#archaelogy

[tinyuglyworld]

Amulet Seal in the Form of a Bull

Sumerian/Mesopotamian c. 3250 BCE.

[genderkoolaid]

on the top of neolithic queerness; something interesting that has happened with Çatalhöyük is the evolution in our understanding from "omg stone age Fertility Goddess Birth Cult!!" to "actually a lot of the figurines aren't of humans, many of the ones that are anthropomorphic can't be gendered, and many of the "fertility goddesses" are likely more tied to the fatness associated with age rather than with pregnancy necessarily, which may have been seen as more of a liminal space between life and death than a purely life-giving act, and also these people actually seemed VERY into penises as a spiritual symbol, far moreso than the vagina"

& specifically i find it very interesting that realizing that penises were likely spiritually important did not automatically translate to gender inequality. like the assumption we tend to make is that Good Feminist Spirituality (tm) in a society where women are empowered will feature a lot of vulvas and menstruation and birth in the spirituality, whereas Bad Patriarchal Spirituality (tm) is very into the penis as a symbol of dominating conquering power and women can't access it.

but there's actually evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük viewed the penis as spiritually potent, while also not seeing that potency as exclusive to those born with penises:

On the basis of research in twentieth-century Papua New Guinea, Strathern proposes a non-Western concept of the person as “dividual” rather than individual: an entity at once more partial and more expansive than the modernist monad, and constituted through multiple heterogeneous incorporations rather than existing as a unitary essence. This notion can help us make sense of the sex of the Çatalhöyük body, especially if we concentrate on its parts. Consider the penis. Meskell identified a number of the ceramic and stone figurines at Çatalhöyük as “phallic” – but she notes that these small objects are surprisingly ambiguous. Some are simultaneously male and female: when rotated, a penis and testicles become breasts or buttocks. This visual punning suggests an attitude that emphasizes the mutability, not the fixity, of bodily sex. The little penises are usually pierced for wearing; they are detached body parts that can be attached to any kind of body, male or female, adult or child. Detachability of body parts and substances is key to Strathern’s theory, since it indicates a body that is partible rather than unitary. The detachable penis, like the bucrania [bovine skulls], does not inevitably serve as a metonym for a whole gendered person, for masculinity as an abstraction, or for “phallic” power. Instead, elements of maleness and femaleness may be intrinsically partible, inhering in the products of men’s and women’s labor, as well as in manufactured body parts. These detachable gendered objects and substances can be exchanged, ingested, incorporated, expelled, discarded, or temporarily held by “dividual” persons. The idea of the body as partible is immensely helpful in understanding Çatalhöyük attitudes toward skeletons. Just as a female child might make and wear a clay penis, so too living persons at Çatalhöyük handled the bones of the dead.

(from "The Hau of the House" by Mary J. Weismantel in Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society edited by Ian Hodder)

remember gang, when people make extremely generalized statements about how "Our Ancestors" lived "back in Caveman Times" to explain modern Western gender roles through the lens of evolution, it is complete bullshit. and prehistoric & stone age humans deserve FAR more respect for their cultures and civilizations than they get.

[dazaicoree]

Terracotta head of Viṣṇu

Eastern India, 5th century CE, Gupta period.

[ancientknitter]

Sweater (European, late 1600s). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

"The rare knitted silks of the seventeenth have never been fully explained, but were probably informal wear. Today they could be purposeful as skiwear or underwear, a light sweater, or a chic bodice. Decorated to be seen, these knits are not represented in painting of the period, yet their role was clearly as a comfortable year-round clothing more consequential than any season's novelty."

[monogreek]

Two Satyrs (mosaic) , 4th century BC , Eretria (Evia Island)-Greece

(New Archaeological Discovery/ photos: Ministry of Culture)

[2seeitall]

Columns | Athens

[animentality]

[aipicsofmuscledmen]

When you think you're digging up history, but you're actually just preparing for your next workout. 🏋🏻‍♀️💪🏻