A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

[Adsos Letter]

SOURCE: New York Times
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?_r=1

Lots of good photos at the link.

[saltpoint]

1. Wonderful.

Recommended.

[Tumbulu]

2. fascinating (nt)

[Hekate]

3. How fascinating. Thanks as always, Adsos. I wonder what Marija Gimbutas would make of...

... this new research.

Hekate

[niyad]

4. interesting how they dismiss the possibility of goddess worship--must make their little heads

explode.

......

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.”

Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.”
......
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

[Hekate]

7. I saw that. What a shame. OTOH, the photos with the article are gorgeous stuff

This is the first time I've seen such detail on the incised figure that's so famous. And when I saw the one with just a long neck and no head I immediately said to myself that that's the peg for the now-missing head--in other words, it looks to me like it was a two-part object.

One of my grad school colleagues did some travel in that part of the world (20 years ago?) and gained access to a small countrified museum with boxes and boxes of these figurines. The old gent who was the archaeologist/curator handed my friend a very large clay pot. As she wrapped her arms around it she could feel that the finger-marks of the potter exactly fit her hands. It was quite a thrilling moment of communication across time for her.

I would be sad to see Gimbutas' pioneering work be slighted by the academy once more. She had to fight so hard to be seen and heard in the first place.

Hekate

[Igel]

8. Some of this is new,

but a lot isn't. Krahe wrote extensively of the Old European culture--knowing a lot less than Gimbutas would have a generation later.

Gimbutas fought a lot, but sometimes her fighting was the problem. When I knew her--just briefly and when she was emerita--she was still more concerned with fighting, sometimes to defend but always fighting, than to consider and revise. Given the dept. she was in, it's mostly understandable. Birnbaum, etc., were products of their time just as she was the product of her time, but she fell for Jakobson's trap (if she even knew it).

Dear ol' RJ said that one's research should never be guided by one's history; he got a lot of things wrong, but in this he gave sound, if difficult, advice. To some extent, and perhaps inevitably, Gimbutas' research was shaped by her history. Interesting ideas, but inflexible because they needed to be to make her non-academic point.

[Ignis]

11. Amazing stuff. Here's a pic:

[niyad]

5. thank you

[starroute]

6. I want to know why the Vinca figures look so much like the Jomon figures of Japan

I'm not quite ready to believe in a direct link between the prehistoric Balkans and ancient Japan -- but there are similarities in the figurines that have nagged at me for years. Anybody want to tell me these two weren't separated at birth?

[intheflow]

12. I had a similar thought.

Except I noticed a similarity between a piece of Old European pottery design and Native American pottery design.


Old Europe


Native American

[myrna minx]

9. K&R n/t

[Ignis]

10. Thanks for posting this.

:kick:

[Angry Dragon]

13. Here are some thoughts on the similar pieces

It is thought by some that we have shared memories. These are passed down through parts of the brain. As people get further and further away from nature we bury these deeper and deeper. Basically as we had more garbage to our lives we lose yourselves. This sounds more on the belief and religion scale than I would like but is not where art comes from, the inner self??

They also could have crossed paths in trade and travel.

[Uncle Joe]

14. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Adsos Letter.:thumbsup: