Volume 6, Issue 2 (Autumn 2027)

Call for Papers

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Monday, 30 November 2026

 

Theme: Prehistoric, Protohistoric, and Other Ancient Matricultures (Open Call)

Given the broad advances in archaeological research pertaining to women, in new techniques and modes of analysis, and in the new questions that arise from the resulting data and given also a renewed general interest in gender in a context which recognizes the importance of archaeology as a human science, it is most pertinent to offer archaeologists, prehistorians, Classicists, and their colleagues a platform to present and discuss the knowledge arising from these developments. In support of this discourse, we offer the concept of matriculture.

The concept of matriculture as a cultural system provides a multidisciplinary tool that bypasses older assumptions. The concept’s provenance starts with anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who used the term ‘cultural system’ to designate, then discuss and describe those components of a cultural context (traits, symbols, meanings, representations) organised around a central general focus. This focus can be identified because it can be recognised from culture to culture (at least by the researcher) as being part of the same set. Such sets, or cultural systems, include religion, art, kinship systems, or jokes, among many others, and may be considered as invariants even as they may not be universally identified as specific concepts in all human societies. They usually vary widely from one culture to the next, but they allow anthropologists and other human scientists to analyse, construct, and compare societies with each other. While rooted in mental representations (worldviews), cultural systems have material expressions in human behaviour and leave traces in the environment. Anthropologist Marie-Françoise Guédon further built on Geertz’ heuristic to establish matriculture as the cultural system pertaining to women, femininity, and related traits, symbols, meanings, and representations.

We invite you to consider the prehistoric, protohistoric, and ancient contexts as defined by women’s lives – these matricultures - especially how women themselves organise, perceive, transmit, and not only participate in but also construct the world in which they live as a cultural system of its own. Whether a human society is matrilineal or patrilineal or bilateral, whether it can be described as patriarchal or leaning toward matriarchy, whether it places women at a disadvantage or provides protection, its women will find ways to define themselves, their bodies, and their environment (including their cultural environment), to create bonds between themselves and with men, to articulate the cultural significance of the sexual differentiation of women and men, and the implications and modalities of maternity, among many other items, and to speak about their world, if only because they have to take care of and enculture their children. All of this is intermeshed to form the matricultural system.

For the insiders, as is the case for all cultural systems, matriculture creates a shared ‘language’ for describing, interpreting, and reflecting reality - a model of reality - as well as prescribing and shaping behaviour - a model for reality. Scholarship driven by masculine-centred worldviews has often treated the realm of women’s lives as a substrate of masculine domains and largely failed to acknowledge the matricultural aspects of culture as a system in its own right, despite the significance of cultures in which women and the feminine may have held explicit cultural, social, and/or political importance. Indeed, the so-called goddess figurines of prehistoric Europe, Inanna’s descent into the underworld, the matrilineal transmission of property and power in ancient Egypt, and the matriarchal queens of the Sino-Tibetan marches, among others, show that women were central to prehistoric and ancient cultures and societies in many regions of the world.

Our next issue of Matrix proposes to explore the matricultural aspects of the prehistoric, protohistoric, and ancient periods, of any geographical region. We are interested in deepening our knowledge of the meaning of woman, mother, grandmother, wife, mother-in-law, birth-giving, womanhood, and/or femininity, among other concepts relating to women’s lives, for people of these societies which no longer exist and, if possible, better understand the relationship of these meanings for social behaviour.

Our journal Matrix is part of an international network and is committed to interdisciplinarity; in this issue, we are open to a wide, far-ranging conversation. Authors are encouraged to explore the symbols and meaning relating to women, mothers, and the feminine in a prehistoric, protohistoric, or ancient society, as well as women’s roles, status, and behaviour. These explorations may bring to bear research from a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, genetics, literature, or the wide range of historical subject areas: art history, cultural history, gender history, ethnohistory, or religious history, to mention a few.

We strongly encourage creative artworks of any media and personal reflections on this theme. Potential research topics may include the following, but don’t be limited by our imaginations!

• What is the latest research on women’s lives in Neolithic times?

• What was the meaning of motherhood, wifehood, and/or matrilineal property for Australia’s Aboriginal peoples prior to British colonisation?

• Exploration of Celtic and or Druidic definitions of woman and/or man, and how these identities were expressed in myth, poetry, or literature.

• Literature reviews of the information on matriculture in Mesolithic periods in Africa, Europe, or Asia.

• What were women’s property rights in Persia or other West Asian societies before the arrival of Islam and how were these discussed in the culture?

• What religious or ritual activities supported participation of women in elite circles during the Mesolithic or Neolithic periods?

• Explorations of women and their role(s) in the Andean kingdoms and, later, the Incan Empire. For example, are they represented in religious iconography or in funerary rituals and exhibits and, if so, how?

• Are there new developments in better understanding the representations of women in the cave paintings of the European Upper Paleolithic? Or in women’s participation in cave painting and rituals?

• Is domesticity still understood as an invariant for prehistoric, protohistoric, or ancient women’s lives? For instance, the women of Classical Greek civilisation are reputed to have been confined to the domestic sphere, effectively imprisoned in their houses. Is this confirmed? Were there exceptions and, if so, how were they understood?

• What was women’s involvement in the domestication of animals and plants? For example, given the strong suggestion of women eating more vegetal food than men and less animal protein, could they have been more directly involved in the domestication of grains and other plants?

• Did the Buddha’s teachings change the meaning of woman for South Asian people during the first few centuries of their dissemination and, if so, how?

• Should we revise our understanding of certain Northern American Indigenous kinship systems? Of descent systems?

Submission via email to: Please submit a 200-word abstract (max) and a 50-word biography to Linnéa Rowlatt, Managing Editor, at lrowlatt@networkonculture.ca, or to the Editorial Collective of Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies at info@networkonculture.ca with the Subject line ‘Matrix 6:2 Abstract Submission.’

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Monday, 30 November 2026

 

Matrix policy on Artificial Intelligence

Matrix refuses all AI-generated content. We check all our submissions through at least two AI detectors and will not knowingly publish any material which has content generated by so-called Artificial Intelligence.

However, we recognize that authors may need editorial assistance in bringing their papers to an acceptable standard of English or French and, to that end, we accept the use of assistants like Grammarly or the editor function in Microsoft Word.

Finally, we have editors among the Editorial Collective who are willing, even eager, to work with you to improve your submission (we love the Oxford comma); please simply request our assistance.