Beginning with the pioneering work of the Norwegians in the 1970's, many Anglo-American archaeologists have been engaged with the study of different roles and actions/activities by participants other than men in the human past. We have focused on women, on what we have referred to as gender, as well as on other social categories (such as "third spirits") in the demonstration that the human past was participated in, not surprisingly, by many different social actors including but very definitely other-than-men. For more than 40 years, we have complicated the story of human actors, and while there is understandably still much ambiguity and the attribution of certain practices to specific social roles and to women is still a challenge, nonetheless this scholarly effort has been exciting and quite successful. In this presentation, I will discuss just some of the ways in which this process has developed and how we have changed the field to incorporate women, gender, and more possibilities than just a male/female binary understanding of the human past.