mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== *McDermott - Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents Previous: Previous Interpretations <4.htm> Stylistic Variability and Choices in Visual Information An unstated assumption of most previous efforts at understanding PKG-style images is that they deviate from ordinary anatomical reality for some symbolic or psychological purpose. Thus, the parts of the female body involved in reproductive or erotic activities are accentuated or enlarged to symbolize societal values, whereas the individualizing and self-actualizing components of face, hands, and feet are neglected because they are insignificant to the message (Giedion 1962:434; Gvozdover 1989b:51; Neumann 1953). The appeal of such an idea is understandable, since individually and as a class PKG-style images reflect choices in the information they represent. First, as previously stressed, some parts of the female body do indeed appear enlarged and others neglected or distorted. Why these specific departures from objective human physiognomy and not others? Furthermore, once chosen, what cultural mechanism sustained the impressive constancy of the PKG style through time and space? Why are the lower extremities of both French and Russian pieces too short to be anatomically correct? Why are the buttocks of female statuettes from widely separated strata elevated (fig. 3)? FIG.3. PKG-style figurines in profile, showing common massing of three-dimensional forms, including elevated buttocks relative to tailbones (a, b, c). a, Grimaldi "yellow steatite statuette"; b, Willendorf no. 1.; c, Lespugue; d, Gagarino no. 3; e, Gagarino no. 1; f, Kostenki 1 no. 3. Secondly, a striking selectivity in gender exists. An examination of the originals reveals that only one of the six figures long claimed as males in the literature for Pavlovian-Kostenkian-Gravettian or earlier levels can withstand even cursory scrutiny. Gvozdover (1989b:56) also reports a male from Avdeevo and Praslov (1985:186) one from Kostenki. If confirmed, these will be the first of this gender ever found in eastern Europe (Abramova 1967a, b).^9 If men were involved in creating human images at this time, why are virtually no males represented? In 1902, Piette decided that two fragmentary lower bodies from Brassempouy, originally published in 1895, were males. Kuhn (1936:226), Passemard (1938:20), Saccasyn-Della Santa (1947:162, 199), Leroi-Gourhan (1968a:123), Pales and de St.-Pereuse (1976:pl 176), and Duhard (1993b:36, 39) have continued to identify males at Brassempouy. After examining these pieces, I join Luquet (1934:431) in concluding that, whatever the artist's original intention, the pubic nodes of these fragmentary pieces lack definition and do not certainly depict the penis.^10 If unfinished, such undifferentiated protuberances could easily have been destined to become either the generalized mons veneris commonly seen in early female statuettes or the developed vulva found in a few specimens (McDermott 1985:199-202). On the basis of what we know about the development of later, better documented art-historical period styles, these Brassempony pieces could with equal logic be considered unfinished examples of the far more numerous PKG-style female figurines with which they share many attributes. Lalanne's 1912 identification of a profile male archer in bas-relief from Laussel has likewise been generally accepted in the literature (Jelinek 1975:412; Kuhn 1936: 232; Lalanne and Bouyssonie 1941-46:138; LeroiGourhan 1968a:123; Luquet 1930:17; Saccasyn-Della Santa 1947:164), although the image possesses no primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Pales labeled it sexually indeterminate in 1976 (pl. 177-55), and Duhard subsequently interpreted it as a juvenile female (1993b: 73). Compositionally this one-of-a-kind work has more in common with variant PKG-style statuettes from Tursac and Sireuil thought to represent profile views of adolescent females than with any known male representation (Delporte 1960). In 1971 Hahn described a "male" statuette that had been reconstructed from badly deteriorated fragments of mammoth tusk originally excavated in 1939. This very poorly preserved ivory figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel, whose over 200 fragments have gone through three configurations (1969, 1983, and 1988), is said to resemble the male found at Brno (Delporte 1993a:152; Hahn 1971:241), but this is a spurious similarity. Arriving independently at our conclusions, I in 1985 and Schmid in 1988 found it far more reasonable that the piece originally represented a female. The penis identified by Hahn (1971:237) is but a serendipitous silhouette produced by differential weathering of the concentric ivory lamellae in the tusk; it is not intentionally carved (McDermott 1985:218) In 1939 Absolon identified as male a fragment of fired loess excavated at Dolní Vestonice. A reexamination of the original in the Moravian Museum in Brno renders dubious even its humanness. An active imagination is needed to see a lower torso with a diffuse truncated mound located between the stumps of what might once have been legs. The "penis," for example, is nearly equal in diameter to one of the legs, and the essentially shapeless piece actually resembles the front or rear legs of one of the numerous broken animal statuettes found at the site. Of the approximately 3,700 modeled "ceramic" fragments from Dolní Vestonice, the representational intent of more than 3,000 cannot be determined, but among the remainder there are 77 nearly whole and 630 broken animals compared with only 14 fragments of human figures (Vandiver et al. 1989). What Absolon saw as a penis is more likely the stump of either an animal's head or tail and its front or rear legs than a one-of-a-kind representation of a human male (O. Soffer, personal communication, August 8, 1988). The muscular fragment of an ivory figure from Brno, also in the Moravian Museum, with its more correctly proportioned stump of a penis at the base of the torso, does, however, create a realistic impression of masculinity. The head, torso, and left arm of the Brno man is all that survives of the only statuette found in an Upper Paleolithic burial. A unique find with no known stylistic antecedent or descendent, it can certainly be accepted as Pavlovian without formal conflict. While claims continue to be made for this or that isolated piece (Lalanne and Bouyssonie 1941-46:139; Marshack 1988), the fact remains that only one male image can be convincingly identified in the Pavlovian-Kostenkian-Gravettian flowering of European Upper Paleolithic artistic activity. This stands in marked contrast to the unequivocal sexual realism and extensive stylistic membership which characterize female figures. The refinement of form and balance and the consummate mastery of materials observed in better-preserved PKG-style figurines speak to a long tradition of female image making and an early investment of physical and aesthetic energies never seen in Upper Paleolithic male images. The scarcity of male images is inconsistent with contemporary claims of the heterogeneity of early human images. The argument of Leon Pales that there was far more diversity of style and gender than has been recognized is particularly well known. According to Pales, the undue attention given the blatant sexuality of the so-called Venus figurines has caused us to see similar attributes everywhere. On the basis of line drawings illustrating 480 "human" images assembled for his study of engraved figures from the French site of La Marche (Pales and de St.-Pereuse 1976), he concludes that numerous Upper Paleolithic representations of males were also made, with most images actually being sexually indeterminate. However, it is only when works in all media from all regions of Europe are lumped with those from the much later Magdalenian that this conclusion can be defended. Not only does Pales ignore basic temporal and formal distinctions and treat the immense 20,000-year span of the European Upper Paleolithic as a cultural whole but he counts items without regard for stylistic attributes or skill of execution. Shapeless one-of-a-kind lumps and incomplete fragments are attributed equal quantitative significance with stylistically related and intact works of rare workmanship and beauty. By collapsing all images ever thought to represent a human figure into a single pool, he creates a nonhomogeneous sample incapable of supporting his conclusions (McDermott 1991). What might be defended as a statistical description of the Upper Paleolithic in its entirety actually obscures the dominant representational form from 29,000 to 23,000 B.P. In his corpus of 480 figures, for example, Pales classifies 242 as "realistic" and only 238 as "humanoid." Thus, almost half look so little like human beings that accuracy requires they be given a separate designation. Of the 242 images classified by Pales as realistic, 25 (10%) are identified as males and 97 (40%) as females; the remaining 120 (50%), lacking primary or secondary features of gender such as genitalia, breasts, or beards, are classified as sexually indeterminate. How "realistic" is a human image if it lacks such fundamental details, and how valid is a classification system which accepts all suggestive forms as evidence of common content (realistic humans) without regard for cultural context or manner and style of representation? Of the 25 males identified by Pales, 21 are two-dimensional works dated to the Magdalenian, thousands of years after the spread of PKG-style images. The maleness of three of the remaining four (Brassempouy, Hohlenstein-Stadel, and Donlí Vestonice), is also questionable, as we have seen. In addition, of Pales's 25 realistic males, 12 are from La Marche, while 10 of the remaining is sites producing such images are also located in the classic Franco-Cantabrian region of Magdalenian art. The contemporary vogue of emphasizing representational diversity among PKG-style images is not supported by the evidence. By pointing to the natural symmetry of the sexes to challenge preexisting biases, Pales did call needed attention to the way in which gender is actually represented among PKG-style images. However, much needless confusion about stylistic heterogeneity or homogeneity in the Upper Paleolithic would have been avoided if students of gender in prehistoric images had applied principles learned from later, better understood styles of representational art. Prehistorians have too often failed to recognize that form is more indicative of a common cultural tradition than content. Ignoring this basic tenet of stylistic classification has led to an undue acceptance of one-of-a-kind "male" images to the point of creating a category of masculine representation where none exists. As Delporte observes, the wish to find males participating in the first tradition of human image making obscures the obvious fact that the complex, multivalent message "of the 'Gravettian group' has to do with /woman/" (1993b:256). Only slightly less detrimental to our understanding of PKG-style female images is the pernicious habit of comparing artifacts with artifacts when judging representational accuracy. If no objective anatomical standard is employed, what is meant when breasts are described as "normal" (Pales and de St.-Pereuse 1976:96-97) or when the thorax is said to be "normally proportioned" (Delporte 1993b:248)? Only careful comparison of image with the anatomical reality it "re-presents" can bring order out of the subjective interpretations which lace the literature on this subject. Furthermore, an artist's success in capturing the appearance of external visual information can and should be objectively evaluated. Hastily executed one-of-a-kind works are not statistically or culturally equivalent with highly finished pieces making up a clear stylistic tradition of representational effort. To assume otherwise is to ignore the mechanisms of culture that train artists and sustain the chronological and geographical spread of a style. Indeed, a classification system sensitive to the basics of art-historical style dramatically alters Pales's counts of male and sexually indeterminate PKG-style images. Males are, as we have seen, virtually absent from the record. Further, if only a few of the so-called sketches, which range from admittedly conjectural roughed-out "blanks" to pieces lacking only the final definition of breasts and abdomen (see fig. 4), are recognized on the basis of numerous shared formal attributes as unfinished female images (rather than being considered sexually indeterminate), the dominance of female over male representations during the opening millennia of the Upper Paleolithic becomes overwhelming. An organized tradition of representing the male figure has yet to be identified for the early and middle Upper Paleolithic, and when males emerge during the Magdelenian their representational accuracy seldom if ever approaches that encountered in PKG-style female images. ^11 Next: Comparing Modern Bodies with Prehistoric Artifacts <6.htm>