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Authors: Norman Davies
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federations and regional alliances. In other words, the hunter-gatherer bands possessed an embryonic representative and political class. The historical problem can be addressed by analogy with the native peoples of North America, Australia, or New Guinea.
The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’. 1
LAUSSEL
T HE ‘Venus of Laussel’ dates from c.19000 BC. It is a bas-relief, sculptured on the inner wall of a cave in the Dordogne, and painted with red ochre. It shows a seated female figure with no surviving facial features, but with a large coiffe of hair drawn behind the shoulder, long pendulant breasts, and knees opened wide to display the vulva. The left hand rests on a pregnant belly. The crooked right arm holds aloft a crescent-shaped bison horn.
Like most of the human images of earliest European art, covering over 90 per cent of human history, the manifestly female gender of this artefact is both striking and eloquent. It is widely taken to represent the palaeolithic Godhead, a variant of the ‘Great Cosmic Mother’, whose cult dominated the rites of a matriarchal community. According to one interpretation, it would have presided over masked ritual dancing, where women, men, and children sought mystical communion with the animal spirits. Less certainly, it formed the pinnacle of cave-life imagery where the cave was the ‘Womb-tomb-maze of the Great Earth Mother’ and where ‘blood-woman- moon-bison horn-birth-magic-the cycle of life are analo-gised in a continuous resonance, or harmony, of sacred energies.’ 1
The matriarchal, or ‘matrifocal’ character of prehistoric society has been accepted by most theorists, from Marx and Engels onwards. However the assumption that matriarchy only operated at the most ‘primitive’ level is not now regarded as valid. In his work on myths, the poet Robert Graves explored the origins and fate of matrifocal culture in Europe, tracing the decline of woman’s status from ancient divinity to classical slavery. 2
Others have considered the female origins of speech, and hence of conscious culture. In humanity’s long ‘nursery age’, women and children may conceivably have learned to talk whilst the menfolk were away hunting. If so, the gender difference can only have been one of degree, since boy-children must surely have learned to verbalize alongside their sisters.
More convincing is the strong possibility that matriarchal and patriarchal societies overlapped, creating a wide range of hybrid forms. If the Gimbutas theory is correct (see p. 86), the advance on to the Pontic Steppes of the late neolithic ‘Kurgan peoples’ marked the arrival not only of the Indo-Europeans but also of warlike, patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, after the subsequent arrival of the Sauromatians—the first wave of the Irano-Sarmatian confederation—the matriarchal newcomers began to mingle c.3000 BC with their patriarchal predecessors. In this connection, Herodotus retailed a curious story how Amazon warriors fled the southern shores of the Black Sea and, after mating with Scythian braves, set up a new homeland ‘three days march from the Maeotian Lake’. Thestory was rejected as sheer invention until archaeologists began to uncover the skeletons of female warriors in Sauromatian graves. A Sarmatian princess of a still later vintage, whose tomb was found at Kolbiakov on the Don, had been buried with her battle-axe. 3
Like every committed doctrine, the feminist approach to ‘preherstory’ has its extravagances. But it is not entirely implausible:
Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, … and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a
The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’. 1
LAUSSEL
T HE ‘Venus of Laussel’ dates from c.19000 BC. It is a bas-relief, sculptured on the inner wall of a cave in the Dordogne, and painted with red ochre. It shows a seated female figure with no surviving facial features, but with a large coiffe of hair drawn behind the shoulder, long pendulant breasts, and knees opened wide to display the vulva. The left hand rests on a pregnant belly. The crooked right arm holds aloft a crescent-shaped bison horn.
Like most of the human images of earliest European art, covering over 90 per cent of human history, the manifestly female gender of this artefact is both striking and eloquent. It is widely taken to represent the palaeolithic Godhead, a variant of the ‘Great Cosmic Mother’, whose cult dominated the rites of a matriarchal community. According to one interpretation, it would have presided over masked ritual dancing, where women, men, and children sought mystical communion with the animal spirits. Less certainly, it formed the pinnacle of cave-life imagery where the cave was the ‘Womb-tomb-maze of the Great Earth Mother’ and where ‘blood-woman- moon-bison horn-birth-magic-the cycle of life are analo-gised in a continuous resonance, or harmony, of sacred energies.’ 1
The matriarchal, or ‘matrifocal’ character of prehistoric society has been accepted by most theorists, from Marx and Engels onwards. However the assumption that matriarchy only operated at the most ‘primitive’ level is not now regarded as valid. In his work on myths, the poet Robert Graves explored the origins and fate of matrifocal culture in Europe, tracing the decline of woman’s status from ancient divinity to classical slavery. 2
Others have considered the female origins of speech, and hence of conscious culture. In humanity’s long ‘nursery age’, women and children may conceivably have learned to talk whilst the menfolk were away hunting. If so, the gender difference can only have been one of degree, since boy-children must surely have learned to verbalize alongside their sisters.
More convincing is the strong possibility that matriarchal and patriarchal societies overlapped, creating a wide range of hybrid forms. If the Gimbutas theory is correct (see p. 86), the advance on to the Pontic Steppes of the late neolithic ‘Kurgan peoples’ marked the arrival not only of the Indo-Europeans but also of warlike, patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, after the subsequent arrival of the Sauromatians—the first wave of the Irano-Sarmatian confederation—the matriarchal newcomers began to mingle c.3000 BC with their patriarchal predecessors. In this connection, Herodotus retailed a curious story how Amazon warriors fled the southern shores of the Black Sea and, after mating with Scythian braves, set up a new homeland ‘three days march from the Maeotian Lake’. Thestory was rejected as sheer invention until archaeologists began to uncover the skeletons of female warriors in Sauromatian graves. A Sarmatian princess of a still later vintage, whose tomb was found at Kolbiakov on the Don, had been buried with her battle-axe. 3
Like every committed doctrine, the feminist approach to ‘preherstory’ has its extravagances. But it is not entirely implausible:
Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, … and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a
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