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December 14, 1999, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section F; Page 1; Column 2; Science
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LENGTH: 2164 words
HEADLINE: Furs for Evening,
But Cloth Was The Stone Age Standby
BYLINE: By NATALIE ANGIER
BODY:
Ah, the poor Stone Age woman of our kitschy imagination. When
she isn't getting bonked over the head with a club and dragged across the cave
floor by her matted hair, she's hunched over a fire, poking at a roasting
mammoth thigh while her husband retreats to his cave studio to immortalize the
mammoth hunt in fresco. Or she's Raquel Welch, saber-toothed sex kitten, or
Wilma Flintstone, the original Roccer Mom. But whatever her form, her garb is
the same: some sort of animal pelt, cut nasty, brutish and short.
Now, according to three anthropologists, it is time to toss such hidebound
cliches of Paleolithic woman on the midden heap of prehistory. In a new analysis
of the renowned "Venus" figurines, the hand-size statuettes of female
bodies carved from 27,000 to 20,000 years ago, the researchers have found
evidence that the women of the so-called upper Paleolithic era were far more
accomplished, economically powerful and sartorially gifted than previously
believed.
As the researchers see it, subtle but intricate details on a number of the
figurines offer the most compelling evidence yet that Paleolithic women had
already mastered a revolutionary skill long thought to have arisen much later in
human history: the ability to weave plant fibers into cloth, rope, nets and
baskets.
And with a flair for textile production came a novel approach to adorning and
flaunting the human form. Far from being restricted to a wardrobe of what Dr.
Olga Soffer, one of the researchers, calls "smelly animal hides,"
Paleolithic people knew how to create fine fabrics that very likely resembled
linen. They designed string skirts, slung low on the hips or belted up on the
waist, which artfully revealed at least as much as they concealed. They wove
elaborate caps and snoods for the head, and bandeaux for the chest -- a series
of straps that amounted to a cupless brassiere.
"Some of the textiles they had must have been incredibly fine, comparable
to something from Donna Karan or Calvin Klein," said Dr. Soffer, an
archaeologist with the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have long been fascinated by the Venus
figurines and have theorized endlessly about their origin and purpose. But
nearly all of that speculation has centered on the exaggerated body parts of
some of the figurines: the huge breasts, the bulging thighs and bellies, the
well-defined vulvas. Hence, researchers have suggested that the figurines were
fertility fetishes, or prehistoric erotica, or gynecology primers.
"Because they have emotionally charged thingies like breasts and buttocks,
the Venus figurines have been the subject of more spilled ink than anything I
know of," Dr. Soffer said. "There are as many opinions on them as
there are people in field."
In their new report, which will be published in the spring in the journal
Current Anthropology, Dr. Soffer and her colleagues, Dr. James M. Adovasio and
Dr. David C. Hyland of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst
College in Erie, Pa., point out that voluptuous body parts notwithstanding, a
number of the figurines are shown wearing items of clothing. And when they
zeroed in on the details of those carved garments, the researchers saw proof of
considerable textile craftsmanship, an intimate knowledge of how fabric is
woven.
"Scholars have been looking at these things for years, but unfortunately,
their minds have been elsewhere," Dr. Adovasio said. "Most of them
didn't recognize the clothing as clothing. If they noticed anything at all, they
misinterpreted what they saw, writing off the bandeaux, for example, as tattoos
or body art."
Scrutinizing the famed Venus of Willendorf, for example, which was discovered in
lower Austria in 1908, the researchers paid particular attention to the
statuette's head. The Venus has no face to speak of, but detailed coils surround
its scalp. Most scholars have interpreted the coils as a kind of paleo-coiffure,
but Dr. Adovasio, an authority on textiles and basketry, recognized the plaiting
as what he called a "radially sewn piece of headgear with vertical stem
stitches."
Willendorf's haberdashery "might have looked like one of those woven hats
you see on Jamaicans on the streets of New York," he said, adding,
"These were cool things."
On the Venus of Lespugue, an approximately 25,000-year-old figurine from
southwestern France, the anthropologists noticed a "remarkable" degree
of detail lavished on the rendering of a string skirt, with the tightness and
angle of each individual twist of the fibers carefully delineated. The skirt is
attached to a low-slung hip belt and tapers in the back to a tail, the edges of
its hem deliberately frayed.
"That skirt is to die for," said Dr. Soffer, who, before she turned to
archaeology, was in the fashion business. "Though maybe it's an acquired
taste."
To get an idea of what such an outfit might have looked like, she said, imagine
a hula dancer wrapping a 1930's-style beaded curtain around her waist.
"We're not talking protection from the elements here," Dr. Soffer
said. "This would have been ritual wear, if it was worn at all, a way of
communicating with higher powers."
Other anthropologists point out that string skirts, which appear in Bronze-Age
artifacts and are mentioned by Homer, may have been worn at the equivalent of a
debutantes ball, to advertise a girl's coming of age. In some parts of Eastern
Europe, the skirts still survive as lacy elements of folk costumes.
The researchers presented their results earlier this month at a meeting on the
importance of perishables in prehistory that was held at the University of
Florida in Gainesville. "One of the most common reactions we heard was,
'How could we have missed that stuff all these years?' " Dr. Adovasio said.
Dr. Margaret W. Conkey, a professor of anthropology at the University of
California at Berkeley, and co-editor, with Joan Gero, of "Engendering
Archaeology" (Blackwell Publishers, 1991) said, "They're helping us to
look at old materials in new ways, to which I say bravo!"
Not all scholars had been blinded by the Venutian morphology. Dr. Elizabeth
Wayland Barber, a professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College
in Los Angeles, included in her 1991 volume "Prehistoric Textiles," a
chapter arguing that some Venus figurines were wearing string skirts. The recent
work from Dr. Soffer and her colleagues extends and amplifies on the Dr.
Barber's original observations.
The new work also underscores the often neglected importance of what Dr. Barber
has termed the "string revolution." Archaeologists have long
emphasized the invention of stone and metal tools in furthering the evolution of
human culture. Even the names given to various periods in human history and
prehistory are based on heavyweight tools: the word "Paleolithic" --
the period extending from about 750,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago --
essentially means "Old Stone Age." And duly thudding and clanking
after the Paleolithic period were the Mesolithic and Neolithic, or Middle and
New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age.
But at least as central to the course of human affairs as the invention of stone
tools was the realization that plant products could be exploited for purposes
other than eating. The fact that some of the Venus figurines are shown wearing
string skirts, said Dr. Barber, "means that the people who made them must
also have known how to make twisted string."
With the invention of string and the power to weave, people could construct
elaborate yet lightweight containers in which to carry, store and cook food.
They could fashion baby slings to secure an infant snugly against its mother's
body, thereby freeing up the woman to work and wander. They could braid nets,
the better to catch prey animals without the risk of hand-to-tooth combat. They
could lash together wooden logs or planks to build a boat.
"The string revolution was a profound event in human history," Dr.
Adovasio said. "When people started to fool around with plants and plant
byproducts, that opened vast new avenues of human progress."
In the new report, the researchers argue that women are likely to have been the
primary weavers and textile experts of prehistory, and may have even initiated
the string revolution in the first place -- although men undoubtedly did their
share of weaving when it came to making hunting and fishing nets, for example.
They base that conclusion on modern crosscultural studies, which have found that
women constitute the great bulk of the world's weavers, basketry makers and
all-round mistresses of plant goods.
But while vast changes in manufacturing took the luster off the textile business
long ago, with the result that such "women's work" is now accorded low
status and sweatshop wages, the researchers argue that weaving and other forms
of fiber craft once commanded great prestige. By their estimate, the detailing
of the stitches shown on some of the Venus figurines was intended to flaunt the
value and beauty of the original spinsters' skills. Why else would anybody have
bothered etching the stitchery in a permanent medium, if not to boast, whoa!
Check out these wefts!
"It's made immortal in stone," Dr. Soffer said. "You don't carve
something like this unless it's very important."
The detailing of the Venutian garb also raises the intriguing possibility that
the famed little sculptures, which rank right up there with the Lascaux cave
paintings in the pantheon of Western art, were hewn by women -- moonlighting
seamstresses, to be precise. "It's always assumed that the carvers were
men, a bunch of guys sitting around making their zaftig Barbie dolls," Dr.
Soffer said. "But maybe that wasn't the case, or not always the case. With
some of these figurines, the person carving them clearly knew weaving. So either
that person was a weaver herself, or he was living with her. He's got an
adviser."
Durable though the Venus figurines are, Dr. Adovasio and his co-workers are far
more interested in what their carved detailing says about the role of
perishables in prehistory. "The vast bulk of what humans made was made in
media that hasn't survived," Dr. Adovasio said. Experts estimate the ratio
of perishable objects to durable objects generated in the average culture is
about 20 to 1.
"We're reconstructing the past based on 5 percent of what was used,"
Dr. Soffer said.
Because many of the items that have endured over the millennia are things like
arrowheads and spear points, archaeologists studying the Paleolithic era have
generally focused on the ways and means of that noble savage, a k a Man the
Hunter, to the exclusion of other members of the tribe.
"To this day, in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing
such boldy wonderful things as thrusting spears into woolly mammoths, or
battling it out with other men," Dr. Adovasio said. "We've emphasized
the activities of a small segment of the population -- healthy young men -- at
the total absence of females, old people of either sex and children. We've
glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other
things that made that life way successful."
Textiles are particularly fleeting. The oldest examples of fabric yet discovered
are some carbonate-encrusted swatches from France that are about 18,000 years
old, while pieces of cordage and string dating back 19,000 years have been
unearthed in the Near East, many thousands of years after the string and textile
revolution began.
In an effort to study ancient textiles in the absence of textiles, Dr. Soffer,
Dr. Adovasio and Dr. Hyland have sought indirect signs of textile manufacture.
They have pored over thousands of ancient fragments of fired and unfired clay,
and have found impressions of early textiles on a number of them, the oldest
dating to 29,000 B.C. But the researchers believe that textile manufacture far
predates this time period, for the sophistication of the stitchery rules out
it's being, as Dr. Soffer put it, "what you take home from Crafts
101." Dr. Adovasio estimates that weaving and cord-making probably goes
back to the year 40,000 B.C. "at a minimum," and possibly much
further.
Long before people had settled down into towns with domesticated plants and
animals, then, while they were still foragers and wanderers, they had, in a
sense, tamed nature. The likeliest sort of plants from which they extracted
fibers were nettles. "Nettle in folk tales and mythology is said to have
magic properties," Dr. Soffer said. "In one story by the Brothers
Grimm, a girl whose two brothers have been turned into swans has to weave them
nettle shirts by midnight to make them human again." The nettles stung her
fingers, but she kept on weaving.
But what didn't make it into Grimms' was that when the girl was done with the
shirts, she took out a chisel, and carved herself a Venus figurine.
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GRAPHIC: Photos: At right is a profile of a woman's head with a
plaited-looking hat, discovered in Brassempouy, in France.; A portrait of a
woman far different from the cavewoman stereotype is emerging from these Stone
Age Venuses: above is Venus of Willendorf in Austria; at right, the back and
front views of Venus
of Kostenki in Russia; far right, Venus of Lespugue, with prominent buttocks and
a "grass" skirt, in southwest France. (Photographs by Steve Holland,
University of Illinois; photo of Venus of Kostenki by Bill Wiegand, University
of Illinois)(pg. F1); Dr. Olga Soffer, a researcher, examining what has been
called the "golf ball" head of the Venus of the Kostenki I site in
Russia. The basket headware was made of plaited starts and coiled basketry.
(Olga Soffer); (Bill Wiegand/University of Illinois)(pg. F2)
Map of Southern Europe shows location of Lespugue, Willendorf and Kostenki. (pg.
F1)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: December 14, 1999