also involved recent research and publication concerning "goddess" figurines, especially of ancient Europe, in collaboration with Berkeley colleague Ruth Tringham.These investigate how the archaeological stories about these figurines have been taken up (often problematically) by contemporary popular culture.
Archaeologists acknowledged that these people obtained their food from out in the open and that they did not live in the caves year-round, but they also seemed to think that activity wasn't going to be interesting or archaeologically fruitful.
This method hadn't yet been used in Europe, so Conkey suggested a new project in which they would be looking for materials - for Paleolithic research, stone tools - out on the landscape as opposed to within caves.
Since 2006, her international team has carried out excavation of the region's first open-air site, and has uncovered more than 3000 identifiable lithic artifacts, some dating back to the Paleolithic era and distributed within a 260 square kilometer transect.
This was carried out using two grants from the National Science Foundation, one from the France-Berkeley Fund, and several from the Stahl Endowment of UC Berkeley, Archaeological Research Facility.
[11] Conkey has consistently challenged the notion that fieldwork is inherently masculine, and encourages fellow archaeologists to consider the myriad of ways in which gender shapes human experiences - both past and present.