The Lady of Amiens: here she is returning to the Light after 23000 years

The Lady of Amiens: here she is returning to the Light after 23000 years
The Lady of Amiens

di Alessandra De Nardis

During an excavation campaign in northern France, in the prehistoric site of Renancourt, in Amiens at the confluence of the Selle and Somme valleys, a team fromNational Research Institute of Preventive Archaeology brought to light a figurine with an unmistakable style that immediately caused it to be renamed the VENUS of AMIENS.

This site has been known for some time, one of the few to offer evidence of the early Upper Paleolithic (35000-15000) and it is here that during the 2019 campaign, this 23.000 year old Lady sculpted in just 4 cm of plaster was brought to light belonging to the Gravettian period.

In the Lady of Amiens we find the voluminous shapes of the buttocks, thighs and breasts and the typical barely outlined arms; we find the absence of a face that seems veiled by a beaded cap; we have already noticed this detail in Hooded lady from Willendorf, (dating back to 23.000-19.000 BC Austria) in that of Brassempouy, (25.000 years ago) and in Laussel bas-relief (approximately 20.000 years old – Dordogne); also thinking about the reconstruction of our "woman of Ostuni” (about 28.000 years ago,) we imagine that the beaded cap was a distinctive sign of the cult.

With that of Amiens, around thirty Ladies have now been found in France, which brings the number of these Gravettian works of art to more than a hundred in all of Europe.

The function or meaning of these Paleolithic figurations continues to remain a mystery for official archeology which considers them linked to a simple symbolic expression of regenerative cult and fertility.

We know that this limited and limiting vision is linked to a way of conceiving life, death and the Earth; we believe that the Ladies bring to the Light the true Roots of the Sacred which, as Luciana Percovich writes: "...they are in the female bodies of our dark ancestors: they sink into the depths of time, covered with forced oblivion and layers of rubble and exploitation. Bringing them back to light means getting out of the dead end of the dominant gaze, freeing compressed and frozen energies, revealing deceptions, daring to imagine in the present a possible horizon of a different civilization. "

Alessandra De Nardis, December 2019

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