Margaret Conkey

Margaret W. Conkey (born 1943) is an American archaeologist and academic, who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées. Her research focuses on cave art produced during this period. Conkey is noted as one of the first archaeologists to explore the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies, using feminist theory to reinterpret images and objects from the Paleolithic Era or the late Ice Age. Presently, she is the Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology and director of the Archaeological Research Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named by Discover magazine in their 2002 article, "The 50 Most Important Women in Science".

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. Conkey has also urged recognition of women in the history of the archaeological discipline.

Conkey, the eldest of five siblings, graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1965 with an ancient history and art history double major, and shortly got the chance to go to Jordan - in what is now the West Bank - to work in biblical archaeology. When she then submitted graduate applications to the anthropology departments at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, she was told she needed to take a year of undergraduate anthropology (which was not available at Mount Holyoke College) before they could grant her a final admission. 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.

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