Curiosity

The invisibility of prehistoric women

Here is an article by the French journalist Clara Hage, published on 25 September 2020 on NEON, an information magazine. The article presents the book “L’homme préhistorique est aussi une femme” (transl. “The prehistoric man was also a woman“) by the prehistoric archaeologist Marylène Patou-Mathis published by Allary Editions still unpublished in Italy.

I found the article by Hage quite interesting because it shows how in France, the country that saw the first development of prehistoric studies, they begin to recognize the lacunae of studies relating to our origins precisely due to the lack of consideration of female figures present in reality since the dawn.

Illustration by Tom Björklund

Prehistoric women have been made invisible: an archaeologist brings women out of the caves of history” by Clara Hage

During Prehistoric times, women also hunted large mammals, painted cave walls and practiced warfare. This was stated by the prehistoric archaeologist Marylène Patou-Mathis in her book “L’homme préhistorique est aussi une femme“, advocating for this the erroneous view of patriarchal society.

 

Imagine the prehistoric era, with its mammoths, its caves; virile Cro-magnons wearing animal skins holding the stone with which they lit the fire in one hand and the ax to repel enemy clans in the other. Exhausted by their deeds and the unstoppable evolution of their ingenious brain, they retire tired to the cave where their companions await them. Women who gather some plants during the day, prepare the game hunted by the men and serve them a meal. Then the men engage in various activities, such as painting the walls of the cave, because they are definitely very intelligent; meanwhile the women take care of the children and… Wait, isn’t that a bit out of date?

“No, the prehistoric women did not spend all their time sweeping the cave and taking care of the children waiting for the men to return from the hunt”,

says Marylène Patou Mathis, archaeologist and research director of the CNRS. After Neanderthal from A to Z (Allary Editions), he publishes in the same publishing house “Prehistoric man is also woman“, an essay that tells a (pre) story freed from the sexist preconceptions that built it and which is based on recent archaeological discoveries . A story that also demonstrates how patriarchy does not go back to the origins of the world and that from their caves, prehistoric men and women can still teach us a lot about gender equality.

NEON: “Prehistoric man is also a woman”, why doesn’t it sound good?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: I noticed during my years of research that the place of women in prehistoric societies was unknown, the topic was not very thorough. Not only does the dictionary completely exclude the question of their role in this period: we speak of “prehistoric man“, of “man museum“, of “human evolution” rather than “human” but in the collective imagination there they are clichés inherited from early prehistoric archeology scholars – all men – which are not based on any archaeological evidence. As if human evolution had taken place without women. Their place during Prehistory is certainly not entirely denied: they are allowed a biological participation in evolution because they are the ones who give birth to children. But culturally, the idea that man is the author of all the main inventions (tools, fire, etc.) is predominant. In addition, presumably masculine actions, such as flint cutting, hunting or painting, were valued. Most of the representations in films or reconstructions, with a few exceptions, for example, give an exclusively male image of the Lascaux painters. Why should they only be men? No one took a picture showing that they were the only ones holding the badger hair brush (you will also find articles on the topic Were the first artists of prehistoric times women? and The first female painters in history)

.

Illustration by Tom Björklund

NEON: How then do you know if women were holding it?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: I’m not saying that women made all the works of wall art. We simply have to propose other hypotheses, open up the field of possibilities: there are no reasons, neither physiological nor intellectual, that would automatically exclude women from certain activities. Another prerequisite concerns hunting and gathering. The prehistoric woman was attributed with the gathering and the man with the hunt, and the latter was valued compared to the collection. Because? Not only do we assume that women perform certain activities and not others, but we have also prioritized seemingly masculine tasks by making them more noble than feminine ones. Indeed, plants among hunter-gatherer peoples were considered as important to their economy as hunting, both for food and for healing.

NEON: What is the tangible evidence that today allows us to redefine the role and status of prehistoric women?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: Today there are technological advances and new methods of investigation that allow us to better talk about the archaeological remains that we discover during excavations. For example, the DNA found in the bones of human skeletons allows us to identify with certainty the sex of individuals. Their study, paleoanthropology, has also provided valuable information on the morphology of individuals, their diseases and the traumas associated with certain activities. We have noticed, for example, thanks to studies carried out on more than 1,000 skeletons, that prehistoric women of central Europe were as robust as the current champions of the shot put or the javelin. This indicates that during the Neolithic period, women were engaged in tasks related to agriculture, very physical tasks such as grinding cereals with heavy millstones.

Illustration by Tom Björklund

The division of tasks appears more complementary than previously thought and should be divided more according to the aptitudes of each person than according to gender. We now know that women entered caves, into the underground world that seemed reserved exclusively for men because they left handprints there. We also have the works of art of the time as clues. Female representations are the majority, between 80 and 90% of human representations. They are silhouettes, vulva painted or engraved on the walls of the caves, but also statuettes, the famous prehistoric Venus. They are mostly naked, but sometimes on certain statuettes, from Siberia for example, they wear a kind of jacket. Again, for many researchers, it was men who painted or sculpted women’s bodies. However, we can very well imagine that some of these statuettes were made by women, even for women, such as the pierced ones, perhaps considered as amulets and worn during childbirth which could have been difficult as there was no Caesarean section at the time!

The comparison is not fair but it is like the “male gaze” at the cinema, a look at these works which until recently was essentially male and the interpretations made by most of them by male archaeologists; women are just models and not creators. The story of the warriors also reveals the sexist bias embedded in the imagination. In my book I give the example of a 10th century Viking tomb that contained a buried skeleton with weapons, two horses and a strategy game board. Discovered in 1880, it served until the 2000s as a reference for identifying warrior leaders. Without certainty, the pelvis was poorly preserved, the skeleton being attributed to a man. In 2017, DNA analysis showed that it was a woman, a war lady! Despite this indisputable evidence, some archaeologists are still convinced that this woman’s relatives dressed her as a warrior without reflecting her true social status. There is so much bad faith.

Illustration by Tom Björklund

NEON: Where does this partial prehistory come from?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: Prehistory appeared as a discipline in the mid-19th century, first in France and then almost everywhere in the Western world. The first prehistoric anthropologists and archaeologists modeled on ancient societies the vision of their patriarchal society in which women are considered minors and their activities often limited to maternal and domestic tasks within their homes. The nineteenth century was marked by a hierarchical and unequal vision of races and sexes, which should have justified all the discrimination existing at the time. The prejudice is there.

Without any archaeological evidence, the early prehistorics determined gender based on activity, valued the masculine and downplayed the feminine. It is an a posteriori cultural construction. I agree with Françoise Héritier and Simone de Beauvoir: the patriarchal system, by inferiorizing women, made them dependent, made them subordinate for a vast historical period. But unlike them, I am not convinced that this system existed from the beginning. The patriarchal system is not natural or written in our genes, but cultural. So there is no determinism, which is rather good news, because it can be replaced by another more equitable system, more balanced between the two sexes.

NEON: Were prehistoric men and women capable of living in a matriarchal society?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: I make this hypothesis in my book, but you have to be very careful with this term. I prefer the expression “matrilineal system” (system of filiation in which the transmission by inheritance of assets, titles, etc., is done by the mother). In any case, there is no evidence that it existed during the prehistory of matriarchal societies, that is, the opposite of patriarchy as the domination of one sex over the other. In the matrilineal system, women play an essential role because they are the ones who guarantee the sustainability of the clans as mothers and the transmission of knowledge and know-how. The rejection by many researchers of the existence of this type of society during Prehistory, common in Africa until recently, derives from a Western vision of the status and role of women in society. It is a reductive vision that does not take into account the new advances in the knowledge of different cultures during Prehistory.

Since it is a long time ago, many have a globalizing view of these societies. As if one could be the same at all times, for more than 400,000 years and in all places! In Eurasia, from the Paleolithic, there was a great diversity of cultures. The roles and status of women were not the same in France or Ukraine, for example. Everything is tangled up, we have to get out of a linear and progressive vision of both biological and cultural evolution of humanity. Until recently, people lived from hunting and gathering and others from agriculture and animal husbandry similar to those practiced in the Neolithic era.

Illustration by Tom Björklund

NEON: How to get women out of the oblivion of prehistory?

Marylène Patou-Mathis, prehistoric archaeologist: We need to change our view of prehistory and history. Today, everywhere we see women emerging from the shadows. They reappear because they were actually very present in the past but then canceled and neglected by archaeologists and historians in particular in the nineteenth century. Assumptions and prejudices must be replaced by real and verified facts. From this point on, we can realize that women have played an equally important role as men in prehistoric societies.

Not so long ago, our society thought that some professions were not accessible to women because, for example, they weren’t strong enough or intelligent enough. When these professions were finally open to them, women excelled in them. These same stereotypes were, and sometimes still are, shaped on prehistoric women. By dint of thinking that they were unable to perform certain tasks, the hypothesis that they may have performed them is not even taken into consideration. We always feel, often in spite of ourselves, the need to give priority to people, sexes, cultures and eras. However, if we are here, it is because prehistoric men and women knew how to adapt to their environment and solve the problems of their time. By changing our view of this distant past, we could more easily imagine that patriarchy, like violence, did not rule prehistoric societies. This gives hope because history is not fixed, nothing is fixed. For my part, I think that the patriarchal system must be replaced by another system, which remains to be built together and not one sex against the other.

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Trained at the University of Turin, where she obtained her three-year degree in Cultural Heritage Sciences and her master's degree in History of Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Heritage, she specialized at the University of Milan, graduating in Archaeological Heritage. Freelancer, she deals with computer archeology and virtual heritage, museum displays, 2D graphics and multimedia products applied to cultural heritage. Collaborates with various public and private bodies in the field of projects related to the research, enhancement, communication and promotion of cultural heritage. She deals with the creation of cultural itineraries relating to the entire Italian Peninsula and the development of content (creation of texts and photographic production) for paper and virtual publications. Her study interests include the development of new techniques and means of communication for the enhancement of cultural heritage and the evolution of the symbolism of power between the Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

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