Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight: Exhibition of Prepatriarchal Old European Artifacts
Female Figurine, Fired Clay
Cucuteni, Drăguşeni, 4050–3900 BC
Botoşani County Museum, Botoşani: 7558
Photo: Marius Amarie
In honor of Women’s History Month, I’m pleased to present this guest post by my friend Artemis March. — V.S.
When I heard about the extraordinary exhibit of 250 artifacts from prepatriarchal “Old Europe” (c. 6500-3500 BCE) that will be shown at 15 East 84th St, NYC—the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW)—until April 25, I wanted people to know about it. For those of us who are familiar with Old Europe and its monumental implications for women, it becomes a matter of: when can I get to NY? But for anyone who doesn’t—and that’s probably most of us—why should she bother to fit it into her busy schedule?
Rest assured that I wouldn’t be making a big deal about this exhibit if it were just about recovering more pieces from the past that enrich the Old Story—which is the direction in which the NY Times and the archaeological establishment would point us. It’s much more than that. It’s about undoing the erasure of women, gender-balanced social worlds, the sacred conceived and imaged as female, and of scholars who dare to see and tell Another Story. It’s about countering the erasure of those whose research threatens the monopoly of the patriarchal story and its alleged innateness and universality. It’s about forestalling the co-optation of the most powerful paradigm-breaking case yet unearthed.
As Mary Daly used to say, by distorting and disappearing our past, they have ravaged and purloined our present and our future. Disappearing acts have gone on for millennia, and they are going on right now, right in front of us. They can be blatant and concrete, as in the absence of women on our currency, our stamps, and the paucity of female statuary in our public life—a situation Lynette Long has recently taken on. They can be as elemental and profound as changing cosmological deities and their stories from female to male—a transition that the late Paula Gunn Allen tracked in numerous Native American traditions, and observed is still taking place. Disappearing acts can be far more devious, complex, and multi-layered as is the case with bringing these Old European artifacts forward.
The well-presented, beautifully-lit exhibit of artifacts on loan here from museums in Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldava gives visibility to the physical residues of Old European cultures. It is not to be missed. At the same time, the cultural meanings and political significance of those artifacts are being distorted and disappeared by those who have framed and interpreted the exhibition in its catalogue, wall panels, and lectures. These same biases are reflected in the NYT article that alerted many people about the exhibition, thereby beginning to shape the lens through which they see it.
Reading that article or the wall panels at the exhibit, you would never know that the Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas was the one who had discovered and named Old Europe, excavated many of its artifacts, and brought forward many more that had been languishing in the back rooms of Eastern European museums (she could read about 20 languages). You would never know that it was she who recognized that these artifacts belonged to distinct-yet-related cultures in southeastern Europe—thus giving rise to the umbrella term Old Europe. You would think that the current crop of (predominantly male) archaeologists came up with this idea all by themselves.
Reading the NYT article or the wall panels at the exhibit, you would never know that her recognition of their distinctive commonalities arose via their marked contrast with the weapons-focused artifacts of the Indo-Europeanized cultures that replaced them and in which she was a world-class authority. You would not have a clue as to why this Old European civilization was “lost.” You would think that it had been “rescued from obscurity” by the male archaeologists who put together the exhibition rather than by Marija. You would never realize how these unnamed archaeologists are advancing their own careers by appropriating parts of her work that they can safely reframe and slip into the Old Story.
You would never know that Old Europe points to Another Story behind the patriarchy. Instead, they slide it into their one and only Story—the Androcentric Story, in which all societies and cultures are assumed/projected to have been formed by men, about men, for men, and organized around hierarchy and domination. Take one example.
As you enter the gallery that displays some of the gold artifacts found in a cemetery at Varna (a mid-fifth millennial trading center on the western edge of the Black Sea), the very first wall panel slips in the phrase “Old European chieftains” to identify those buried with the biggest stashes of gold ornaments. The curatorial archaeologists who framed the exhibit are not at all shy about assuming that only chieftains could warrant such gifts in the afterlife. Such boldness contrasts sharply with how agnostic the wall panels are on many subjects, especially with regard to how this civilization came to be “lost.”
It is instructive to note what they dance around (the role of external groups, especially the “steppe elements” putatively equated with the Indo-Europeans, in disappearing Old Europe) and what they conveniently treat as fact: male centrality and hierarchy in Old Europe—despite all the evidence against the existence of chieftains, hierarchy, and domination, and favoring matrilocality, matrilinearity, and gender balance. Such evidence is trumped by unstated androcentric assumptions: gold jewelry found with men = prestige items = hierarchy = domination = male authority. When women are buried with gold jewelry (as some were) or ceremonial ornaments, the assumption is that they were trying to look attractive to men, or that they were a big man’s wife—not that they were honored as clan mothers, wise elders, or priestesses.
Yet it is the latter interpretation that fits with the traditional burial patterns of Old Europe prior to the acceleration of trade, the appearance of the Varna cemetery, the infiltration of “steppe elements” into the Danube Valley, and the appearance of defensive measures such as fortifications—all beginning around 4400-4300 BCE. Old European burials were communal, and grave goods symbolic of the person’s gifts and skills in the life just passed. Elder women were the most honored and clearly central to the symbolic and spiritual life of the community. By contrast, Indo-European burials were for individual men. Grave goods were his possessions for the afterlife; they sometimes included women, servants, and/or horses. The Varna cemetery appears at that transitional moment, and does not seem to fit either pattern.
Despite its not being representative of Old Europe, the curators not only use gold artifacts to map hierarchical assumptions onto Varna, but also project them back onto 2000 years of Old European development and fluorescence. They thereby conflate the social structure that they impute to Varna with the social structure of Old Europe of the preceding two millennia. By setting the parameters of Old Europe between 5000 and 3500 BCE and naming the exhibit by this period, the curators have conveniently blurred all that, mixing up traditional Old European patterns with those affected by the intrusion of expansionary elements whose values and social structures were their antithesis. The consequence (and the purpose?) of this conflation is to perpetuate the lie that all societies of any complexity are organized around male hierarchy and that its seeds are present in all societies.
To appreciate the enormity of what’s at stake here, I invite you to read Joan Marler’s summary of Gimbutas’ work discovering and reconstructing Old Europe (OE), and another about her interpretation of its demise and the prehistoric transition to patriarchy in Europe. Marler is executive director of the Institute of Archaeomythology, dedicated to developing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of prehistoric and present cultures.
The disappearing acts perpetrated through the OE exhibit are hardly unique. Another example is the archaeological team at a key Neolithic site in Asia Minor (Çatalhöyük). Marguerite Rigoglioso exposes the strategies and tactics through which they deny evidence of, and even the possibility of, prehistoric female deities and female authority, and try to marginalize and discredit Gimbutas and others who have the courage to name what they see rather than project a patriarchal pattern onto every prehistoric society.
Marler’s and Rigoglioso’s work helps to bring home an appreciation of the some of the layers and complexity of the struggle to reverse millennia of female invisibility and the intense political struggles over the all-important issues of patriarchal origins and its finite existence rather than its alleged innate nature. Male entitlement, sole male authority, and male control over women are not god-given or “how things are,” but integral to an historically finite, socially constructed type of socio-political system that’s been around for only a few thousand years.
Logistics: The ISAW museum is closed on Monday, open 11-6 Tuesday-Sunday and until 8 on Friday. It is housed in a lovely, six-story townhouse just off Fifth Avenue. It is handicapped accessible, with an elevator just to your left as you come in that takes you up the ten steps or so to the first floor where the two galleries are. Another elevator goes to all floors, including the basement where restrooms are located. If you drive into the City, street parking is possible even during the day, but you do have to slug the meter every hour. A quarter gives you ten minutes, so bring a roll of quarters.
Admission to the museum is free. On the first floor, there is an unattended coatroom, and three guards on duty. Cameras are not allowed. There is a guest book, and you can also get a form from the office to give feedback. Catalogues are kept in that office. The 4-pound, $50 “catalogue” is a beautifully designed, hardcover book produced in Italy, full of gorgeous photographs, letters from museum directors who loaned the artifacts, and ten articles by archaeologists. It is an excellent record of a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit, the mentality of the archaeological establishment, as well as of how the process of erasure works.
They do not allow chairs in the two galleries, but when you need to sit, there is a bench in the foyer that overlooks two spectacular pieces and has a map mural at which to gaze (which is in the catalogue as well). I was there around 5 PM prior to a lecture, and then again mid-morning into early afternoon. I saw a small but steady stream of quietly engrossed visitors—predominantly women, but many men as well.
©Artemis March, Ph.D
25 Responses to “Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight: Exhibition of Prepatriarchal Old European Artifacts”
-
sister of ye says:
Thanks for the info, it’s very interesting. Unfortunately I have just a slightly greater chance of making it to New York than I have of going to the moon.
I suggest that what is needed isn’t just women going to view this. I suggest what is needed is informed women going at conveniently busy times of the day, who give explanations of the exhibit to friends, that might happen to be just loud enough to be overheard by other visitors.
A little derision expressed toward established archeological viewpoints might not be amiss.
March 9th, 2010 at 10:31 pm EST -
lambert strether says:
Volunteer public docents — brilliant concept.
* * *
It’s too bad cameras are not permitted. It would be wonderful if some kind soul in NY brought a sketch pad and then scanned and posted the results.
-
soopermouse says:
Familiar:)
I have been seeing these statues in pretty much every museum back home in Romania.
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/cul.....obro02.jpg
This is a female statue of the Hamangia culture. In Highschool, I was taught it was a motherhood goddess.The Romanian National History Museum has more.
http://www.mnir.ro -
simply wondered says:
vi - thanks (as usual); reading and learning…. and here’s me arrogantly assuming i know lots of stuff. i just hope it comes to london.
-
bob c says:
This essay, exhibit, and point of view, is just the kind of thing we need to un-disapear women in the present world, along with Dr. Socks of course.
-
Artemis March says:
I, too like the idea of informed public docents! Fridays at 6 would be an especially fertile time because there is a tour and they could challenge the establishment biases.
Yes, Romania is a primary source for these figurines as Old Europe was focused in southeastern Europe, west of the Black Sea, the Danube River Valley
I did see people quietly using cellphone cameras . . . I think the next venue is in Europe, my recall is Greece, but the dates were very far out … leaving space for other venues here . . . I believe there are discussions underway, and I’m trying to find out more, and will post what I find.
-
quixote says:
This reminds me of how shocked people were — shocked! — to discover that the artists’ hand prints in the famous Stone Age cave drawings had to be women’s hands. The size and finger proportions were female. Nobody had bothered to measure them before. (This was a few months ago.)
But, of course, we all know that the use of “he” as an indefinite pronoun doesn’t color perception at all. Not at all.
Historiann has had brilliant posts about The Great Forgetting in recent history.
-
lambert strether says:
quixote @7 Ouch!
-
parallel says:
Really interesting, thanks.
the struggle to reverse millennia of female invisibility
If women’s stories, and proper female history were learnt and taught throughout mainstream culture, it would have a huge impact. Instead we are drowning in men’s lies about women and men too.
-
purplefinn says:
Thank you Violet, Artemis March, quixote et al for the information and resources. This is the reminder I needed of our ongoing struggle. A struggle that we wage regardless of its enormity. Something much bigger than our current political climate, but not unrelated.
-
Artemis March says:
Yes, thank you, quixote. Agree, purplefinn, our struggle is bigger and deeper than our current political climate, informing and contextualizing it.
The ISAW museum in NYC reports that there are no plans for the OE exhibition to travel elsewhere in the USA. “From ISAW it will go to The Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology at the University of Oxford and then to Greece. As soon as the dates are finalized they will be posted on ISAW’s website.” That’s http://www.nyu.edu/isaw
-
Violet Socks says:
When Artemis initially forwarded me the New York Times article about this exhibit, I was astonished by the way Marija Gimbutas had been disappeared. Just erased. I was gobsmacked, really. The article and the exhibit is all about the civilization Gimbutas identified and named, and yet you would never know that from the article. She’s just referred to as some anthropologist who talked about goddess figures three decades ago, but who is no longer respected. Jesus Christ.
(What keeps sticking in my mind — and this is odd, the way memory can be — is my recollection of wrestling with Gimbutas’s Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, the early definitive text on the archaeology of the region. And I mean “wrestling” literally: that was the single most awkward book I’ve ever handled. I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of gigantic anthropological texts, but for some reason Bronze Age Cultures was just impossibly awkward. Very big and very heavy.)
Gimbutas also, of course, authored the kurgan theory of the Indo-European homeland, which is still the preferred explanation (despite Colin Renfrew’s incessant lobbying for Anatolia). She was simply a giant in European archaeology.
But now she doesn’t exist. Poof.
-
Kiuku says:
I know it is amazing. Men, in my opinion, due to my observation of their behavior, examples of dark ages relative to male rulership, and examples just like this, -never- came up with anything; never, ever. They mock women, they sit and wait, til it becomes something, when it becomes something, they scramble to take credit for it. And the woman, usually one woman, is gone. Poof.
Then, they color anything prior to patriarchy, as patriarchy, even dinosaurs. No kidding. Even when they can’t prove the existence of male dinosaurs, or what they looked like, they can’t stop talking about dinosaur sex, or how they mated, what the males did, and giving known female dinosaurs male names.
I don’t understand how men can view their need to have identity as more important than a woman’s own work, such that they take credit for, and disappear women. They just don’t think women have needs or have a need to her own life and her own identity. They hijack everything and then claim to be oblivious to the male hijacking, even their own, such that they internalize, i mean they actually believe that men, mostly men, come up with stuff.
I had one male colleague try to talk to me, and I brought up feminism, Mary daly specifically, and he would not talk about her, and of course he tried to tell me all about feminism, but the only feminists he knew of were -two men-.
-
In Honor of Women’s History Month « Liberal Rapture says:
[...] a post on Tuesday, Violet Socks had Artemis March write a guest post about an exhibit on prepatriarchal “Old Europe” in New … in honor of Women’s History month. She explains: To appreciate the enormity of what’s at [...]
-
In Honor of Women’s History Month « The Confluence says:
[...] a post on Tuesday, Violet Socks had Artemis March write a guest post about an exhibit on prepatriarchal “Old Europe” in New … in honor of Women’s History month. She explains: To appreciate the enormity of what’s at [...]
-
alwaysfiredup says:
Fantastic post, Violet. Very interesting and informative, on a topic I knew nothing about until today. Thanks.
-
Violet Socks says:
Thank you, alwaysfiredup, but thank Artemis! She wrote it.
-
Merryn says:
What a triumph! Like with the ‘mistaken’ identity of women artists (such as the great Gwen John) women are ‘often presented as an ‘unknown’, to be regularly ‘rediscovered’ by subsequent generations of curators and critics’ (Chadwick, W. Women, Art & Society, p. 275). I propose that women who set about creating and shaping their socio-cultural landscapes are erased by marketing drones (some of whom are women) who can only think in terms of quantitative demographics. Unless you direct films and write books (for recent example) about men, you’ll rarely get past those gate keepers who never leave the gallery without an armory of reliable stats to remind us that ‘people’ don’t care for their world to be understood and narrated through the eyes of a woman.
-
Elliot says:
O, I would love to see this exhibit. NY may as well be the moon, though, for me.
Not only those cave handprints are female; the vast majority (if not ALL) fingerprints on the earliest pottery are female. Those masterpieces in museums of early Japanese & Korean wares, the earliest gorgeous Greek and Roman stuff…. women made them. I was lucky to have some really great art history profs, and women ceramics profs. I’ve tried to carry that teaching forward.
-
allimom99 says:
I wish I still lived back there. I was not surprised but I was saddened by the complete dismissal of Gimbutas’ significance. Of course, giving her her due would require some discussion of her own conclusions - but they don’t fit the STORY, so tough. Yet another field where the boys still make all the rules :-(
-
purplefinn says:
On a somewhat related note, I saw the Guerrilla Girls program at a university last night. I had seen them years ago as well. Their presentation has been revised, and I thought it was effective for the audience - lots of humor with the data. One of their issues is reclaiming the history of women artists. It was heartening to me that they used the word feminist and activism as if they were a good thing. http://www.guerrillagirls.com/
-
Swannie says:
I love Marija Gimbutas ,and own most of her books, even the big ones ;) The art alone is breathtaking.
I was stunned as well that little to no reference to her work or credit given, and that credit cavalierly dismissed .. throughout the presentation of these artifacts, even tho I could only visit them online. How can one miss, or over look the overweening enormity of her contributions?
Isn’t that comparable to throwing out the contributions of Margaret Mead or Marie Curie?Then again, isn’t that what James Watson and Francis Crick did to Rosalind Franklin ?
-
Unree says:
I went yesterday afternoon. What a fabulous collection. I’ve never appreciated NYU as an urban institution before. FWIW, the majority of the visitors (high single digits) were men.
How pathetic is it that when I first read the NYT story I was grateful that it didn’t blather about women as prestige items, instruments of chieftains, etc., and gave a neutral-ish comment on Gimbutas (’some admire her, more say she is wacky’? Withholding the credit she earned seemed more benign than other treatments of her I’ve read in the media.
-
. . . says:
Thank you, Artemis and Violet, for this article. I was not familiar with the exhibition, the culture of Old Europe, or of Gimbutas’, Marler’s or Rigoglioso’s work. With this article, you have made me aware of all those treasures, enriching my life as well as brightening my day. Thank you for your efforts to keep all these important works in the public’s awareness.
-
kalibhakta says:
what a kick-ass post! thank you, Artemis and thank you, Violet.
I worked the ancient goddess figurines into a powerpoint presentation I made to my spiritual lit. class earlier this semester. the students were astonished at how consistent the imagery is and how far back it goes, as I was when hipped to the tradition by a cool anthro prof in the 1980s.
the erasure of Marija Gimbutas is depressing but not surprising. I can just imagine Mary Daly’s take: “This shows how subversive the word ‘Goddess’ still is”…
