Goddesses and the divine feminine

[Aptrgangr]

Goddesses and the divine feminine

Gender and the
Problem of Prehistory

IMAGINING PREHISTORY
To examine the contested issue of gender in ancient Near Eastern prehistory, I be-
gin with a definition of the period. Prehistory is the time before the invention of
writing (which took place around 3500 bce in the ancient Near East). This period
is divided into several major eras of human development in eastern Europe and the
ancient Near East: late Paleolithic (c. 30,000–9000 bce), proto-Neolithic and Neo-
lithic (c. 9000–5600 bce), and Calcolithic (5600–3500 bce). In the European late
Paleolithic, we begin to havesome evidence of human creative consciousness in the
form of cave paintings, figurines, and tools decorated with designs or with figures
of animals or humans. The Neolithic is divided from the Paleolithic by the move-
ment from food gathering (hunting and collecting fruits, nuts, and plants) to food
growing and domestication of animals. The Calcolithic describes a time of more
developed agriculture (including the use of the plow and irrigation) as well as trade
and early urbanization.
The Neolithic revolution took place gradually in the ancient Near East between
9000 and 7000 bce. At first, herds of wild animals or areas of wild grains were cor-
doned off and controlled by more settled human groups; later, with full domestica-
tion, animals were bred for food, milk, or skins, and seeds were conserved for plant-
ing grains. These innovations developed along parallel lines in several places in the
ancient Near East and spread to other nearby areas. There was not a uniform,
straightforward pattern of development. Agriculture might havebeen started in one
area and then abandoned when water supplies gave out; the group that had begun
to growfood might then havemigrated and become pastoral. Earlier Paleolithic pat-
terns of hunting and gathering continued in societies near those that had moved on
to agriculture and stock breeding. Many Neolithic societies mixed stock breeding
and agriculture with hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants.
A variety of female figurines with markedly large breasts, buttocks, and bellies
are found in Neolithic sites. These figurines are often seen as reflecting a view that
links the female body with fecundity, likely an inheritance from the Paleolithic pe-
riod.
The development of pottery around 7000 bce offers new artifacts with geo-
metric designs, often molded in human and animal shapes. But without writing, it
is very diffcult to determine the actual thoughts or intentions of those who created
these images. Even early writings, such as texts from third-millennium Sumerian
cities, are not easy to interpret, a topic explored in the following chapter. With no
writing, and with only those artifacts that happen to be made of materials capable
of longer survival (stone, metal, baked clay, bone), determining what a group of
people meant by particular images is guesswork, an area into which trained archae-
ologists venture with great caution.
Yet humans, including trained archaeologists, are driven to know what such things
meant and thus what they might mean for us today. This is why such quests for ev-
idence of the lives of earlier peoples are undertaken. How does knowing the paths
trod by humans in the past inform us about what we are, about our potential as hu-
mans? Prehistory—precisely because one can say so little about it or about the in-
ner life of its people with certainty—easily becomes a tabula rasa on which to project
our own theories about what humans necessarily are or should be and hence must
have once been. Questions of gender roles, in particular, have reflected the social
assumptions of the archaeologists.
Archaeological studies of prehistory reflect sharply contrasting lines of inter-
pretation of gender roles. The dominant line in archaeology, which continues to-
day, simply assumes that, however much human society might change in terms of
technology and movement from hunting and gathering to agriculture and stock
breeding to industrialism, gender roles are fixed bybiology.This interpretation holds
that the male is the dominant food provider, that from the dawn of human devel-
opment he was the one who left the home base to secure food, primarily by hunt-
ing animals. The focus of many paleoanthropologists, then, has been on “man the
hunter.” This view assumes that the primary diet of early humans was meat and
that the role of hunter was filled exclusively bymales. Males are also seen as the pri-
mary innovators of social and technological advances: hunting generated both so-
cial cooperation among men and the impetus to create implements such as spears,
axes, and knives.
This view casts women as passive recipients of the food brought back to the home
base bythe males. Women’sprimary work was maternal, producing and raising ba-
bies. They also did secondary food processing, grinding and cooking grains or meat.
This image of Paleolithic humans has had an overwhelming impact on anthropo-
logical museums throughout the world as well as pictorial representations in intro-
ductory anthropology books.
Representations of “early man” picture males as mo-
bile, working in groups, hunting, fishing, and shaping tools for the hunt; women are
isolated, sedentary, caring for children, cooking food.
Archaeologists have typically assumed that males created and used most of the
surviving stone or bone tools from Paleolithic peoples. Thus, a rounded implement
is likely to be interpreted as a mace used by males to kill animals, rather than as a
pounding tool used by women to process grain or nuts.
Such depictions of Paleolithic “man” reproduce the presumed sexual division of labor
within the Western industrial middle class, with its split between “home” and “work,”
with men as providers and women confined to domestic work and child raising.

Please read the whole text here:
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9564/9564.ch01.pdf