Gendered specialization in labour can lead to gendered social participation, wealth and legitimization, because specialization is social labour that serves to create networks beyond the resident group and because crafting in complex societies is materially and ideologically connected to power heirarchies of all sorts. Once gender division has been identified is to specify the labour roles of the past, rather than assume them with stereotypical notions of male and female work roles. This may be important and useful in reconstructing such variables as rules, ideas, access to resources, marriage patterns and the like which are difficult to observe by traditional archaeological method. Appropriate cautions regarding the authorship and biases of ethnographic data must of course be observed. While each data type has its own strengths and weaknesses, they all reflect normative or idealized views of gender roles.
Gender is a conceptual category, being a structural phenomenon.
Given that archaeology examines palimpsests and speaks in terms of averages, archaeological investigation of gender should begin by identifying the core meanings of gender that were relatively fixed and widely shared within the society being studied . From here, we may consider, later, the identification of outliers and boundary margins. Naturally, the use of multiple lines of evidence is the best way to go about testing hypotheses for confirmation or disconfirmation. The ethnographic literature is currently underutilized in gender studies. This study is often cited to justify general analogies ascribing genders to particular activities.