di Alessandra de Nardis
We report the article by the French journalist Clara Hage dated 25 September 2020 published in NEON, an information magazine. It is a topic that we know well and with even more in-depth references but we believe it is important to note that in France, a nation that saw the birth of the study of Prehistory and thanks to the work of an academic archaeologist, the incredible blindness that has prevented knowledge is highlighted of our origins since its inception. The article presents the book “Prehistoric man was also a woman" of the prehistoric archaeologist Marylene Patou Mathis published by Allary Editions still unpublished in Italy.
“Prehistoric women have been made invisible: an archaeologist brings women out of the caves of history” by Clara Hage
During prehistory, women also hunted large mammals, painted cave walls, and went to war. She is the prehistoric archaeologist Marylene Patou Mathis to state it in his book “Prehistoric man is also a woman.”, supporting this with the incorrect vision of patriarchal society.
Imagine the prehistoric era, its mammoths, its caves; virile Cro-magnons in animal skins holding in one hand the stone with which they lit the fire and in the other the ax that repelled the enemy clans. Worn out by their exploits and the unstoppable evolution of their ingenious brain, they return tired to the cave where their wives await them. Women who harvest some plants during the day, prepare the game hunted by men and serve them a meal. Then the men dedicate themselves to various activities, such as painting the walls of the cave, because they are definitely very intelligent; women take care of children and… Wait, isn't that a little old-fashioned?
“No, prehistoric women did not spend all their time sweeping the cave and looking after children while waiting for the men to return from hunting,” says Marylène Patou Mathis, archaeologist and research director at the CNRS. After Neanderthal from A to Z (Allary Editions), published by the same publishing house Prehistoric man is a woman, an essay that tells a (pre)history freed from the sexist prejudices that built it and which is based on new archaeological discoveries. A story that also says that patriarchy does not date back to the origins of the world and that from their caves, prehistoric men and women can have a lot to teach us about gender equality.
Q: “Prehistoric man is also a woman“, why doesn't it sound good?
Marylène Patou-Mathis, archaeologist: I noticed during my years of research that the place of women in prehistoric societies was unknown, the topic little covered. Not only does the vocabulary completely exclude the question of their role in this period: we talk about "prehistoric man", "museum of man", "evolution of man" rather than "human" but in the collective imagination there they are clichés inherited from the first scholars of prehistoric archeology – all men – who are not based on any archaeological evidence. ” As if human evolution had happened without women. Their place during Prehistory is certainly not entirely denied: they are granted 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 major inventions (tools, fire…) is dominant. Furthermore, supposedly masculine actions, such as flint-knapping, hunting, or painting, were valorized. Most representations in films or reconstructions, with a few exceptions, give for example an exclusively male image of the Lascaux painters. Why should it only be men? No one took a photo to prove they were the only ones holding the badger hair brush.
Q: How then do you know if it was women who held it?
I'm not saying that women did all the parietal art. Simply, we must propose other hypotheses, open the field of possibilities: there are no reasons, neither physiological nor intellectual, that would automatically exclude women from certain activities. Another assumption concerns hunting and gathering. Gathering has been attributed to prehistoric women and hunter men, and hunting is valued over gathering. Why? Not only do we assume that women perform certain tasks and not others, but we have also prioritized seemingly male tasks as more noble than female ones. Indeed, plants among hunter-gatherer peoples were considered as important to their economy as hunting, both for food and for healing.
Q: What is the tangible evidence that today allows us to redefine the role and status of prehistoric women?
Today there are technological advances and new investigation methods that allow us to make the archaeological remains that we discover during excavations speak better. For example, the DNA we find in the bones of unearthed human skeletons allows us to positively identify 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 1000 skeletons, that prehistoric women from Central Europe were as robust as today's shot put or javelin champions. This indicates that during the Neolithic period women performed tasks related to agriculture, very physical tasks such as grinding grains with heavy millstones. The division of tasks appears more complementary than previously thought and they should be divided more on the basis of each individual's aptitude than on the basis of gender. Now we know that women entered the caves, 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, vulvas painted or engraved on the walls of the caves, but also statuettes, the famous prehistoric Venus. They are mostly naked, but sometimes on certain figurines, from Siberia for example, they wear a kind of jacket. Once again, for many researchers, it was men who painted or sculpted women's bodies. However, we can very well imagine that some of these figurines were made by women, even for women, such as the openwork ones, perhaps considered as amulets and worn during childbirth which could be difficult because at the time there was no caesarean section!
The comparison is not fair but it is like the "male gaze" at the cinema, a gaze on these works that until recently was essentially male and the interpretations made mostly by archaeologists; women are only 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 1880th century Viking grave that contained a skeleton buried with weapons, two horses, and a strategy game board. Discovered in 2000, it served until the 2017s as a reference for identifying warrior leaders. Without certainty, the pelvis was poorly preserved, the skeleton had been attributed to a man. In XNUMX, DNA analysis proved that it was a woman, a warlord! Despite this indisputable evidence, some archaeologists are still convinced that this woman's relatives dressed her as a warrior without this reflecting her true social status. There is a lot of bad faith.
Q: Where does this partial prehistory come from?
Prehistory appeared as a discipline in the mid-19th century, first in France and then almost everywhere in the Western world. Early prehistoric anthropologists and archaeologists modeled ancient societies' vision of their patriarchal society in which women are considered lesser and their activities often limited to maternal and domestic duties within their homes. The 19th century was marked by a hierarchical and unequal vision of races and sexes, which should have justified all the discrimination that existed at the time. The prejudice is there.
Without any archaeological evidence, early prehistoric gendered activities valorized the masculine and downplayed the feminine. It is a cultural construction a posteriori. I agree with Françoise Héritier and Simone de Beauvoir: the patriarchal system, by inferiorizing women, made them dependent, made them subordinate for a great historical period. But unlike them, I'm not convinced that this system existed in the first place. 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 system that is fairer, more balanced between the two sexes.
Q: Were prehistoric men and women capable of living in a matriarchal society?
I make this assumption in my book, but you have to be very careful with this term. I prefer the expression “matrilineal system” (filiation system in which the transmission by inheritance of goods, titles, etc., is done by the mother, ed.). In any case, there is no evidence that matriarchal societies, the opposite of patriarchy as domination of one sex over the other, existed during the prehistory. In the matrilineal system, women have an essential role because they 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, stems from a Western view 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 distant time, 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, we must move away from a linear and progressive vision of the evolution, both biological and cultural, of humanity. Until recently, people lived by hunting and gathering and other agriculture and animal husbandry similar to that practiced in the Neolithic era.
Q: How to bring women out of the oblivion of prehistory? We must 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, particularly of the nineteenth century. Assumptions and prejudices must be replaced by real and verified facts. From this moment on we can realize that women had an equally important role as that of men in prehistoric societies.
Not so long ago, our society thought that some professions were not accessible to women because, for example, they were not strong enough or intelligent enough. When these professions were finally opened to them, women excelled at them. These same stereotypes were, and sometimes still are, modeled on prehistoric women. By dint of thinking that they were not capable of carrying out certain tasks, the hypothesis that they could have carried them out is not even taken into consideration. We always feel, often despite ourselves, the need to give priority to people, genders, 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 might more easily imagine that patriarchy, like violence, did not govern 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.
Translation by Alessandra de Nardis, October 2020
