Ancient Goddesses

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J1

Ancient goddesses

THE MYTHS AND THE EVIDENCE_

Editors

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris

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The British Museum Company Ltd 46 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QQ

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7141 1761 7

Designed and typeset by Martin Richards Printed in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner

Frontispiece: The ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor in a role more usually associated with Isis, nursing the infant Horus. Temple of Hathor, Dendera. Ptolemaic Period, 332-330 BC.

HARVARD ARVARDR`_ l-`f

LIBRARY

Acknowledgements

Lucy Goodison would like to thank Hilary Armitage, Sue Cowan-Jenssen, Sheila and Rosie Ernst, Jane Foot, Anna Ickowitz, Paul and Barbara Morrison, Stef Pixner, Anna Robinson, Jo Ryan, Helen Schafer and Vic Seidler, whose support and practical help in various ways enabled her to finish co-editing this volume through the difficult time of her parents' death. To them — Betty and Robin Goodison — she dedicates her work on this book, in appreciation of their unfailing encouragement and their rich sense of what the past can offer us. She is also grateful to her family — Carlos Guarita, Julio Goodison Guarita and Corey Goodison — for generously tolerating the side-effects of the work, including stress, long phone calls and piles of papers.

Christine Morris especially wishes to thank Alan Peatfield for many thought-provoking discussions on ancient religion, and for his unwavering support for this project. Thanks are owes: also to Parshia Lee-Stecum for his forthright critica1 comments and for his readiness to discuss almost anything, including goddesses. She is grateful to Amanda Kelly and Conn Murphy for assisting with the preparation of the volume, and to her colleagues in the School of Classics, Trinity College Dublin for providing a creative and happy working environment. Her family, Alan, Daniel and Andreas Peatfield, have patiently endured living with goddesses and she gratefully acknowledges their loving support.

We would both like to express our

appreciation of the skill and good humour of our commissioning editor at British Museum Press, Carolyn Jones, who steered and encouraged the project from inception to completion.

Introduction. Exploring Female Divinity: From Modern Myths to Ancient Evidence

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris 6

1 Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the `Goddess' and Popular Culture

Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey 22

2 Twin Peaks: The Archaeologies of Çatalhöyuk

Lynn Meskell 46

3 Goddesses of the Ancient Near East 3000-1000 BC

Joan Goodnick Westenholz 63

4 Goddesses in Early Israelite Religion

Karel van der Toorn 83

5 The Earliest Goddesses of Egypt: Divine Mothers and Cosmic Bodies

Fekri A. Hassan 98

6 Beyond the `Great Mother': The Sacred World of the Minoans

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris 113

7 From Athena to Zeus: An A-Z Guide to the Origins of Greek Goddesses

Mary E. Voyatzis 133

8 God or Goddess: The Temple Art of Ancient Malta

Caroline Malone 148

9 A 'Mother Goddess' in North-West Europe c. 4200-2500 BC?

Elizabeth Shee Twohig 164

10 Some Gallo-British Goddesses: Iconography and Meaning

Miranda J. Green 180

Notes 196

lllustration Acknowledgements 218 Index 220

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Introduction 7

Exploring Female Divinity: from Modern

Intro

duction

Myths to Ancient Evidence

Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris

he ideaof an original Mother Goddess in prehistory is surrounded by an 1 intense controversy, but one in which neither side speaks to the other. In entering the debate on the nature of female divinity in ancient European and Mediterranean societies, this book is intended to bridge the gap between two camps, shedding light on areas of prejudice and showing that in this fascina-ting area of study we all still have more questions than answers.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a new movement which claims that human society and religion began with the worship of a Goddess in a peace-loving, egalitarian, matriarchal society, and that female divinities everywhere represent survivals of this early mode of religious expression. A stream of books by non-specialists, artists, psychotherapists, feminists and amateur historians has drawn attention to powerful and often neglected ancient images of the female. These many voices have together been termed the 'Goddess movement'.

Some Goddess movement writers accuse the academics — archaeologists and ancient historians — of wilfully ignoring the evidence for female power in pre-history. Some have fulminated against the prejudice of conventional scholars for keeping the `real history' of women in the dark. Contemporary academics on the other hand have, with a few notable exceptions, either remained silent, ignoring the claims, or have tended to dismiss the Goddess story as an inven-tion of polemic and hysteria.

Is one side reinventing the past? What can or cannot be proved by the evidence from prehistory? Can we debate competing reconstructions of the past in a way which is both respectful and flexible? This book aims to address such questions from an archaeological viewpoint; we seek to bring a breath of fresh air, speak-ing in a spirit of enquiry.

We approached ten scholars and invited them to write about their specialist areas of study. We asked them to be as open-minded as possible and to make their material and the grounds for their interpretations visible and accessible so that readers could make up their own minds. In this way we sought their help to breach the academic silence and enable the general reader 'to pick a path through the myths and the evidence in the Goddess debate.

Why does it matter? Why is it important to us now to understand what hap-pened in those obscure corners of prehistory? There are many reasons for delving into the past, but people have felt this issue particularly to have a strong contemporary relevance. Modern campaigns for the ordination of

women and struggles for a fairer distribution of social power to women have sought inspiration and justification from the claim that women held those roles at the very beginning of human society. Opposition to those movements has countered that there has always been sexual asymmetry, that women have always been the 'second sex' and should stay so. lf we see those modern move-ments which draw strength from the Goddess theory as progressive, it might seem churlish to scrutinize their appropriation of the past.

However, while the use of the `Goddess' as a metaphor has been inspira-tional for many, the attempt to reconstruct a literal past has appealed to authoritarian attitudes and fundamentalist principles which we find deeply troubling, as we will explain below. Let us look briefly at the stories told by both the archaeologists and the Goddess writers; then we may be able to see in what ways this book interrupts, underscores or reshapes those narratives.

The archaeologists' story

The discipline of archaeology is in its childhood. Born in the late nineteenth century, it slowly established an identity distinct from its sibling, anthropology.

Some of the most influential works on matriarchy and the `Goddess' emerged in those early formative years before either discipline had cut its teeth. Johann Jakob Bachofen's Mutterrecht (Mother-Right), published in 1861, introduced the idea of female power in prehistory.' He argued that matriarchy, that is the rule of the mother over family and social institutions, arose from the close biological relationship between mother and child, but that this 'primitive' social structure evolved over time into the patriarchal system. Bachofen based his views largely on reading myth as a memory of historical reality, while interestingly conceding the absence of `the most elementary spade work' in the domain of archaeological investigation.2 Other writers, such as Tylor and Morgan, added their scholarly weight to this theory.3 In parallel with social developments the female `idols' of `fertility cults' were held to have developed into a more advanced male-focused religion.

Similarly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Darwin, Sir James Frazer produced a mammoth work on religious thought, The Golden Bough (1911-15).4 This compilation of mythical and ethnological material set a mould by focusing on the relationship, in various cultural settings, of a maternal divinity and a male son-consort: the Great Goddess and the Dying God. This was a formation recognized in historical antiquity in the Near East, most famously in the cult of Cybele and Attis. Through Frazer's writings this template influenced perceptions of Greek religion and even of prehistoric cultures, such as the Bronze Age 'Minoan' civilization.5

In the early twentieth century while Sigmund Freud was presenting his the-ories about the sexual feelings of the male child for his mother, psycho-anthro-pological books such as Robert Briffault's The Mothers (1927) helped maintain

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8 ANCIENT GODDESSES Introduction 9 a male academic consensus. The `Goddess and her son-consort' became a

catch-all for the interpretation of primitive religion, and terms like `Mother Goddess' and `Great Goddess' were used unquestioningly of the archaeological material emerging from Greece, Malta and the north-west European megaliths.

In the 1950s, during the post-war re-emphasis of women's role within the family, the publication in English of the work of Carl Gustav Jung assigned the Great Mother transcendental status as an eternal 'archetype' independent from, predating and influencing human society. He assigned her an immutable psychic reality (`As a primal being the mother represents the unconscious') and suggested that the paternal principle of Logos (consciousness) has to struggle for its `deliverance from the mother', stating that `its first creative act of liber-ation is matricide'.6 Psychology interacted with archaeology and this period saw further books, such as Erich Neumann's The Great Mother: An Analysis

of the Archetype

(1955), O.G.S. Crawford, The Eye Goddess (1957) and E.O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (1959). The latter refers in his pref-ace to the prominence and prevalence of the Goddess cult throughout the

ancient world as:

an essential element very deeply laid ... centred in and around the mysterious processes of fecundity, birth and generation.?

It was against this background that James Mellaart's publication of his excava-tions at Çatalhöyük in Turkey (1967) and the first of Marija Gimbutas' publi-cations on prehistoric European religion (The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 1974), both stressing the importance of a Goddess, caught the atten-tion of many in the newly emerging women's movement.

Interestingly, at the very point where feminists took up the story, many archaeologists turned their backs. In the late 1960s came a sea change in archaeological attitudes to the Goddess story: Peter Ucko's 1968 book on anthropomorphic figurines from Egypt and Crete and a seminal article by Andrew Fleming, `The Myth of the mother-goddess', in the following year both pointed out the flimsiness of the evidence, and what massive assumptions had been built into the existing consensus.$

At this time archaeology took an important general change of direction. This `New Archaeology' sought explicitly to explain change and the over-arch-ing processes — especially social and economic — through which it came about. This `processual archaeology' of the 1970s and early 80s was often coupled with rather negative views on the possibility of effectively studying religion through archaeological materials. The emergence in the 1980s of a number of yet newer approaches — of which cognitive, contextual and feminist archaeology are most relevant here created a renewed interest in the ritual and symbolic world.

Within this more fractured academic arena the approaches of the French structuralists and the later post-structuralists, originally developed to analyse

language, literature and myth into their component structural elements, have provided new tools for tackling archaeological problems. Marxism too has pro-vided a vocabulary for looking at power relations in society. As a result issues concerning structures of social power — such as the rise of elites, class conflict, the role of religion as a mode of social manipulation and control — have become a major focus for archaeological study.

Feminist approaches have had an impact on archaeology only in the last decade, and they cannot be reduced to a single, shared set of aims and interests. Feminisms in archaeology range from `adding' women to our reconstructions of past societies, to radical restructuring (a paradigm shift) of what we deem appropriate for study and how we study it.

Assessing the archaeologists' story

The discipline of archaeology is grounded

in

the recovery of primary material: the laying out of trenches, careful excavation and recording of long-buried walls and often fragile finds. Less glamorous, but equally important, is the meticulous task of sorting and classifying the finds in order to reach an understanding of the material. For the presentation of the findings, the empirical method of the discipline has required that archaeologists proceed from the material evidence to their conclusions with the minimum of personal interference.

Implicit in this process was the claim that archaeological publications were impartial, and the assumption that they provided a well-judged overview of the lives and cultures of past peoples. For much of the history of archaeology as a discipline, this 'objectivity' has obscured the importance of how the individ-ual's experience, as a human being living in a particular time and place, might shape and filter understanding of the past. `The burial was accompanied by a mirror, therefore the skeleton was female.' But the expectation that women (and women alone) look in mirrors is constructed around our society's atti-tudes to women's appearance; we cannot simply shift those behaviours and values onto another society in the distant past. 'The figurine has large breasts so it represents motherhood.' `The figurine is naked so it represents sexuality and fertility.' Such interpretations, which are still widespread, were first for-mulated within specific social contexts; contemporary sexual stereotypes were projected backwards, with little or no self-awareness of how the present was conspiring in the creation of the past.

-While some archaeologists still subscribe to the `facts speak for themselves' school of thought, most would now accept that any interpretation of an ancient society is a working model always open to being confirmed, modified or rejected by further evidence or analysis. Some archaeologists have also responded to the idea of multiple, equally valid `readings' of the past. However, the subjective and partial aspect of archaeological endeavour still often remains unacknowledged.

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10 ANCIENT GODDESSES Introduction 11

Archaeology has in recent decades tended to prioritize questions about cer-tain aspects of the archaeological record. The decision to focus on issues of social power and status, and on how religion may have been used to create and maintain elite groups, has brought with it the implication that these are the most important questions, and has, for example, often closed the door on debate about ritual practice and experience. Such tendencies in themselves reflect the specific time, place and interests of archaeologists. As Ian Hodder has commented, `On the whole, post-processual archaeology has concerned power, negotiation, text, intertext, structure, ideology, agency ... [These concerns] represent the interests of a predominately western, white, male discourse.' This theoretical discourse is of the mind and relates primarily to other theories, usually in a confrontational way. The 'body' of evidence becomes secondary: 'argument is over the top of, rather than through the data that become relevant only as examples.'9

The separation made in Western thought between mind and body, and the associated devaluing of bodies and emotions, results in a denial of many aspects of experience, as Victor Jeleniewski Seidler has stressed:

Within late modernity so many of our intellectual traditions serve to sustain the control that a dominant masculinity seeks over experience ... The point is that life is there to be controlled, not to be lived. 10

The reasoned archaeological publication masks preparatory processes of hunch, lateral thinking, intuition, even — in the case of Sir Arthur Evans — visions, which have all contributed to the final product, but which are rarely acknowledged." A disembodied mind will be resistant to trying to engage with the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences of individuals in the past. Lynn-Meskell has suggested that in recent archaeological work 'ever-popular models of domination and resistance continue to posit issues of power and control as central. Somehow this sells short the life experiences of the individ-uals involved.'12 Humans become passive objects constructed by society, and

we are left with a non-peopled past, devoid of `embodied individuals' capable of feeling and acting.13 While many contemporary archaeologists have been

reticent about investigating the spiritual preoccupations of prehistory, off-shore of the archaeological establishment recent years have seen a tidal wave of books from the Goddess movement devoted to these very issues.

The Goddess movement's story

A careful ear can pick out many voices in what has been termed the Goddess movement: despite calls for unity they are not all discussing things in the same way.

The impetus came from an archaeologist: in the 1970s Marija Gimbutas' works, focusing on the prehistoric cultures of south-east Europe, gave

authority to the story of Goddess religion, and other specialist historians like Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986) have followed. A parallel strand of works by non-specialists, such as sculptor Merlin Stone's

When God was a Woman (1976),14 used archaeological material — mostly

from Egypt, Greece and the Near East to argue how in a distant past the worship of a Great Goddess was universally supplanted by male religions. Other writers, such as Asphodel Long, have drawn similar conclusions using textual evidence.1

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Another strand of cultural historians have produced synthesizing works of broad-sweep history with the express purpose of redressing the balance in favour of women's contribution to human development. One early such work, Helen Diner's Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminist History of Culture (1927), was reprinted in the 1960s, and authors working in this field since have included Elizabeth Gould Davis (1975), Riane Eisler (1987) and Elinor Gadon

(1989) .16

From a very different perspective, some feminists involved in the field of theology have asked not so much `what happened in history?' as `where are the female images of the divine?' If they cannot be found, said Mary Daly, women should invent them.' Writers working inside and outside the established Judaeo-Christian traditions have seen the quest as a personal and religious one: a ques-tion of finding, reshaping and transforming symbols of divinity which validate women's experience. Their concerns include religious practice and the devel-opment of new symbols, rituals and forms of prayer. Writers like Carol P. Christ, Rosemary Ruether and Starhawk have contributed to a lively ongoing discourse explicitly based around the spiritual needs expressed by contemporary women.'$ Less clearly founded are the series of writings from psychotherapists influ-enced by Jung; these celebrate the 'feminine principle' linked to elements such as the moon, mothering, intuition, instinct, mystery and love, and enlist selective help from archaeology and anthropology to support their case. Esther Harding's Women's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern (1971) was one of the earliest of these conflations of archaeological `facts' with previously determined `psychic truths', which prompted the reviewer of one recent book by two Jungian analysts to exclaim: 'Mythographers, it seems, are as prone to self-delusion as any other over-ardent believer. Baring and Cashford have unwisely swallowed their own story, and taken it for history.'19

-There is thus a tremendous spectrum of writers within the Goddess move-ment, and their treatment of the archaeological evidence ranges from the careful to the cavalier. However, certain themes recur throughout their writings, certain stories which are retold, whether allegorically, speculatively or dogmat-ically. A central hypothesis is that a peaceful, Goddess-centred culture existed in the distant past in many places, and especially in `Old Europe', Greece, Malta, Egypt and the Near East. Priestesses officiated and the `Goddess', sometimes represented by a mortal woman, is often seen as entering into a

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sacred marriage with a son-consort, in some cases a king who, like the vegetation, died yearly following Frazer's schema.

Her functions of menstruation and childbirth are emphasized, and the `Goddess' is often described as having three faces (virgin, matron, crone) or as having a double role of creator/destroyer. Although primarily a maternal sym-bol, she can absorb warlike and social skills within the same matrix. She is linked with the moon, contrasted with a male sun; identified with the earth, contrasted with a male sky. The end of the story tells of the take-over of her matriarchal society by warlike Indo-European males (c. 3500 BC), and carries a strong moral sub-text with women as the `goodies' and men as the `baddies'.2o

The claims have largely been either ignored or slated by academics.21 Let us

step back for a moment and try to appraise briefly both the strengths and weak-nesses of this strong cultural offensive.

Assessing the Goddess movement's story

The contribution of the Goddess movement needs to be recognized as both spiritual and archaeological. Spiritually, the images of female divinity it puts forward has offered comfort and inspiration to women who felt negated by the female images offered within mainstream Judaeo-Christian religion. It has also revitalized that tradition as a whole by drawing attention to forgotten material within it which reflects positive symbols of women and important roles played by them within it, especially before St Augustine (AD 354-430) definitively equated women with sin.22 The movement's emphasis on honouring the

physical — the female body and its functions, and the earth - have reawakened an aspect of Christian thought which is more respectful towards the natural world and more in tune with modern ecological awareness. As Christian theologian Mary Grey has commented, the result has been a broadening of the sense of the divine:

If we can see this affirmation of the female life-cycle as `redeeming' the cen-turies of anti-body, anti-nature and misogynist tradition, when women were described as more carnal, more earthy than men, and as such, responsible for sexual sin, then the value of Goddess spirituality is indisputable.23

She suggests that Christianity can benefit greatly from the metaphor of the Goddess through `rediscovering connectedness with nature as a redemptive strength'.

Archaeologically, the contribution has been more contradictory. Goddess writers have adopted the nineteenth-century consensus of mainstream (male) scholarship, despite the fact that the underlying cultural evolutionary theories have been cast into the `dustbin of long discarded anthropological ideas'.24

The key differences are that the Goddess literature has reversed the story by re-assigning positive values to those female elements previously designated as

intrinsically `primitive', and that they pressed the claim that women were not only `fertility idols' but also held temporal authority within society. This turns the `Mother Goddess' model into something less cosy, especially when interwoven with modern feminist issues. It can provoke a defensive reaction. In Cretan archaeology the Goddess has provoked less intense debate than a possi-ble `Queen' enthroned in the palace of Knossos. Parallels with gender issues over who controls seats of learning are easy to see. In this way Goddess writers have raised issues of power and authority which have made academic prejudice stir uncomfortably. Ian Hodder has regretted the inaccessibility of archaeological texts, asking, `how can alternative groups have access to a past that is locked up both intellectually and institutionally?' He recommends `transforming the relations of production of archaeological knowledge into more democratic structures'.25 In their own way, Goddess writers have indeed contributed to this

process.

However, just as they have challenged the evolutionary model by reversing it — rather than questioning its whole premise — so too they have challenged archaeological authority by setting up new authorities. Many Goddess writers naturally quote extensively from the archaeologists who have trodden the ground before them. There is, however, an over-reliance on authority rather than primary evidence and an appeal to reach certainties about the past, to establish a new `truth' about what happened `in the beginning' which mirrors the old fundamentalisms of conventional religion. A personality cult emerged around the few professional archaeologists notably Marija Gimbutas — who have proposed the Goddess theory and who are viewed as bravely `stepping out-side the official academic ideology'.26 The search for a new orthodoxy leads to

intolerance, a shutting down of imaginative powers and a sense of closure.

-As women, mothers and committed archaeologists, we are left with a sense of the denial of other voices apart from theirs. We experience disquiet at the sense of the appropriation of feminism for themselves, as if there were not many diverse feminisms, both within and outside of archaeology, which would all be silenced if this new orthodoxy were adopted. For us it is important to reassert the need for continued questioning and debate within a feminist framework.

Another disquieting issue is the appeal to universals, as if human societies all started the same way following a single blueprint, and all women have been essentially the same since the beginning of time. Such `essentialism' reduces our options, as if there were only one predetermined `archetypal' path for women to follow; ironically at base the same one which male thinkers have traditionally allotted to us, that of motherhood. Contemporary writers often overlook the fact that the existence of a `Mother Goddess' in prehistory was a matter of consensus from the late nineteenth century onwards for many male scholars who found this image compatible with their sense of the female as a primitive, `natural', sexual, maternal being utterly divorced from their `rational' male world. It seems strange that this is a tab which some women now

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want to pick up. Although these same qualities are now redefined as positive, the Goddess literature still frames its discussion in terms of the male/female polarization which our society imposes. Just as matriarchy is patriarchy in reverse, so too the Goddess curiously reflects the monotheistic God of Christianity. Their biologically essentialist vision is one which they share with the reactionary forces who have always opposed the emancipation of women; it serves, as Lauren Talalay has pointed out:

to isolate women as outside of history ... If women's reproductive capabilities are the source of their power, then women remain, to some extent, locked within an unchanging domestic sphere.27

The appeal to a fixed definition of women in the name of change is inherently contradictory. A narrative which promotes `it was always like this' silences `here is a new possibility, where will it take us?'

The Goddess movement has espoused the `intuitive' or `experiential' approach which offers potential for fresh ways of looking at the past, and for making imaginative leaps of interpretation. Archaeology's traditional claims of scientific objectivity have been shaken by science's own move away from the notion of an impartial observer towards that of the `participant observer' who inevitably interacts with what is seen.28 The role of imagination and inspira-tion in scientific progress has been increasingly recognized; Einstein himself described scientific models as `free creations of the human mind'. 29

But again perhaps the opportunity to do more has been missed, by rev-ersing rather than challenging the whole intuitive/rational dichotomy which is taken for granted in Western culture. The caricature which pictures the feminist on an ancient earthwork communing with the 'Goddess' while the academic sits crouched over books in the library does justice to no-one. Glamorizing `female' intuition, while demonizing archaeologists as "grubby schoolboys" seeking shelter in the "hutch of reason"'30 reinforces the very gender stereotypes we could be questioning. Subjectivity without self-awareness can lead to a colonization of the past whereby the remains of ancient peoples' lives get sucked into a self-centred image of modern desires. In the rush to reclaim female history Goddess writers have not addressed the com-plexity and diversity of the archaeological record; in the search for eternal verities they have failed to engage with its fluidity. By plucking out only those ancient artefacts whose faces fit their theory, they have not engaged with the primary evidence in a way which respects its context.

Recontextualizing the past

What we do mean by context? Let us take the example of a figurine, say a naked female figurine made of clay. She may or may not represent a goddess: the existence of the figurine is not in itself proof of a goddess. How do we go

about studying it? A Goddess movement writer may quote from what is written in a book, or on a museum label, and may even travel to the site where the figurine was found — an important aspect of context — but will delve no further. She may then interpret the figurine as a 'goddess' and move on to link it with other figurines from a different time and place. Curiously, in a movement that stresses the value of the body of the 'Goddess' and of physicality in general, this approach shows a lack of care for the physical reality which gave that figurine birth. To understand the figurine better calls for a process of `recon-textualizing', of giving back the figurine its context.31

A first, essential step is to supply, as Susan Sontag puts it, `a really accurate, sharp, loving description' of the figurine; by describing, handling and drawing an artefact archaeologists may avoid making interpretations while missing important details and taking `the sensory experience of the work of art for granted.'32 Beyond the object itself there is the find context. As Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey (Chapter 1) emphasize, we need to ask: Was the figurine found in a building? In a grave? Was it in a well or on a rubbish heap and how might it have ended up there? What other objects were associated with the figurine? Was it found with everyday broken pottery or more precious finds like jewellery or weapons?

We may now have a number of ideas about its possible use but we need also to explore the social context, that is, what other evidence is available for under-standing the society which produced and used the figurine. How was society organized? Who had wealth and authority? What was the economic basis and the level of technical and artistic skills? Before drawing conclusions about the significance of our figurine the religious context of the society must also be explored: can we identify special cult places, ritual paraphernalia, depictions of religious activity? Unless it is situated in the archaeological record in this way, the figurine is decontextualized. It becomes simply a passive object onto which the beholder can project his or her fantasies.

Time provides another context. Many Goddess writers have ignored the specificity of the historical moment when the figurine was made or used. Committed to the idea of a static `Golden Age', they have often failed to rec-ognize that human life is dynamic, always in a process of change. Compiling encyclopaedic works with the urge to universalize, Goddess writers have rarely looked closely enough at any one time and place to see the specific detail, or the value of differences between cultures. Cycladic figurines looted from their original findspot have been described as `orphaned'. Plucking a figurine from its geographical, social and historical context also leaves it orphaned; to deny an object's physical circumstances, lifting it out of time, leaves it strangely disembodied.

Moving from past to present, there is also the context of modern thinking. How have others approached the interpretation of figurines?33 A recent dis-cussion has, for example, made explicit the possible distinction between `image

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of' and `image for'. Haaland and Haaland take a modern ethnographic example from Tanzania: a Makonde figurine of a pregnant female, but used for the initiation rites of adolescent boys.34 Taken out of its context, the figurine could easily have been identified as a `Goddess' rather than a symbolic device for the formation of male identity. This framework for thinking is likely to prove useful for anyone with an interest in figurines. More generally, it illustrates the importance of being aware of and responsive to current'schol-arship, rather than (as some feminists have tended to do) writing as if `the intellectual world began yesterday'.35

A diversity of goddesses

Neither we nor our contributors can step outside the unique moment of time which houses us and shapes our view of the world beyond; our own context inevitably shapes our thoughts and perceptions. Given that limitation, we have attempted to be aware of our place in history and in contemporary debate, and to focus in detail on specific areas of study. In this way the material evidence is made available, which others both now and in the future — may see and interpret differently.

In selecting the areas to be covered in the book we chose for discussion those places and periods of history where claims for a Goddess have been most insis-tent and where there is, therefore, a case to answer. The evidence presented is primarily archaeological but where written evidence is available, especially in the ancient Near East, texts are fully drawn upon. The contributors are all actively involved in scholarly study of the areas covered by their chapters, and some are at the forefront of excavation and have included new material. All the contributors have looked afresh at their material, presented it accessibly, and, in keeping with the aims of feminist scholarship, have offered coherent yet undogmatic interpretations.

The result has been a revelation. Not of a single, fundamental pattern uni-versally repeating itself, but of a picture of staggering diversity. Most of the contributors found strong evidence for female divinities, but not necessarily in the forms or roles conventionally assigned to them. Let us look more closely at some of the themes that have emerged.

The first of these themes refers us back to the dilemma: how can a deity be identified? Here the varied types of evidence call for different approaches. A written text may name a deity, but with a mute anthropomorphic figurine or an artistic image it is harder to tell whether we are looking at a deity, a priestess, worshipper, or an ordinary person. In early north-west Europe Elizabeth Shee Twohig traces the shift in scholarship away from seeing a Goddess in every spiral to a more cautious and nuanced discussion of possible anthropomorphic images. Miranda Green, writing on Gallo-Roman goddesses, discusses various iconographic signs of 'otherness' such as nudity, disproportionate size, or

reversal in weapon-bearing hands, which may be taken as a sign of divinity. Non-human features such as wings and otherworldly attendants appear in sev-eral chapters as indicators of a supernatural being, although there is a range of possible interpretations from god/goddess through to personal deity, guardian spirit or spirit guide.

Several chapters draw attention to a second theme: the fact that divinity need not be envisaged in anthropomorphic or personified form at all, remind-ing us that the humanist perspective is one among many and that anthro-pocentrism reduces and forecloses a variety of spiritual experiences. Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 variously suggest interest in astronomical events, concerns with animals, plants, the sun, time-keeping, the weather, spirits of place and the dead. In the relatively well-documented ancient Near East (Chapter 3) it is suggested that in some areas deities did not take on personified form until the third millennium BC.

Thirdly, where there is clear and abundant evidence of female divinity, the question of `one or many' arises. In many of the cultures investigated here, plurality is most evident, and the interaction of goddesses with other deities needs to be addressed. Recalling Brested's comment that `Monotheism is but imperialism in religion',36 we need to be open to the possibility of religions structured very differently from Western religion. There is a great difference between one primal Mother Goddess and a mother goddess amongst other deities with a range of functions. In the past some writers have treated female forms differently from male, privileging them or conflating them into one `Goddess' in a way they would not do with male deities.

Here, the concept of motherhood as itself culturally constructed becomes crucial, reflecting how a society sees both the biological function of parturition and the relationships surrounding a mother. A mother figure, like a father fig-ure, need not literally be a parent. This leads to a fourth theme, that of the relationships in which goddesses engage, which range far beyond the Frazerian template of mother-son. Sibling rivalry and sibling love - are fundamental narratives in some religions; one thinks of Anat, sister of Baal (Chapter 4), or the siblings Isis, Osiris and Seth (Chapter 5). There is also an emphasis in some cultures on the relationship of paired female figures, sometimes perhaps the mother-daughter relationship; examples from Çatalhöyük, Crete and Malta challenge the notion of a single primary figure (Chapters 2, 6, 8). Joan Westenholz (Chapter 3) describes how a combined male/female deity and a divine triad comprising husband, wife and husband's sister extend the range for Near Eastern goddesses, who are by no means confined to maternal relationships. The whole concept and process of gendering into male and female can also be drawn into question. Sometimes gender identification is based on unexam-ined assumptions; in the case of Malta (Chapter 8) corpulent body forms used to be automatically designated female. In some cultures, it is suggested, gender may have been a less important or even an irrelevant factor in defining

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figurines and images. Many prehistoric figurines are ungendered or sexless, while some have been tentatively identified as belonging to a `third gender' (Chapter 1) or having dual sexuality (Chapter 2).

Another theme which emerges strongly is that the symbols which have been claimed as `universal' — such as analogies between sky/earth, sun/moon, male thought/female sexuality — are clearly seen to be culturally specific. In Egypt (Chapter 5) frequent references to female links with the sky and to the `Queen of Heaven' belie the `Earth Goddess' stereotype. The idea of the moon as inevitably female is challenged by female links with the sun (Chapters 3, 5, 6). Highly diverse rolesare undertaken by both male and female deities: there are male deities of fertility, while goddesses may represent the state and justice or writing and libraries, may give and protect kingship, preside over war and dis-play violent tendencies.37 All these roles undermine the male culture/female

nature clichés of western society. Such evidence in well-documented societies should encourage a greater openness to similar possibilities elsewhere. The evidence time and again suggests the importance of female divinity, but with-out the centralized formation proposed in the Goddess literature. As Mary Voyatzis' (Chapter 7) study of the Greek goddess Athena demonstrates, roles of deities do not conform to universal schemes or unitarian reconstructions, but shift with cultural change and the passage of time.

The relationship between divinity and society also emerges as an important but complex theme. Fekri Hassan (Chapter 5) suggests that the changing loca-tion and economy of the early Egyptians changed their vision of crealoca-tion. However, there appears to be no simple correlation: important female deities do not necessarily mean a society in which women exert greater authority, although conventional archaeological scholarship has, from the beginning, been swift to favour interpretations of male dominance. In the Bronze Age Aegean, Arthur Evans centred Minoan religion around a `Goddess' and recog-nized the prominence of women in Minoan art, yet he envisaged a 'Priest-King' at Knossos. Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (Chapter 6) reaffirm the importance of female divinity and female officiants in palatial Crete, but draw attention to the continuing scholarly ambivalence over the issue of tem-poral power. Using theories of social development, Caroline Malone (Chapter 8) challenges ideas of matriarchy by proposing a chiefdom structure for pre-historic Malta, while stressing that the sheer paucity of evidence, especially the crucial data from settlements, makes it difficult to integrate the rich symbolic material within a clear social structure.

For societies without translated texts, one is often left with a strong sense of ambiguity about both social and religious issues. But the availability of both archaeological and written evidence does not necessarily resolve the situation. As Karel van der Toorn points out in his discussion of Old Testament Israel (Chapter 4) there may be a sharp mismatch between the two forms: without the Bible ohr picture of the religion of that society would be very different;

conversely, papyrus texts and archaeological material can subvert and reshape

Biblical narratives. - -

-Conclusions

Given this wealth of diversity in the material from ancient Mediterranean and European cultures, we might wonder why the debate about early religion has been relatively mono-track around the question of a `Goddess'. Perhaps part of the problem has been that unacknowledged sub-texts within the debate have cast over prehistory a shadow of modern need which has obscured our vision. One such sub-text is the idea that male reason and female body/emotions are universal and necessarily opposed categories. Where archaeology meets the `Goddess' is also where science meets religion, and where mind meets body; they are not expected to brush shoulders comfortably in our society.

However this potentially explosive mix can also provide a creative chemistry where new questions and possibilities crystallize. As the discipline of archaeology begins to acknowledge subjectivity, the emotive and physical language of spiritual experience — awe, calm, trance, arousal, communion, ecstasy, hallucination can be used to extend the scope of cognitive archaeo-logy.38 We cannot assume that those experiences were the same in prehistory

as now — any more than eating or sex — but enquiring about ritual action, belief and feeling, and whether these activities and experiences involved a Goddess or goddesses, is a valid area of study. Linking such aspects of human activity with a dispassionate appraisal of the material evidence and locating them in relation to social dynamics, power, status, conflict and change, helps to create fuller possible pictures of the past. We need to be literate in the worlds of both material and spiritual experience if we are to understand how the two may have interacted in an ancient society. Women (past and present) do not need to be aligned to emotive and biological functions or men confined to a disem-bodied head any more than we should accept the conventional female nature/male culture divide. As Raymond Williams has observed, such dichotomies as 'Man/Nature' are a cultural construct and a denial of complex

interactions:

-In our complex dealings with the physical world, we find it difficult to recognize all the products of our own activities ,,. We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out.39

Rather than perpetuate traditional splits which polarize 'male' and `female' we should welcome the challenge and opportunity of moving towards more fluid and diverse approaches.

A second sub-text seems to be the notion that what happened in the distant past is a model for political realities today. Using the Goddess as a poetic

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20 ANCIENT GODDESSES Introduction 21 metaphor or inspiration for desired social changes is quite different from the

literal approach which seeks to re-write history — even at the expense of vio-lence to past lives — in order to validate such changes. Lynn Meskell (Chapter 2) has suggested that our current aims for social change should be based not on an imagined ancient `golden age' but on the lessons of the recent past, our humanity and our hopes for the future. Equally, the male academic response to the suggestion of past female power might be more reflective if it were not seen as a blueprint for the present and future. Modern struggles for social justice need to be fought on their own terms. `The past is a foreign country';40 and it is not there to serve us.

Another sub-text seems to be the haunting idea that the beginning of society represents the beginning of our lives. In this curious view of prehistory as the childhood of humanity, the `Mother Goddess' sometimes seems to reflect our conflicting feelings about Mother. The Victorian scholars' notion of the all-powerful, all-sexual and potentially all-destructive Mother Goddess who part-ners the son-consort-dying god significantly mirrors the obsessive sexual love, fear and hate of the small Freudian boy in his mother's lap. Glamorizing `matricide' as a struggle for freedom, the Jungian male hero also has to escape from the `Terrible Mother', the `womb of death',41 in order to achieve con-sciousness and identity, reflecting the dilemma of the male child who must reject the protective wing of mother, the limitations of home and traditional `female' qualities in order to forge an acceptable identity out in a male world.42

If language can betray an undertow of attitudes, we might detect a politer and chillier note of rejection and the need to differentiate in Fleming's 1969 paper challenging `The myth of the mother-goddess': `The mother goddess has detained us for too long; let us disengage ourselves from her embrace.'43 Denial and the flight from intimacy resonates in a sense of loss: `Mother, are you there?' calls Ucko-humorously into the post-modern void in a recent paper.44

Sexual mother, concubine and entangling female embrace are all male fantasies. None of these narratives reflect the experience and feelings of the female child. In response, some Goddess writers have argued with and raged at the fathers of our academic institutions, and have recreated in their descrip-tion of matriarchal society a vision of blissful intuitive merging with the Mother Goddess as all-encompassing and undifferentiated as Winnicott's `psychological unity' of mother and child or Lacan's `Imaginary' pre-Oedipal phase, when the infant experiences identity with the mother and is unaware of any separation between itself and the world. The monopolizing of `truth', the sucking of all prehistory into one Goddess-worshipping whole, the insistence on subjectivity at the expense of all else, can be seen as reminiscent of the mono-vision of the baby at her mother's breast. There is a sense of `this is it, nothing else exists.'

If such sub-texts have indeed been present it is little wonder that feelings have run high, that both sides have coloured the Goddess debate with

symbolism about women, mothering and primal beginnings. It seems crucial to remember that prehistory is not the childhood of humanity writ large. It is time perhaps for the debate to develop towards an exploration of the bound-aries between self and other, acknowledging the experience of self, and of others present and past, and moving beyond the need for certainty.

Ruth Padel has commented on how `feminist reading' was made possible by reading revolutions of the late nineteenth century — psychoanalysis, Marxism and social anthropology — which offered new ways of looking at differences between people. Moving from traditional scholarship's assumption of a stable reader and an established `text', feminist perspectives highlight the instability of the reading, writing self as well as the constructedness of the other.45 Our contributors Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey (Chapter 1) also stress that the contribution of feminist archaeology is not to construct `Goddess' narra-tives but to demystify archaeological `facts'.

Using a variety of approaches, the contributors all seek to communicate and to `demystify' their material for the reader. They follow neither the path of dogma nor a scepticism which acknowledges the multivocality of alternative views as a way of maintaining authority.46 Certainty is seductive, but we can learn more about the past by engaging creatively while accepting doubt. In each of the societies discussed in Ancient Goddesses, our contributors have reshaped assumptions about the `Goddess' through careful attention to the evidence within its historical context, while confirmingthat unanswered ques-tions remain about the reasons for the centrality of women in some prehistoric iconography. The monolithic `Goddess' whose -biology is her destiny may to a large extent be an illusion, a creation of modern need, but in acknowledging greater diversity in religious expression we allow for the possibility of finding new patterns in a rich and fascinating body of evidence.

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Rethinking Figurines 23

z RethiinIing

'Figurines

A Critical View from Archaeology ofGimbutas, the `Goddess' and Popular Culture

Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey

I

n almost all of its variants, the Goddess movement has appealed to and uses archaeological materials, especially those that it claims to be images of females: female figurines or statuettes and female motifs on ceramics or other media.' Above all, images from the European Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (c. 40,000 to 5,000 years ago) are claimed to represent fertility and other positively-valued attributes2 and thus are often taken as material and symbolic evidence for the existence of a world in which females, as a generic category, were valued positively. We entered into a more thorough discussion of the use of archaeology in these contemporary social movements in an earlier version of this paper, 3 in which we drew attention to the rich literature, the complexity of the issues, and the variety of participants and views involved in what for the purposes of discussion we have termed the `Goddess movement'. Here, we shall focus on the use of the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic (c.

40,000 to 5,000 years ago) figurines of Europe in this literature.

The power and authority of archaeological essentialization

To essentialize something is to reduce a complex idea/object to simplistic char-acteristics, thereby denying diversity and multiple meanings and interpreta-tions. Essentialization — of women, men, society, and history — underlies much of the diverse literature that is part of the Goddess `consciousness', but it is used implicitly as a device that may be taken for granted and not questioned. This, with the unquestioning acceptance of the authoritative word of archaeologists such as James Mellaart and Marija Gimbutas, forms the basis of our critique.

Recent feminist literature has focused on a critique of such essentializing in the feminist literature of the 1970s and 1980s in anthropology and history. This critique, however, has been slow in being trained on the use of archaeo-logical data.4 We believe that women and men in prehistoric societies are not identical and interchangeable.5 The aim of rethinking our gendered accounts is not merely to reclaim inventions and origins for women. The recent emergence of archaeologies of gender confirms why we should inquire into what were sure-ly variable, dynamic, and historicalsure-ly specific gender roles, relations, ideologies, and identities.6 But the emergence of this kind of gender research in archaeo-logy runs up against an authoritative and totalizing account of `the past' that is widely held in popular cultural views of the Goddess. Although admitting

variations, the Goddess movement holds a general account of life in what Gimbutas calls Òld. Europe' that has direct continuities out of the Upper Palaeolithic (c. 40,000 years ago): `matrifocal, sedentary, peaceful, art-loving, earth-and-sea bound'.? Marija Gimbutas has àuthenticated' a story about such a positive place of women in human societies ever since the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and through the Neolithic period (c. 40,000 to 5,000 years ago), until Òld Europe' was overthrown around 3500 BC by a `patrifocal, mobile, warlike, ideologically sky-oriented' society that was ìndifferent to art'.8

In this account, the whole of European prehistory is treated as a homo-genous unit from the point of view of religion and social organization. The rich variation of European prehistoric material culture is essentialized so that the figurine and clay-rich archaeological record of Neolithic south-east Europe

(c. 6500-3500 BC), for example, `stands for' the continent as a whole. Furthermore, in this universalized Eurocentric story, gender roles are homo-genized, ignoring the agency of prehistoric men and women, as well as their variable roles, identities and practices. No gender questions are asked: the role and symbolic place of men and women are set and fixed.

There is a widespread- demand for unambiguous `facts' that has perilously constrained the emergent archaeologies of gender that are probing the varied and dynamic aspects of social relations in past societies. This demand is fed as well by continuing androcentric or monolithic views, especially in the media.

This demand has been heightened by the recent publications of Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the

Goddess (1991), which provide a version of (pre)historical data that obviously

fits the notion of what is desired and 'healthful'.9 The media and her followers have deemed Gimbutas `the archaeological au.thority'10_{and it is because of her} status that we take her work to be emblematic of the problems of the Goddess.

movement for both feminism and archaeology. She presents a markedly author-itative voice that is in line with the prevalent mode of discourse among both traditional and New (processualist) Archaeologists who all:

... offer authoritative optimistically-worded statements about what they have found. They interpret (the archaeological record) according to a very specific

[read limited] set of questions which are deemed relevant and answerable, and based on a number of very specific premises (usually unexpressed) about how people behave and behaved in the past. It is these mainstream studies that pro-vide statements on the archaeological `facts', which then become reiterated and reconfirmed in secondary studies that incorporate.... all the archaeologists' lim-itations into their own works.11

Despite the existence of an authoritative discourse within archaeology more widely, it is still the case that Gimbutas does diverge from archaeological prac-tice with her arguments by assertion, that increasingly lack even the minimal

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24 ANCIENT GODDESSES Rethinking Figurines 25

`linking arguments' between the archaeological materials and the interpreta-tions that are made of them. The narrative is presented in an authoritarian way in which the process of inference from artefact to interpretation is mystified and ambiguities of the archaeological record are hidden. Few of the artefacts that Gimbutas refers to are presented in their archaeological contexts, and few justifications are provided, much less developed, for the interpretations of cer-tain attributes or forms, such as the interpretation of structures as `temples' or `altars', and of figurines as `the Goddess'. Often, for example, Gimbutas suggests that the female imagery all shows a certain `cohesion', but this is not explained. And yet, other leading figures in the Goddess literature such as Riane Eisler, Elinor Gadon and even Gerda Lerner, accept unquestioningly these ideas, reproduce them and widen their distribution as `facts' about the past.12 The `pull' for a universalizing account has led Gimbutas and others to

some glaring inconsistencies. They focus on the Neolithic period (c. 7000-3500 BC) — on the sedentary, agricultural communities — yet they invoke a continu-ity in the symbolic repertoire that `goes back' into the Upper Palaeolithic, of 40,000 years ago. However, their account of the onset of agriculture involves great social change; humans, no longer gatherer-hunters, now came to `control nature.' There is no satisfactory account of why the basic symbolic matrix matrifocal and female, as powerful and fertile, as earth and water — remained essentially intact. Phenomena such as the correlation between social change and symbolic change or between social and symbolic continuity must be ques-tioned and problematized, not assumed.

Thinking about figurines

Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines are at the heart of the debate over origins in the Goddess movement and in Gimbutas' work. They constitute the main data-base on the religion of Old Europe that Gimbutas has reconstruc-ted. Figurines, however, do not speak for themselves, as has been concluded by a number of papers in a recent issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.13 They have to be interpreted to have meaning in any century. Since

figurines have been and can be interpreted in many different ways, each inter-pretation is a clear indicator of where a writer stands both on the past and on feminism. As Ucko has noted, the antiquity of the female figurines dating to the Upper Palaeolithic period secured for many interpreters of the later Neolithic period the notion that the Neolithic figurines (c. 7000-3500 BC) were indeed `Mother Goddesses' and that this was a symbol of considerable antiquity.14 Thus, for some time, the interpretations of the female statuettes of

the two periods have been linked without question.

Female figurines have been found in archaeological sites of the Upper Palaeolithic from south-western Europe (France) eastward into Siberia, espe-cially from sites dating to 26,000-10,000 years ago, and of the Neolithic of the

circum-Mediterranean area and of south-eastern Europe 7000-3500 BC. The

ways in which these two sets of figurines have consistently been described by a wide range of academic scholars and others reflect the primacy of the notion of `Woman' as both an erotic and aesthetic ideal, and contemporary porno-graphic views of the female body as sexual object.15 Late nineteenth and early

twentieth-century authors claimed that the female figurines — especially those of the Upper Palaeolithic with large stomachs and so-called pendulous breasts — depicted pregnancy and/or lactation, and therefore signified fertility and the magical desire for successful births to maintain the viability of the (assumed-ly precarious) population.16 Most traditional authors assume that the depiction

of biological and essential female traits meant that females- in the Upper Palaeolithic were themselves the objects not just of image-making but of social control and male desire; that their place and functions in Palaeolithic society were biologically determined and determinative; and that women's status was therefore less cultural and less central to the highly-valued arenas of artistic production, political control, and other domains of social and ritual power. In contrast, most Goddess authors view the fertility interpretation for both Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines as a positive attribution that highlights the cultural importance and centrality of female qualities and biological powers.

Neither approach, however, problematizes the notion of `fertility' for which figurines are so frequently believed to be images. That large breasts or large stomachs are agreed-upon conventions of imagery signifying lactation and the more inclusive concept of fertility has never been demonstrated or considered critically. Rice17 has argued that many of the Palaeolithic figurines are more

likely to be images for `womanhood' than `motherhood', although what 'moth-erhood' might have meant some 20,000 years ago in these particular societies is itself problematic.18 The striking diversity of female imagery of Upper

Palaeolithic and Neolithic figurines is all too readily collapsed under the rubric of `fertility' images. Even the identification of some imagery as being unam-biguously referable to the female is itself debated, such as in the debate over the so-called `vulva' shapes in the Palaeolithic repertoire of imagery. The Upper Palaeolithic statuettes especially have often been read as sexually charged because the ones that are usually depicted in texts — a non-representative sample to begin with — have large buttocks, breasts, and/or hips. This does not necessarily and immediately signify fertility but reveals a very contemporary (and partial) notion of sexuality. Onians describes the so-called Venus of Willendorf from Austria, one of the major icons of the Upper Palaeolithic figurine repertoire (Fig. 1):

Those areas of her body which are shown in all their rounded perfection are pre-cisely those which would be most important in the preliminary phases of love-making, that is, the belly, thighs, breasts and shoulders, while the lower legs, lower arms, feet and hands are withered to nothing.l9

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26 ANCIENT GODDESSES _{Rethinking Figurines} ₂₇

Fig. 1. The so-called Venus of Willendorf (Austria). This is one of relatively few female statuettes from Palaeolithic contexts that bear a triangular incision clearly marking the vulva. H. 11 cm.

As Rainer Mack has argued convincingly, this citation presents `a list of erotically-charged body parts that are — without legs and feet — made immo-bile; passive and available for possession'.2°

He shows that scholarly discourse about these Upper Palaeolithic female images relies upon and effects — a hierarchical and gendered subject-object relationship: that is, the appropriation of a female body by a mascu-line subject.21

In much of the more popularized literature which includes the uncritical inclusion of Venus figurine interpretations in introductory archaeo-logy texts twentieth-century sexist notions of gender and sexuality are all read into the cultural traces of `our ancestors': the male-female sex and gender bipolarity, the primary association of the female with reproduction and fertility, the conflation of anatomical sex with gender, and the assumption that these images are unambiguously about female-ness of a limited nature. For the most part, androcentric and gynocentric views differ primarily only in the high status that the gynocentric view would hold for the images within a different system of gender ideology. For both, the authority residing in `origins' then legitimizes these notions and makes them appear 'natural'.22

The recent literature about interpreting figurines (especially those from European and Near Eastern archaeological contexts) has involved a critique of Gimbutas' books

and

the derived Goddess literature. Their critique has focused on forefronting the diversity of the figurines, articulating details of their context, and offering interpretations that are based on these variables and on a more careful and explicit reading of theory of representation, imagery, and social action.

Dealing with diversity

In Gimbutas' books, an entire body or `class' of material culture - clay figurines — has been treated as a homogenous group and given a single inter-pretation: representation of `the Goddess'.

But the figurines do not occur in equal quantities (or forms) everywhere in

Europe and the Near East from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. Not only are the geographic distributions for the two periods not at all overlapping or isomorphic, but also areas and periods of their high frequency — south-east European Neolithic, Western and Eastern European Upper Palaeolithic — can

not, in fact, stand for the whole continent or eons of continuous time. The

differences in distributions and forms need to be investigated and explained. Traditionally, there has been a lack of discussion — let alone documentation — of the fact that the female statuettes of both the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic are not all the same in form or context and that females are not the only sex/gender depicted.23

For example, quantitative analyses of Upper Palaeolithic imagery make it clear that there are also images of males and that, by and large, most of the imagery of humans-humanoids cannot readily be identified as male or

female.24 In fact, no source can affirm that more than 50 per cent of the imagery is recognizably female. Most images can be called — at best — anthro-pomorphic. With a particularly rich corpus of Upper Palaeolithic figurines from Moravia (Czech Republic), Soffer shows that most are animals and that the few human figurines are strikingly diverse, and cannot be readily accommodated under a single interpretive rubric such as `Mother Goddess'.25

Likewise, many authors mention the high proportion of Neolithic figurines in south-east Europe that have no obvious sexual characteristics (e.g. 32 per cent of the Golyamo Delchevo, Bulgaria figurines)26 — and the clear presence

of a small proportion of figurines with clear male sexual attributes. 27 There

are even figurines with both male and female sexual attributes on Eneolithic settlements in south-east Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.28

Quantitative analyses in the 1980s and 1990s show consistently enormous variability in form, decoration, and degree of abstraction of anthropomorphic figurines.29 This formal variety can be explained, generalized or minimized as

`Her' variable manifestations within a standardized iconography, while the basic interpretation as Goddess representation remains intact.30 Or the diversity can

be brought into the foreground and investigated as a crucial aspect of figurine interpretation. Biehl, while recognizing the diversity, has attempted to discover `rules of production' which constrained the diversity of Eneolithic figurines from north-west Bulgaria.31 Bailey, on the other hand, has noted the fact that no two

figurines from the north-east Bulgarian Eneolithic settlements are the same; in fact he interprets the diversity as a deliberate attempt to represent individuals32

— an approach that Hamilton finds `is most in line with 1990s socio-politics'.33

The need for context

The generation and use of contextual information — where an object was found and what it was found with — has also come to the forefront as a crucial factor in the interpretation of figurines.34 For most Upper Palaeolithic images of

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28 ANCIENT GODDESSES Rethinking Figurines 29 females, there is very little traditional contextual information, such as

associ-ated stone tools, climatic information or associassoci-ated fauna that might indicate how a site was used, how long people were there, what the group size or com-position might have been. Many statuettes were found early on and/or by chance,35 although others continue to be discovered. The contexts on the

statuettes from sites in the Russian Plain — such as Gagarino or Avdeevo36 — are

more hopeful and promising.37

The lack of context for figurines in traditional analyses of later periods has been discussed by a number of recent studies.38 `Context' in the case of these

and other authors refers primarily to spatial context: the fact that, as with the Upper Palaeolithic figurines, the figurines are from the surface or have no exact provenance, or that it is not known with what other kinds of materials they were found. Meskell, for example, has drawn attention to the fact that the figurines from Gimbutas' own excavations at Achilleion, Greece, were not recorded with detailed provenance.39

However, we feel that the apparent lack of spatial context may have been exaggerated by the undervaluing of the varying and yet potentially `informing contexts' within which figurines were mostly deposited in archaeological sites. Figurines have been sought in `primary contexts' which it is assumed were the place of ritual performance, i.e. houses or sacred areas.4° From this standpoint,

the `garbage pits'- where most figurines end up — are seen as `secondary con-texts' and of less value in interpreting the figurines.

There has been strikingly little concern with what we might call the `use-life' of a given figurine: how, for example, might it have been altered, modified, broken, used, re-used, repaired, redecorated, or disposed of? In fact, most figurines have been found in trash pits in a broken state. What do we know about other objects that were thrown away with them? Were some objects never disposed of with figurines? How were the figurines broken? How do we differ-entiate between accidental or deliberate breakage? What materials were the figurines made of, are their tempers and pastes all the same and the same as those used for ceramics and other clay artefacts? How were they formed? At what temperatures were they fired?

These questions about context are regularly asked of all archaeological materials.41 Why have figurines and other imagery only rarely been subjected

to this same level of analysis? Many of the recent analyses have attempted to unravel why details of use-life variability and context have seemed to be irrel-evant in traditional interpretations. They draw attention to the emotional and empathetic reactions that anthropomorphic figurines engender. Traditionally, figurines have seemed to speak for themselves to the viewer, so that other sources of information have indeed been deemed irrelevant. Because of the strong emotions involved in interpreting human representations, such a tradi-tional viewpoint, although long outdated in modern archaeological practice, has survived in the treatment of anthropomorphic figurines.

For the south-east European Neolithic-Eneolithic, a number of studies have recently been published in which the diversity of formal variables of figurines has been presented in the context of spatial distribution, use-life information and formal and artefactual associations.42 We are now ready to add a further

study with the figurines from the Vinca culture settlement of Opovo in the former Yugoslavia. Today, Opovo is a small town in the recently drained marsh-lands north of the Danube in the former Yugoslavia. In prehistoric times there was a small hamlet (now called Ugar Bajbuk), located 2 km from the modern town, that was occupied for perhaps a 200 year period. The archaeological remains of the hamlet have been attributed to the Late Neolithic-Early Eneolithic Vinca culture (c. 4400-4000 BC). Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk is located in the inhospitable (for early farmers) marshlands in contrast to the majority of Vinca settlements which are situated in the fertile wooded hilly area south of the Danube river. During 1983-89, Ruth Tringham, in collaboration with Bogdan Brukner, excavated a part of this site with a team from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Novi Sad. The following analysis is the product of a joint authorship of Ruth Tringham, Mirjana Stevanovic and Vesna Muncan and is reported more fully in the Opovo monograph which is now in press.43

The context of figurines at Opovo, Yugoslavia

At Opovo, as in other settlements of this period, the majority of figurines — both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic (animal) — were found in pits. Approximately 100 anthropomorphic figurines — 90 per cent fragments — were found in the 16 x 20 m excavated block from this small (12 hectare) settlement (Fig. 2). The figurines are distributed in all three phases of occupation defined in the excavated block. Very few of the figurines have obviously sexual attrib-utes that would identify them as female or male (see, for example, the figurine with breasts, Fig. 3). Few of the figurines have the mask that Gimbutas sees as `typical' of the Vinca culture (Fig. 4).44

At Opovo, we have analysed the formal and use-life attributes of the fig-urines — as in the Selevac project45_{— within the context of production and}

uti-lization of clay and its firing. The anthropomorphic figurines make up a small part of the enormous number of recovered items that are made of fired clay. This material is mostly made into ceramics, but also into clay weights, balls, other perforated objects, and a variety of miniature objects: pots, furniture, zoomorphic figurines. Clay was also used in huge quantities for daubing the walls, floors, (and possibly roofs) of rectangular detached houses and the con-struction of their interior furniture. Unlike the movable clay objects, the daub was fired at the end of a house's use-life in what Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanovic have determined was a deliberately set conflagration of each and every house that was excavated.46 The figurines were fired intentionally as part of their initial production, but those that were caught in the house fires lying

Ancient Goddesses