Two key areas of study strongly resonate with Vivat Matriarchia in the examination of ‘missing archaeology’ or ‘engendered archaeology’. Referencing his 2017 collaborative doctoral project ‘Ceramics as an archaeology of the contemporary past’ at the University of Sunderland and Sunderland Museum between 2010 to 2014, C. McHugh argues that:

‘A socially engaged ceramic practice may have much in common with the aims of current archaeological approaches to investigating the recent and contemporary past.’ The manifestation of objects for memorialising can be seen as, ‘The constitution of an otherwise absent material culture.’

In 1984, two anthropological theorists, Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector, called for an engendered archaeology for practitioners in the field to recognise the lack of gender considerations in analysis of the past. In 2006, Professors of Anthropology at Berkeley, University of California, L.A. Wilkie and K.H. Hayes, discuss the development of engendered and feminist archaeologies in their 2006 paper ‘Engendered and Feminist Archaeologies of the Recent and Documented pasts;’ focussing on how societal gender roles were renegotiated with the advent of engendered archaeology in the 1980’s and ways to direct future archaeology practice.

Historical archaeological practice has looked at the past from the dominant patriarchal standpoint, in tandem with the historical narrative in general. Feminist historians attempt to redress the balance, and archaeologists using an engendered practice can revisit objects previously seen through the patriarchal lens, but this is not yet common practice in school history lessons or archaeological studies.

The Vivat Matriarchia project cannot create false archaeological artefacts, but it can imagine what those artefacts could have been if we had lived in a matriarchal society the last few thousand years. A society where women were offered the same opportunities afforded to men, and where their endeavours were celebrated and commemorated. No one creed, colour or gender was dominant over the other – we can only imagine.