Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic Venus Figurines and Archeological Mythology

Meanings attributed to Upper Paleolithic female figurines in the past have been based on the assumption that they are all alike in important ways. Attention is called here to the diversity of the figurines, and possible alternative interpretations. Among the earliest depictions of human beings, dating back to perhaps 30,000 years ago, are small figurines of nude females, which are found across a broad belt in Europe from the Pyrenees in southern France to the Don river in the USSR, with outliers in Siberia. Every anthropologist is familiar with these Upper Paleolithic "Venus" figurines. They are used to titillate freshman classes, and photographs or drawings, especially of the figurines from Willendorf and Dolni Vestoni e, routinely enliven introductory textbooks. Current trends in literary criticism lean toward deconstmction of "texts," in which both words and situations may serve as the text for analysis. In this chapter I would like to deconstruct some texts in a narrower sense, using the example of the Venus figurines to demonstrate that introductory textbooks of archeology and physical anthropology produce gender metaphors which, by ignoring much of the scholarship on the figurines, reaffirm the folk model of gender preferred by our culture. FIGURINE DESCRIPTIONS The figurines themselves have only gender in common. They are diverse in shape, in pose, in the somatic details depicted, and in ornamentation (Soffer 1988, Fleury 1926, Abramova 1967, Luquet 1926, Delporte 1979). They seem to represent