The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory

Natural History, May, 2007 by Laurence A. Marschall

The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory by J.M. Adovasio, Olga Softer and Jake Page Smithsonian Books; $26.95

Surely the title of this book is a bit hyperbolic. Judging by their place in popular culture, prehistoric females were far from invisible. After all, the best-known australopithecine is Lucy, the diminutive hominid whose 3.2-million-year-old skeleton was uncovered in Ethiopia in 1974. And what of Ayla, the Cro-Magnon heroine of Jean M. Auel's blockbuster, The Clan of the Cave Bear, and its sequels?

Still, the prehistoric archaeology of Homo sapiens, like most academic fields, has historically been dominated by men. It's not surprising, therefore, that, in the museum dioramas, textbooks, and popular literature produced by these august gentlemen, Stone Age people are generally represented as tribes of skin-clad cavemen who hunted mammoth, bison, and giant bears and sat around chipping spear points in their spare time. Women may not have been invisible, but traditional archaeologists did not regard them as central to Paleolithic and Neolithic culture. In the canonical story of human prehistory, men were the shamans, men invented atlatls and digging sticks, men created the exquisitely conceived paintings on the walls of hidden caves.

When women did appear front and center, they assumed an exaggerated sexual role. The famous Venus of Willendorf, a buxom statuette discovered in an Austrian riverbank in 1908, became the archaeological archetype of a Stone Age fertility goddess. Many similar figures discovered since have conventionally been described as avatars of the passive role of women: the bearers of children, the embodiment of hearth, home, and sedentary life.

Yet to J.M. Adovasio, an archaeologist, Olga Softer, an anthropologist, and Jake Page, a science writer, the Venus statuettes symbolize, at most, the ambiguity in the evidence for women's place in prehistoric society. After all, they argue, the societal significance of many artifacts from the distant past is not immediately obvious. For all we know, the statuettes may have served as religious icons, children's playthings, or sex toys.

Thus it would be as presumptuous to attribute too much power to prehistoric women as it would be to attribute too little power to them. New Age feminists like to cite the work of the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who saw the Venus figures as evidence for a pervasive matriarchal society that dominated the prehistoric scene in Europe. But after years of academic debate about the evidence, the case for pacific matriarchal societies remains as fragmentary and contradictory as the case for male-dominated packs of hunters. It's likely that Edenic clans of goddess worshippers led by Wicca priestesses are more common in California today than they ever were in Neolithic Europe.

That said, the authors offer up some less ambiguous evidence that women's roles in developing culture were at least commensurate with those of men in several important areas. Women, according to the authors, had an important part to play in the agricultural revolution. Just as important, though perhaps less well appreciated, women in both ancient and modern cultures have been the ones involved most directly in producing textiles.

Stone, of course, is more durable than cloth. But in dry caves and other places where textiles dating to the Upper Paleolithic (some 26,000 years ago) have been preserved, spun and woven artifacts outnumber stone artifacts by a ratio of twenty to one. Imprints of textiles and basketry have been found that date back tens of thousands of years. If the authors are right, the loom ought to appear along with the stone-tipped spear in those museum dioramas, and the "String Age" ought to be given equal billing with the Stone Age.