Over the weekend I visited the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum. This small but wonderful exhibition has as its theme the argument that our Ice Age ancestors 40,000 years ago were intellectually modern human beings whose aesthetic responses to the world were the same as ours. It is amazing to look at small finely sculpted or moulded representational figures and imagine someone, professionally skilled, producing these decorative objects while living in a hostile environment with an Ice Age climate, being the prey for carnivorous animals, and with a technology only of stone tools.
It is also fascinating that some of the earliest representational objects found were small figures of pregnant women. The exhibition speculates whether these objects were made by women as talismans for a good outcome in childbirth. Many were pierced and showed signs of being worn, and many seem to have been deliberately broken. These ‘Venus’ figures kept being produced in more ever more simplified versions for 30,000 + years alongside carvings of the animals that these early humans hunted for food and clothing.
Ivor Bison 20,000 years old. From www.britishmuseum.org
It would be nice to think that they were creative representations by both women and men in a community of the value they placed on motherhood. But perhaps these Venus figures could simply be representations of ‘commodified’ creatures that human communities needed to exploit/exchange for survival [sadly this pessimistic possibility comes from my early reading of Engels on the origins of the family].
We can’t ever know which of these explanations comes close to the reality. But we can wonder about the life of the woman – who looks so much like us- portrayed in the 26,000 year old little head below.
Woman's head in ivory. 26,000 year old. From www.britishmuseum.org
