An Uninformed Visitor Goes to NYU-ISAW Exhibit
March 4, 2010
by Amy Siskind
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Thanks for Marille and Nancy who sent me a cover letter by Artemis about the NYU-ISAW Exhibit The Lost World of Old Europe.
I traveled into New York City this past weekend having only a cursory knowledge of what to expect. And of course, at that time, I had not read the wonderful piece that Artemis has since posted on our blog.
Even to my extremely untrained eye, there was something terribly wrong with this exhibit. The artifacts just did not match up with the story line told on the wall panels.
Before I was told that picture taking was not allowed, I happened to take a couple of pictures with my cell phone of one case that really struck me. It was in the center of the first room – as it well should be. The title, as you can see is “Council of the Goddesses,” Set of Twenty-One figurines in Thirteen Chairs.
Unfortunately, the quality of my photos are poor, but you can gather that these figurines are quite obviously women – as with many of the artifacts they have exaggerated features such as large hips to differentiate them. The women (and perhaps girls in the middle) seem to be assembled for some sort of meeting, or council. To my untrained eyes it looked like a government meeting (perhaps one where things actually were accomplished!). The women in the council seem to be wearing some sort of head adornment that to me signified holding office.
And piece after piece did demonstrate to a layperson like myself that this culture was different from what I have seen at other museums. There was no evidence of war and killing which seems so central in artifacts from surrounding periods. The inhabitants apparently stayed in one place and built homes that were shockingly advanced. They set up villages and had a seemingly peaceful, creative and advanced culture.
The last wall panel really caught my eye, and I only wish I could have taken a picture of it. There was an explanation of what might have ended the period shown in the exhibit. One theory was that Old Europe was a matriarchy that was overthrown by nomadic warriors who basically came and wiped them out. But this theory according to the panel is nonsense. We know that there were men in old Europe – surely they would have faced those nomadic warriors (this is what I took in from the wall panel – unfortunately I don’t have the exact words). It couldn’t possibly have been that this was a peaceful, thriving society that was burnt to the ground by outsiders.
In any case, I congratulate Artemis on her must read article. And, yes, we must be mindful not to lose our herstory.
Remembering from my visits to Crete, there was also an explanation that a natural disaster might have wiped the culture out. they had advanced watering systems on Crete 1000s BC not matched until fairly late in the current culture.
with old Europe in the countries like Turkey and surrounding eastern Europe, that belongs to the area where some believe the Amazon tribes were living and fighting. I am no professional historian but loved to go to exhibits and excavations.
and thanks for that picture.
I think Marija Gimbutas speculates on how this culture/civilzation ended in her book “Civilization of the Goddess” – if I am remembering correctly, she looked at the layers of civilization (layers that accumulate over time and give an idea of what happens) – and she suggested that it was a peaceful society that was overrun by outsiders. Her archeology showed a dramatic change – not a slow one – that suggested war or invasion, and that there was little in the matriarchal culture to suggest a war like focus, and therefore they were vulnerable to invasion from very aggressive outsiders. Am I remembering that correctly? anyone else have an idea about the fall of this culture? (keep in mind that this culture had been in existence for many thousands of years, they weren’t some kind of fluke, or blip on the radar).
Amy, good for your untutored eye recognizing the disparity between the voice of the artifacts and the words on the wall panels. I hope other visitors pay attention to their own intuition.
It was to prepare people who might visit that I began writing a critique of the NY Times stenographer whose article informed many of us about the existence of the exhibition. He gave a big megaphone to the defenders of the patriarchy-always-and-forever mentality that dominates the archaeological establishment and projects their view onto all of prehistory even when the evidence says otherwise. That evolved into a 4000-word piece too long for a blog—I am still looking for an appropriate place to publish—and a cover letter which I sent out to friends. I turned the latter into a standalone short piece suitable for posting. Some of the links in that post (here on March 2) speak to Kaija’s memory and Amy’s intuition, but briefly:.
Marija was sick to death of the weapons, weapons, weapons excavated in the Indo-European (IE) layers, and was stunned when she got to dig deeper and there were no weapons or fortifications, just beautifully decorated pottery of the finest clay and thousands of female figurines whose found context suggest a spiritual sensibility infusing all of life and household tasks. She named this distinct-but-related set of cultures Old Europe (OE).
Because she was an expert in both OE and IE, she could track the demise of the former—its fragmentation, migrations to more marginal areas, co-existence, and its survivals—which took place in conjunction with IE infiltrations into Europe, their routes, their building of forts, their distinctive kurgan burials, etc. The IE had domesticated the horse which gave them enormous mobility and advantages when coupled with an aggressive, expansionary mentality. This transition took place over a millennium and was complex. There is clear evidence of massacres and hundreds of OE settlements being burned to the ground—fast and dramatic. There was also co-existence and trading relationship that went on for centuries. Bottom line, however, is that the patriarchal, sky-god worshipping, militant (sound like a familiar trinity?) Indo-Europeans brought about the demise of Old Europe, and their expansionary mentality has led to half the world’s speaking Indo-European languages. Marija would argue that it was the Indo-Europeans who brought patriarchy to Europe from the Volga-Ural steppes where they had originated.
The archaeological establishment totally resists this interpretation. They need to see male domination, or its seeds, in every prehistoric culture, and argue that more complex patriarchal forms (e.g., chiefdoms, city-states) grew out of their own cultures. They cannot conceive of anything other than male-centered, hierarchical societies. They cannot conceive of people doing a complex project unless organized in a hierarchical way by men.
Thus this debate is not some arcane academic quibble, but is foundational to feminism and our future: whether and how gendered social life has been organized in a wide array of gender-balanced (which goes along with peaceful and cooperative) as well as male-privileging and male-dominating ways. My own work addresses why a society takes one shape rather than another, and the processes through which this occurs.
Artemis: I find this discussion and your article fascinating. This is the sort of topic that could go on a Kindle reader. There would be little in the way of publishing costs and people like me who want to read more could download your long article or even a book for a fee. That way you do not need to get a male publisher to approve of what you have to say or of your research. And feminist sites like this could serve as a place to post a teaser. It would be a tremendous service to women and considering women are 52% of the population there should be a commercial value to a site that linked femalecentric writers with women readers.
Just wanted to echo the many thanks of others for the mind-boggling post about the OE exhibit in NYC by Dr March. Study of ancient civilizations was one of my favorite areas in school and I’ve been a feminist before I knew the word, yet I’m ashamed to say that I never heard of Gimbutas’ work or of Old Europe. I’m very grateful to know about them now. I was tickled at reading that Gimbutas was surprised to find that feminists were interested in her work – there’s a true scientist for you – a laser-like focus on discovering the truth regardless of what those discoveries might mean to anyone else.
The implications of her findings and theories are just staggering for feminists. Her Kurgan theory seems to have caused the most consternation amongst her male peers, but like Amy said, that same scenario has played out numerous times in HIStory. People living in a somewhat egalitarian society, sometimes matrilineal or matristic in nature, get taken over by aggressive, oppressive invaders of a definite patriarchal bent. The Romans take over the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons take over the Celts, the Europeans take over the indigenous Americans, or at least the ones they don’t kill outright. Here in the Southwest, there are ancient pueblo people like the Anasazi that no one seems to know what happened to – now I wonder if that story is another HERstory that’s been buried by the male-dominated culture. We do know that some of the pueblos were matrilineal and remain so to this day; we also know that horse-centered aggressive tribes laid waste to many of them. The Kurgan theory is more than a theory – it’s downright Santayanan – those who fail to understand HIStory’s lessons are doomed to repeat them. It would seem that democracy and egalitarianism is a female-centric organizing principle while war and imperialism is a male-centric organizing principle; I’m not exactly shocked, but now there’s proof!
I now will have to seek out Gimbutas’ books to find out the extent of what was buried by the Ancient World professors. I’d also be interested in Dr March’s 4000 word piece. If it is published somewhere, please let us know where to find it.
Every once in a while I put on talk radio, PBS style Radio, and every so often there are men discussing archaeology. They are always surprised that our ancestors had some kind of sophisticated technology. Yet, continually they assume the men had a central part in the development of this technology. Recently they were discussing the bright surprise that some stones weren’t actually querried from the rivers. They were created by heat. They surmised in this discussion that weapons smiths (aka men) got together and came up with this brilliant idea. Why? Because men teach us that technological advancement has been linear, and achieved primarily by men. However, Archaeology by archaeologists who are not biased continues to disprove this. Most ideas are brought forth AND brought to bear by women, only to be erased and hijacked by male peers. That, unfortunately, the case is more that technology has been hampered and our history is a sad case of reinventing the wheel, due to women’s creative process, and men’s destructive one. Our matriarchal ancestors had technology, great technology built on sophisticated unifying concepts. They just didn’t have destruction. Just because you don’t see huge landfills doesn’t mean they couldn’t build megaliths.
They say yin and yang is a symbolism of the male and female dynamic, but it looks an aweful lot like day and night from space. You know, if all the figurines were women, not only was the comittee matriarchal, maybe there just weren’t any males in that society. Maybe this was before males were invented, created, or happened about, and that is what destroyed the society.
I also want to do some research to see if there is a correspondence between the predominance of male artifacts and lithics (stone tools/weapons). Because when you think about it, the technology of our ancestors didn’t really need lithics. You heat stuff to break it apart. You use cold and heat to do that. You don’t need to chop anything. And you don’t even need to stab something to hunt and capture. I think men, males in general, of all species, have impulses, and have an impulse to stab, and may have created lithics, or made more of them in order to stab things. So men, yes, may have hunted. hunting may have been very enjoyable to men as an excuse to stab things. Killing people, hierarchy, and war is completely irrational. There really may have not been very many men, males in this society or even any at all. And when you see more men in the artifacts, you start to see weapons.
“People living in a somewhat egalitarian society, sometimes matrilineal or matristic in nature, get taken over by aggressive, oppressive invaders of a definite patriarchal bent.”
I’ve been researching some Petroglyphs and Pictographs in West Central Idaho that appear to depict a male invasion of a peaceful community. They are drawn with exaggerated features, and appear menacing and evil. The fact that the features are exaggerated compared with the “normal” humans, would indicate that these dwellers had no idea what they were encountering. Why? IMO, they were ALL female. And htis is just one example of the male anomaly invading something, as it came out of the African continent, as an anomaly, and spread through hte already inhabited (by women hominid for millenia). It’s obvious to me. They drew these beings exaggerated, to depict tham as ominous and menacing, and htey drew them as triangles. How would you, if you grew up only around females, spent your entire life as females, handle the concept of a male? You wouldn’t. Women are drawn by men with exaggerated features because they perceieve themselves the norm. Here we see the opposite. If you had no idea what it was, the male, You’d draw it as a triangle. In the following petroglyph you can clearly see them, wielding a large femur bone (probably because they were too dumb to make their own weapons), taking over a creative and peaceful society of all women.
the thing is, it is now known that recorded history began when war began. That means that society was so peaceful and continuous as to never have to write anything down. it was all oral. Of course, men would have us believe htis was our linear “evolution” becoming rational beings. The truth is, the very first drawings encapsulated ideas about space and time. The Eye of Ra, for instance, was used for geometry. They used right angles in ancient egypt and a plethora of geometry from who knows where (prior women’s civilization). This was way before Euclid. It’s obvious that men never came up with anything, ever. They just appear to, after destroying women’s contribution that they ultimately take everything from.
If it weren’t for men’s access to women, men would be running around with large femur bones beating only themselves.
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