When respected journals - Nature for example - use terms such as "Prehistoric pin-up" and "35,000-year-old sex object", and a German museum proclaims that a figurine is either an "earth mother or pin-up girl" (as if no other roles for women could have existed in prehistory), they carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and researchers, evolutionary psychologists in particular, to legitimise and naturalise contemporary western values and behaviours by tracing them back to the "mist of prehistory".
I like how EP is singled out here - not all of it is bad, of course, but that which is most egregious in transposing current 'commonsense' realities onto the past does drinks deeply from the well of these kinds of unsupported assertions, drawing on the apparent reputability of the sources in which they were published to bolster the credibility of their own conclusions. That's not to say that sexuality wasn't one of the dimensions of at least some Venus figurines, but Nowell's perspective certainly goes a long way to show that assuming that this was the single or most important motivation behind their manufacture in many cases probably says more about prehistorians than it does about prehistory itself.
I also really cannot agree enough with her observation that assuming that all figurines look like the ones from Willendorf or Dolni Vestonice biases our understanding of how variable this class of objects truly is. If we don't acknowledge this variability and the fact that it is a defining feature of figurine-making in the Upper Paleolithic, we're doing our interpretations a major disservice. By extension, we're also doing a major disservice to the interested public who often has a strong interest in the past of our species. In fact, assumptions about the homogeneity of various forms of behavior in the Upper Paleolithic (e.g., cave art, burials) has really been an impediment to getting a realistic understanding of what life between 45-10,000 BP must have been like.
Read the whole thing, it's well worth your time, and make sure you also check out the gallery that accompanies the piece - there's even more info in there.
4 comments:
By the way - did the prehistoric people know the association between sexuality and pregnancy? I wonder about that because, acc. to remarks I found scattered in diverse reports etc., this seems not at all obvious even when people are skilled observers of animals.
T. -
Fair question. It's very difficult to say with certainty what 'prehistoric people' knew and didn't know. Clearly, they didn't have an understanding of genetics in the same way we do, although even that is a fairly recent development in Western science. On the other hand, artificial selection on certain traits was a defining feature of the earliest domestication, so people in the past clearly had some understanding of how reproduction worked, and how it was tied to sexual activity, even if their understanding of the mechanics must have been murky.
I'm assuming, though, that you refer to the pre-agricultural past. Hard to say definitely. In spite of its many flaws, though, the book Sec at Dawn does provide a survey of beliefs about sex and procreation among (at least some) extant hunter-gatherers that suggests that there was a pretty decent understanding of the link between the two phenomena. This varies from culture to culture, though, which must have also been the case in the Pleistocene. This ties back to the main theme of the interview, namely that we should be wary of assuming en bloc that the belief systems and cultural norms of Paleolithic people were uniform and expressed/encoded in the same way.
JRS
Thanks for your answer! At that occasion, I am curious about some of the talks in the coming conference you mentiond in your last post: "Why Humans (especially simple foragers) Are So Egalitarian" and "Childhood, Play and the Evolution of Cultural Capacity In Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans". Would you be so kind and post the links to texts or slides on that (if and when they come into existence)?
Best,
Thomas
Thomas -
my pleasure. I don't know if the organizers are planning to make any of this stuff available, but I'll definitely check with them. I might, however, put my remarks on the session's various papers on line in relatively short order, so maybe that will give you a taste of what was discussed in the session.
Cheers,
JRS
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