A perusal of the literature dealing with gender archaeology makes immediately evident the gulf that separates France and Portugal from Spain. In Portugal, the debate on gender in archaeology is still in its infancy. The invisibility of women and the prevalence of gender stereotypes in archaeological discourse were first discussed by two of the best-known Portuguese archaeologists at a session of TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) in 1993 entitled “Women in European Prehistory”(Jorge and Jorge 1996; Jorge 1997). This line of questioning was taken up again recently by young researchers contributing papers to conferences held in 2008 (Gomes nd; Martins nd). Importantly, the study of gender in past epochs features, however indirectly, in publications dealing with other topics such as weapons (Senna-Martinez 2009) and is the main subject in an as yet small number of papers (Vale 2010; Boaventura 2011; Jorge and Jorge nd). Despite the high number of female professionals in Portuguese archaeology, the lack of a strong tradition of critical reflection within the Portuguese feminist movement, according to Vale (2010: 143), has so far precluded the rise of gender archaeology in Portugal. In France, feminism and archaeology seem to have gone separate ways, and gender archaeology stirs little enthusiasm. Coudart (1998) places this lack of interest within the context of French history and sociology, claiming that in French culture in general a universal concern over human beings prevails over gender divisions and the focus on gender issues. For this reason, she claims, gender is not a priority in French archaeology. This account, however, seems to us to be contradicted by the relevance of gender in other cultural fields in France. As Coudart herself acknowledges, there is a long-standing tradition of feminism in France, from Simone de Beauvoir and the Mouvement de libération des femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement, MLF) in the aftermath of May 1968 to more recent forms of activism to which we owe concepts such as “ecofeminism” and “the feminism of sexual difference.” Despite the marginalization of feminism in university circles, France was the first European country in which a center for women’s studies was founded (Segarra 2003). A more likely explanation for the irrelevance of gender in French archaeology may perhaps be found in what Coudart herself sees elsewhere (1999) as the manifest resistance to theory on the part of French archaeologists, or what Audouze (1999) sees as their different approach to the role of theory. A refusal to explicitly engage with issues of theory explains the absence of works dealing with gender in French archaeological literature, and accounts for the fact that discussions of theory are circumscribed within the sphere of publications on methodology. A good example of this is a widely used handbook, now in its third edition, in which the term “sex” is employed while “gender archaeology” is summarily dispatched with a synopsis of Coudart’s views on the subject (Demoule et al. 2009: 205, 236). In the same country that has given us anthropologists of the stature of Bourdieu, archaeology has not confronted the existence of the individual within society, and prefers to continue talking about the social group as a whole as if it acted as a seamless, coherent unit (Coudart 1999). Despite all the above, it might be argued that André Leroi-Gourhan’s (1911–1986) vision of prehistory, promoting concepts such as chaîne opératoire, has strongly influenced research on men’s and women’s roles as conducted in particular by some of