WOMEN IN SCIENCE, PART 2
Archeology, anthropology & the string revolution
By Joyce Chediac
(Women in science, part
1)
What was human society like in the Stone Age? Were men
really brutally dominant, and women cowering and
submissive? Did cavemen really kill giant mastodons,
then drag them back to camp in order to feed helpless women and
children?
Fred Flintsone move over. New research in archeology and
anthropology suggests that Stone Age women brought home most of
the bacon and the vegetables to go with it, and may have
contributed 70 percent of the calories consumed by Stone Age
peoples. Stone Age society was communal. Women were not
passive, and men not aggressive and dominant. Everyone's labor
was needed and appreciated.
The old view
Dolni Vestonice is an Upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) site
in the Czech Republic. For five decades archeologists sifted
through a huge pit of charred and butchered mastodon bones and
broken stone tools there to come up with a view of Stone Age
life.
They concluded that camps like Dolni Vestonice "were once
the domain of hardworking male hunters and secluded, pampered
women who spent their days in idleness like the harem slaves so
popular in 19th century [Western] art," explains Heather
Pringle in "New Women of the Ice Age" (Discover, April 1998).
Men provided the main source of food, according to this view.
Using clubs and short-range spears, they killed huge tusked
mastodons, then dragged the meat back home to feed their
dependent families.
But this view didn't seem right to Dr. Olga Stoffer, now one
of the world's leading authorities on Ice Age hunters and
gatherers.
Stoffer and her team went to Dolni Vestonice and nearby
Pavlov, another Old Stone Age site. Based upon previously
overlooked evidence, they reconstructed something very
different. They saw a society depending largely on women,
plants and a technique of hunting previously invisible in the
archeological evidence--net hunting. Stoffer explains, "Net
hunting is communal, and it involves the labor of children and
women."
Stoffer and her team did their work after the women's
movement of the 1970s. This movement laid bare much of the
prevailing patriarchal, capitalist and class prejudices
concerning women, and created a new social receptivity to
women's issues. At the same time, this mass movement pried open
the door so that more women could become scientists and bring
their experience and questions to research.
Stoffer's findings exposed the "caveman" interpretation as
an embarrassing projection that says much more about the gender
bias of the researchers than the subject being studied.
Previous investigators merely assumed that women were
immobile and dependent because they had to take care of
infants. They never looked into what Stone Age women actually
did. "When they talked about primitive man, it was
always 'he,'" says Stoffer. "The 'she' was missing." Stoffer
and her colleagues, Drs. James M. Adovasio and David C. Hyland,
made an active search into women's work.
Asking the right questions
"The data do speak for themselves," Stoffer explains. "They
answer the questions we have. But if we don't envision the
questions, we're not going to see the data."
"Scholars had been looking at these things for years, but
their minds had been elsewhere," explained Adovasio.
Elsewhere, indeed. Take the hundreds of small statues of
full-figured naked women discovered throughout Europe and
dating back 20,000 years and more. With their large breasts and
hips and often well-defined vulvas, these "Venus" statues were
seen as men's prehistoric erotica. In the 1980s paleontologist
Dale Guthrie wrote a scholarly article comparing the statues to
Playboy centerfolds.
When Elizabeth Wayland Barber looked at these same statues,
she did not dwell on the size of the body parts. She was struck
that the women were clothed, if very scantily, in hats, bands,
string skirts and other forms of woven decoration carved on the
statues in great detail. When she asked for more information on
prehistoric weaving, male archeologists told her "nobody could
have known how to weave such complicated textiles so
early."
But Barber, who had learned to sew and weave from her mom,
recognized the stitching. Since so little research was done on
this subject, she did it herself and wrote "Women's Work, the
First 20,000 Years," detailing women's long relationship to
textiles and weaving.
In the chapter "The String Revolution," Dr. Barber explains
that people who made the skirts on the Venus statues knew how
to twist string. This "opened the door to an enormous array of
new ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival, much
as the harnessing of steam did for the Industrial
Revolution."
From string came "snares, fish lines, tethers and leashes,
carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a way of
binding more complex tools." With string early humans could
weave baskets, make slings to carry babies, thereby making
women mobile, and make nets to catch game and fish, a highly
successful and low-risk hunting method.
String, says Barber, is "the unseen weapon that allowed the
human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out
into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Paleolithic.
We could call it the String Revolution."
Since it is not disputed that women first domesticated
plants and were the first weavers, it is likely that women
discovered string and made the first nets, although they were
used by the entire population. But how important were nets, and
how widely were they used?
Searching for string
Taking into account Barber's findings, Stoffer, Adovasio and
Hyland sifted through hundreds of tiny clay fragments excavated
from a site at Pavlov, a short walk from Dolni Vestonice. They
found imprints of textiles and basketry going back to at least
29,000 B.C., the oldest ever found. They found casts of nets
strong enough to capture large Ice Age rabbits, birds and
foxes. They saw that bones of rabbits and foxes littered the
camp floors at Pavlov and Dolni Vestonice. They determined that
46 percent of the individual animals found at Pavlov were small
game, and thought they were likely caught in nets.
Exploring further, they found that Ice Age camps throughout
Europe were littered with small game bones, suggesting that
nets were widely used. Right there on the camp floors were bone
fragments that looked like the awls and net spacers used by
traditional hunting societies of the last century. All this had
been missed in the previous five decades of excavation.
To test their findings, Stoffer and her team turned to
anthropologists who observed women in the few remaining
hunter-gatherer societies and studied written descriptions of
recent hunting peoples. Pringle explains that, "Women and
children have set snares, laid spring traps, sighted game and
participated in animal drives and surrounds--forms of hunting
that endangered neither young mothers nor their offspring. They
dug starchy roots and collected other plant carbohydrates
essential to survival. They even hunted, on occasion, with the
projectile points traditionally deemed men's weapons....
Anthropologists have come to realize how critical the female
half of the population has always been to survival."
Nets are one of the most efficient hunting systems, and are
far more valued in present-day hunting societies than bows and
arrows, according to Adovasio. Researchers living among the
net-hunting Mbuti in the forests of the Congo report that they
capture game every time they set their nets, and catch
half the animals they encounter.
Net hunting is communal. For example, Native peoples in the
U.S. placed nets on poles across a valley floor, "Then the
entire camp joined forces. Everybody and their mother could
participate," says Stoffer. "Some people were beating, others
were screaming or holding the net. And once you got the net on
these animals, they were immobilized. You didn't need brute
force. You could club them, hit them any old way."
Mammoths died at
watering holes
If most of the meat was caught in nets, then what was the
significance of those charred and whittled piles of mammoth
bones found in Russia and Eastern Europe and so long studied by
previous archeologists? Stoffer found that the bone piles
contained 220-pound skulls, which hunters would have no reason
to bring back to camp. The bones showed a wide range of
weathering, and the sex and age distribution of the animal
remains was similar to the death pattern of animals found at
African watering holes.
It seemed improbable that these were the remains of meat
dragged home by brave male hunters, and much more likely that
Ice Age humans pitched camps near water holes, and scavenged
the remains of the exhausted animals that died there.
Studying traditional societies in Asia and Africa, Stoffer
learned that no tribal hunters made their living from killing
elephants, the modern equivalent of the mastodons, until the
advent of metal weapons. "If one of these Upper Paleolithic
guys killed a mammoth, and occasionally they did," says Soffer,
"they probably didn't stop talking about it for ten years."
How could the previous archeologists have been so mistaken?
"Very few archeologists are hunters," said Stoffer, "so it
never occurred to most of them to look into the mechanics of
hunting dangerous tusked animals. They just accepted the ideas
they'd inherited from past work."
Myth of the all-meat diet
Besides, humans could not have survived on a diet of 90
percent meat, as the old school maintains. According to recent
nutritional studies, humans who get more than half their
calories as lean meat will die from protein poisoning.
Carbohydrates are needed to promote human life.
Linda Owens, who specialized in the microscopic analysis of
tools, took a closer look at those Upper Paleolithic tool piles
and found among the spear heads and clubs large quantities of
pounding stones and other tools used to gather and process
plants. Researchers agree that women harvested and prepared
plants. At question is how much this contributed to the
diet.
Archeobiologist Sarah Mason sampled remains from a
26,000-year-old hearth at Dolni Vestonice. She found fragments
indicating that women had dug roots and cooked them.
Owens estimates that if Ice Age females collected plants,
bird eggs, shellfish and edible insects, and if they hunted or
trapped small game and participated in the hunting of large
game (as Inuit women did in the last hundred years), they
probably brought in 70 percent of the consumed calories.
And those Venus statues? They were hardly male pornography.
The new view is that the statues were probably made by women to
use in rituals recognizing the huge contribution made by
women's work.
"Those terribly stilted interpretations with men hunting big
animals all the time, and the poor females waiting at home for
these guys to bring home the bacon--what crap," Adovasio
exclaims. (New York Times, Dec. 14, 1999) "To this day in
Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such
boldly wonderful things as thrusting spears into wooly
mammoths, or battling it out with other men. We've emphasized
the activities of a small segment of the population--healthy
young men--at the total absence of females, old people of
either sex and children. We've glorified one aspect of
Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other things
that made that life way successful."
It took a women's movement and women researchers to expose
the blatant gender bias of archeology and anthropology. What
more will we learn about true human history when class
relations are overturned and national oppression ended? When
all oppressed people can come to science as equals,
contributing their community's history, insights and
perspective?
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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