Womb Politics: The pregnant body and archaeologies of absence

Pregnancy encompasses core socio-political issues: kinship, demography, religion, gender and
more. In any society, the ontology of the pregnant body and the embryo-fetus holds core
existential concerns. Is a pregnant body one or two beings? When does personhood begin?
Yet, pregnancy is still a marginal topic in archaeology, and its onto-political consequences have
scarcely been raised. It would be ludicrous to claim that pregnancy or childbirth is part of the
grand narratives of prehistory. Also in scholarship centring theoretical perspectives on the body
and personhood is the pregnant body absent.
This article poses fundamental questions of the body-politics of pregnancy. We develop
concepts from material feminism, medical ethics and philosophy to interrogate pregnancy, and
provide a case study to demonstrate how these concepts can work in practice from the Viking
Age. The questions posed, however, are not limited to the Viking period. Our overall objective is
to centre pregnancy as a philosophical and political concern in archaeology writ large. We
develop new thinking and language to this end, which can be used to examine the politics of
pregnancy in other periods and regions. Ultimately, we discuss the absence-making of pregnant
bodies from our sources as well as from archaeological discourse.