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 the pregnant body is 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.

中文翻译：

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子宫政治：怀孕的身体和缺席的考古学


怀孕涉及核心的社会政治问题：亲属关系、人口统计、宗教、性别等。在任何社会中，怀孕的身体和胚胎-胎儿的本体论都承载着核心的存在主义关注点。怀孕的身体是一个还是两个生命？人格什么时候开始？然而，怀孕在考古学中仍然是一个边缘话题，其本体政治后果几乎没有被提出。声称怀孕或分娩是史前宏大叙事的一部分是荒谬的。同样，在以身体和人格为中心的理论观点的学术研究中，怀孕的身体是不存在的。本文提出了怀孕的身体政治的基本问题。我们从物质女权主义、医学伦理学和哲学中发展概念来询问怀孕，并提供案例研究来展示这些概念如何从维京时代开始在实践中发挥作用。然而，提出的问题不仅限于维京时期。我们的总体目标是将怀孕作为考古学中的哲学和政治问题。为此，我们开发了新的思维和语言，可用于研究其他时期和地区的怀孕政治。最终，我们从我们的来源和考古论述中讨论了怀孕尸体的缺席。