#stone age

[letmeinimafairy]

A recent commission, back to the cave. Slowly started creating some kind of a story in cave paintings in my head, a continuation of the ammonite cave.

[visionsofnightfall]

Calanais Stone Circle, Isle of Lewis, Scotland

alexmilton_photo

[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.

[thesilicontribesman]

Moel Hebog Late Bronze Age Shield, 1100 to 900 BCE, 'Treasure: History Unearthed' Exhibition, Museum of Liverpool, Merseyside

[river-taxbird]

The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.

In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.

People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.

This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.

If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.

People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.

[eopederson]

Poulnabrone Dolmen, a prehistoric portal tomb located in the Burren region of County Clare, Ireland, 2013.

[tinyuglyworld]

Natufian scuplture from from around 11,000, credited as the first artwork portraying sex

Found in Jericho, West Bank, Palestine

[thesilliestpotato]

Don’t mind me I am crying over these anthropomorphic statues from 35th century BC