Ahatmose Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Doug you wrote:
>
> ... 2. There is quite a controvery over what the
> 'venus' and other figurines represent, and it is
> not a given that they represent a goddess.
>
> Who then is represented ? The local harlot ?

And why do you assume that concept also existed at that time? Don, once again I wish you'd do some of your own research.

A quick search, for instance, would have brought up this url:
[www.mnsu.edu]

And I have posted this before:
Archaeologists frequently identify art, artefacts and structures which
they believe to have been associated with religion. Some of the earliest
of these are the so-called Venus figurines found on palaeolithic sites in
Europe, painted stone plaques in southern Africa, rock shelter art in
Australia, and the famous cave paintings of Spain, France, etc, all of
which have been considered to have been evidence of religious activity,
most if not all of which have been the subject of some controversy. Most
noteworthy of these controversies has been the arguments over the ‘Mother
Goddess' and the Venus figurines, exemplified by the writings of Marija
Gimbutas. Female figurines (male, androgynous etc figurines being
ignored} were interpreted as proof that early humans worshipped a
universal female deity until invading Indo-Europeans brought with them
male gods. In some of Gimbutas' writings "every figure that is not
phallic - and some that clearly are - are taken as symbols of the
Goddess. This includes parallel lines, lozenges, zigzags, spirals, double
axes, butterflies, pigs and pillars." (Meskell 1995). More recently many
other interpretations have been put forward, eg that they were
territorial markers, teaching devices, magical tools, identification
tokens, teaching devices, primitive contracts, objects used in birthing
rituals, and so on. (Maskell 1995). Some archaeologists have argued that
certain ‘female' figures may not be female and even that some have been
looked at upside down and are actually male phalluses (Bisson and White,
1997).

I'll throw this in also from the wayback machine:
"A Sexist View of Prehistory"
by Brian Fagan
in Archaeology March/April 1992



Fads and fancies come and go not only among the general public but within the academic community as well. One of the latest of these fads, popular with some feminist scholars and New Age groupies, is the cult of the Mother Goddess.

Marija Gimbutas of the University of California at Los Angeles is a principal advocate for this cult, having worked at Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in central Europe for decades. She has long had a preoccupation with Mother Goddesses in what she calls "Old Europe," and writes in her latest book, "The Civilization of the Goddess": "According to myriad images that have survived from the great spell of European prehistory on the Eurasian continents, it was the sovereign mystery and creative power of the female as the source of life that developed into the earliest religious experiences." And, says Gimbutas, the great Mother Goddess became the "cosmic giver and taker of life, ever able to renew Herself within the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth."

Gimbutas traces the beginnings of this primordial cult back more than 20,000 years. The Mother Goddess, she says, came into her own during an explosion of artistic creativity in the late Ice Age. Artists depicted animals and symbols in which modern scholars have been able to discern "an iconography of the Goddess," comprising "several kinds of abstract and hieroglyphic symbols." And, she contends, these symbols persisted into Neolithic times (6500-3500 B.C.). According to Gimbutas, this period saw a great flowering of the Mother Goddess cult and an era of agricultural prosperity within a peace-loving, egalitarian matrilineal society, which began in the Aegean, central Balkans, and Adriatic regions and quickly spread to what is now Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, writes Gimbutas, this prehistoric Garden of Eden came to an end in the mid-fourth millenium B.C. when a warlike, patriarchal culture from the Black Sea displaced the placid peoples of "Old Europe."

Reading her latest book on the Mother Goddess, I felt like a disciple being led back into the past by a prophetess who held the key to the Sacred Mysteries. We pass from site to site, from image to image, from the Old Stone Age to modern Czechoslovakia, with effortless ease, following symbols of the Mother Goddess through the millennia. It is all so simple, so enlightening.

But, I doubt if Marija Gimbutas has many followers among her archaeological colleagues, for the way in which she threads together her goddess story involves the most subjective of judgments at every stage. How can one possibly trace intangible religious beliefs from 18,000 to 8,000 years ago purely on what are claimed to be resemblances in artistic motifs? Yet Gimbutas strings together stylistic motifs from different periods of prehistory, motifs so simple they occur in art from many parts of the world. This form of analysis stretches scientific credibility beyond reasonable bounds.

Gimbutas places women and their fecundity at the heart of prehistoric life, and writes as if the goddess is a matter of scientific certainty. Few archaeologists would disagree that fertility rituals were of vital importance in prehistoric life for tens of thousands of years, as they are in many societies today. But to accept the probable existence of such rituals is very different from claiming that there was a primordial Mother Goddess, with a capital M and G, who presided for millennia over what a New York Times reviewer called a "paradise lost." Putting it bluntly, Gimbutas's Mother Goddess thesis does not reflect the incredible complexity of what we now know about hunter-gatherer and farming societies in prehistoric Europe. The 529 pages of Civilization are crammed with descriptions and interpretations of figurines and art motifs, of shrines and dwellings that are remarkable for their uncritical subjectivity. A typical example "More than half the figurines of Old Europe appear to be nude above the hips, hence we presume they represent goddesses or priestesses as they enact rituals." The entire panoply of the Mother Goddess thesis is based on such presumptions rather than on critical, contextual analysis.

The study of gender has come late to archaeology, and there are few studies for researchers in other fields to turn to. Gimbutas's sweeping generalizations appeal to feminist scholars engaged in studies of patriarchal institutions in Christianity and Judaism. The close relationships among fertility, motherhood, and Earth invoked by the Mother Goddess cult are of fundamental interest to an emerging school of ecofeminists studying women's roles in ecological and environmental issues.

While Gimbutas's work is sometimes hailed as pioneering research into the role of women in prehistory, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, she projects a Eurocentric and frankly sexist view of prehistory, which is remarkable for its subjective generalizations and outdated research methods. Her image of Old Europe is uncannily similar to that of The Noble Savage so popular with nineteenth-century romantic novelists. Such simplistic perspectives have a deep popular appeal in a world where science and, for that mattter, archaeology are becoming ever more complex. Whatever its superficial appeal, the Mother Goddess theory is not science but speculation.

While I was reading "The Civilization of the Goddess", I chanced upon archaeologist Christine Hastorf's remarkable study of Andean men and women in Prehispanic Sausa society. The Sausa were maize and potato farmers who lived in highland Peru's northern Mantaro Valley. Before the Inka took control, in about A.D. 1460, the Sausa lived in local population groups of several thousand people. Their conquerors, anxious to increase maize production, dispersed them into small village settlements. Hastorf was interested in the role of women resulting from the Inka conquest. She approached this fundamental guestion not by marshaling subjective evidence but by examining the changing distribution of food remains in excavated settlements, and changing dietary evidence obtained by isotope analyses of skeletons from ancient Sausa villages.

As they have been for centuries in Andean households, women are responsible for food preparation and storage. Hastorf, an expert on native plants, believes that there is a relationship between the distribution of plant remains in Sausa dwellings and compounds and the activities of men and women. In households with male heads, for example, she found the most diverse plant remains in kitchen areas, and fewer types elsewhere in the compound where other activities took place. Households with a female head had concentrations of plant remains not only in the kitchen area but on the patio, as if different rules on the preparation of food and its consumption were followed.

Hastorf then plotted the distribution of crop seeds in pre-Inka structures, which date to a time when maize was less common, and found that the inhabitants of every dwelling used and consumed a wide range of plant foods, especially potatoes and legumes. Maize occurred mostly in patio areas. It was here, argues Hastorf, that such communal activities as the making of corn-based beer took place - the beer being a commodity that was a vital part of ritual, social, and political meetings. A later, Inka-period compound yielded fewer potatoes and much more maize. Here the processing of corn was more concentrated, with little burning of corn, as if most of it were consumed as beer. Hastorf believes the dense and restricted distribution of maize in the later compound might reflect more intensified processing of corn by women. Inka policies that sought a constant rise in maize production, regular taxation in the form of labor and produce, led to more restrictive roles for women - roles that supported male activities.

Hastorf then turned to the skeletons found in the compounds, studying the stable carbon isotopes in bone collagen extracted from them. She found pre-Inka diets were the same for men and women, mainly quinoa and tubers, with some maize. This suggests that if corn-based beer were being consumed, it was shared between men and women. The skeletons that postdated the Inka conquest revealed a higher consumption of maize, but half of the male diets were much richer in maize than that of the women. Hastorf believes this reflects changed social conditions under Inka rule. The women were processing much more maize into beer, which was consumed not by everyone but by a relatively small proportion of the males in the community. Furthermore, most men were eating more meat than women. The dietary differences reflect a changed political climate, in which the Sausa, once small groups, were now incorporated into a larger sphere that depended on men becoming involved in far more gatherings, rituals, and obligatory tasks during which beer was consumed. The women worked harder, but their position outside the home was more restricted under the Inka regime.

The Sausa example shows how archaeological data, meticulously gathered from many sources, can document the change in men's and women's roles in a given society. In addition to archaeological evidence, Hastorf had the advantage of working with rich ethnographic and historical sources. While these are, of course, lacking for the Stone Age, the lesson is clear. Gender relations have always been dynamic and can hardly be inferred from simple decorative motifs on pots or figurines.

Hastorf shows us a plausible and fascinating road ahead. This kind of research is a far cry from sweeping generalizations about Mother Goddesses and fertility cults. For me, Hastorf's innovative approach to gender and the role of women in prehistory is far more intriguing.

My thanks to Meg Conkey, Margaret Miller, and Julie Ruiz-Sierra for criticizing this column in draft. Marija Gimbutas lays out her thesis in "The Civilization of the Goddess" (Harper Collins, New York, 1992). Christine Hastorf, "Gender, Space, and Food in Prehistory," appears in Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey (eds.), Engendering Archaeology (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 132-159).




Doug Weller

Director The Hall of Ma'at
Doug's Skeptical Archaeology site::
[www.ramtops.co.uk]