Museums - Paleolithic art exhibition / Exposición de arte paleolítico

Back in late 2012-2013, I visited an exhibition on Paleolithic art at the Museo Arqueológico Regional of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).

So here's another one of my historical museum/exhibition picture spams xD, with the pics I took at the exhibition  (as usual, click on all pics or open in new tab for larger size). Coming a little bit late, but I just finished reading the huge book I got at the shop this past month (the book contains both the catalogue and 24 essays), so posting it all now! Book review and some ramblings on the Paleolithic female representations on another post here.

• Female representations:

Original - Venus of Laussel (France) (Gravettian, c. 25,000 y)

Replica - Venus of Brassempouy (France) (Gravettian - 33,000 to 21,000 BP)

Replica - Venus of Berlin (Laussel, France) (Gravettian, c. 25,000 y)

Replica - Venus with a hairnet/braided hairstyle (Laussel, France) (Gravettian, c. 25,000 y)

Replica - Venus of Lespugue (France) (Middle Gravettian, c. 25,000 y)

Replicas - Venus' of Dolní Vêstonice  (Czech Republic) (c. 29,000 BP)

Replica - Venus of Holhe Fels (Hohlestein, Germany) (c. 40,000-35,000 BP)

Original - Carven vulva (La Ferrassie, France) (Aurignacian, c. 30,000 y)

Original - The hunter/a dancing prepubescent girl (Laussel, France) (Gravettian, c. 25,000 y)

Original - Scene with two figures, a female figure and an inverted male(?) figure (Gravettian, c. 25,000 y). This could be one of the few extremely rare depictions of sexual intercourse known in Paleolithic art.

Modern Venus by Raimond Clavell (1970s), inspired by the Venus of Willendorf

•  Tools and animal representations:
  
  

  

  Original - Silex blade (Placard cave, France) (Upper Solutrean, c. 20,000 y)

  

  Contemporary - Carven baton and arrow

Replica - Bison licking its neck (La Madeleine cave, France) (13,000 y)

 Original - Carven rods (Isturitz cave, France) (Magdalenian, c. 15,000 y)
 

Replica - Carven panel with galloping horses (Siega Verde, Salamanca, Spain) (Middle Magdalenian, 14,000-11,500 BC)

• Hunters:

Painting of the Barranco dels Gascons de Calapatá (Teruel, Spain) (Henri Breuil, watercolour, 1908)

Cave paintings depicting hunters and female figures (Henri Breuil, watercolour, 1911)

I would like to delve deeper into this other topic sometime in another post because I adore it, but I would still like to give a shoutout here to the fact that there are depictions of female hunters/huntresses in Paleolithic art (see below), and that therefore we would fall into a sexist bias were we to instantly assume that all hunter figures are male, not only in the depictions above, but in general. Archaeology and history are still massively male-dominated fields, and we also live in patriarchal societies with a whole set of constructed roles and stereotypes based on the gender binary, and so there is often a gender bias when it comes to identifying the sex/gender of figures and/or ascertaining their role in society. And even inside a patriarchal society with gender roles we can find some cases which subvert the norm, if only in mythological settings sometimes (as we can see in Greek and Roman art, for example). But these often rarer cases can be easily overlooked if we instantly assume that, for example, only men are hunters. 

 

And this assumption is actually done even in those cases where breasts and/or genitalia (note also that we are talking in the context of binary sex here, of course, which may fit a majority of cases in these contexts, but it's worth mentioning that it's also an added bias that can be considered) are clearly present, as is the case of some of the examples above. However, we also know that in more than one culture the artistic choices in the case of schematic figures of this kind often depict women with inverted triangle shapes, thick thighs and/or a thin torso (with males being depicted with straighter torsos in a rectangular shape and thinner legs), for example, which could be compatible with some of the hunter watercolours of the exhibition above. Am I saying some of those hunters are definitely huntresses? No, I can't know for certain either (males are also depicted with triangle shaped torsos in some cases, so this is not a 'definitive sign' of the figure's 'femaleness' either). But what I'm actually saying is, they could be, and I personally think that at least some of the figures in this Levantine cave painting (as shown in this shop replica), with their inverted triangle shapes, thick thigh and thin torsos, could easily be female (and a couple of them are included as such in the huntresses merge above, actually):

So yeah, I'm very probably talking about Paleolithic huntresses sometime in the future :D xD In the meantime, more posts about gender bias in archeology here: 1, 2.