快猫短视频

THE POSTCARD shows a fur-clad woman cowering in the back of a cave. In the
foreground, her manly-looking husband deftly carves a female figurine. This
image from a French archaeological museum reflects current ideas of human
society in the Ice Age, about 28 000 years ago. Man the hunter is also cast in
the role of sensitive artist, while his partner fades into the background. 鈥淭he
image is almost certainly wrong,鈥� says Jim Adovasio.

Beautifully carved female forms鈥攖he so-called Venus figurines鈥攁re
some of the earliest works of art. Their often explicit sexuality has led
archaeologists to see them as fertility symbols or mother goddesses. But
Adovasio, from Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, and his colleagues want to
rewrite the history books. They have discovered what look like carvings of woven
fabric detailed on the figurines. If they are correct, it means that textiles
were being made long before anyone ever suspected. It also challenges old ideas
about the status of men and women, and who did what to fill the larder.

Notions about how our Palaeolithic ancestors lived come mostly from evidence
in ancient stones and bones. They paint a picture of macho men wielding
stone-tipped spears as they hunted for mammoths. In reality, though, the great
majority of material that Ice Age people worked with probably came from plants.
In technologically simple societies today, and in more recent archaeological
sites, people used 20 times as much plant material as stone. But it is only in
the past couple of decades that archaeologists have started to get a handle on
this 鈥渕issing matter鈥�.

Adovasio鈥檚 lab is leading the way. He got his first glimpse of evidence for
Palaeolithic weaving five years ago when, lacking a proper screen, he projected
a slide showing a strangely embossed piece of ancient ceramic onto the door of a
refrigerator belonging to his colleague Olga Soffer from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 鈥淚t was immediately obvious to us that the image
was of the warp and weft of woven fabric,鈥� recalls Adovasio, who has spent many
years working with ancient textiles.

That set them off scrambling for more evidence. Working with David Hyland,
also at Mercyhurst College, they found a rich vein in the archaeological sites
of the Czech Republic, where ancient domestic conflagrations had fired wet clay,
leaving traces of textiles on the surfaces. So far, they have analysed 100-odd
small fragments. 鈥淚t鈥檚 clear to us that by 28 000 years ago people had developed
technologies for sophisticated weaving of textiles, making nets, and plaiting
and coiling baskets, using plant material,鈥� says Soffer.

Secrets of Venus

鈥淭he work is very exciting,鈥� says Sarah Nelson from the University of Denver
in Colorado. 鈥淚t fits into what people have begun to say must be there.鈥�

There are no known fragments of woven fabric in the archaeological record
from this time, but Adovasio and his colleagues realised that there might be
clues on the Venus figurines. About half of them have patterns on the head that
have been interpreted as Ice Age hairdos, or around the arms, chest and waist
that are usually thought to be tattoos or cloth made of animal skins. When the
researchers started to look at these patterns under low-power microscopy,
however, they saw depictions of twined or plain woven cloth, just like the
indentations Adovasio and Soffer had noticed on the ceramics.

鈥淧eople have been handling these figurines for 100 years, and they have been
so overwhelmed by the sexual imagery that they barely saw these patterns, let
alone analysed them,鈥� says Adovasio. 鈥淏ut when you point it out to people, they
say, `Of course, it鈥檚 so obvious鈥�.鈥�

The detail of the carving is extraordinary. On the famous Venus of
Willendorf, for example, the criss-cross pattern on the head, once thought to
represent plaited hair, turns out to be a representation of a fibre-based woven
cap. The patterns on the lower body of the Venus of Lespuge depict a kind of
skirt made from 11 cords. The carver even went to the trouble of depicting the
cords in one section as fraying at the hem. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not something you could carve
just by looking at textiles,鈥� says Adovasio. 鈥淵ou have to know how the weaving
or plaiting is done technically.鈥�

In today鈥檚 technologically simple societies, women do most of the weaving. If
the carvers were also the weavers, then it might have been the women who
fashioned the figurines. 鈥淭hat challenges a lot of unquestioned assumptions in
archaeology,鈥� says Soffer. What鈥檚 more, the sophistication of the textiles
implies that their production was very labour intensive and required great
skill. The researchers believe that these were probably ritual
items鈥攕ymbols of achievement鈥攏ot daily garb. If so, they say, Ice
Age women were not just the subservient preparers of food and bearers of
children as has been assumed, but individuals with social prestige and
power.

Margaret Conkey from the University of California, Berkeley, believes that
such inferences about social status may be 鈥済etting onto shaky ground鈥�.
Nevertheless, she concedes: 鈥淭his work is important because it forces people to
sit back and figure out what questions need to be asked to get a deeper
understanding of past societies. They are rattling a few cages, and that鈥檚
迟别谤谤颈蹿颈肠.鈥�

In the practical realm of subsistence, for example, the ability to make nets
would bring new ways of acquiring meat. Armed with nets, Palaeolithic people,
including women, children and older people, could have caught rabbits and other
small game. 鈥淸This] is a much more realistic picture of what was probably going
on in the Upper Palaeolithic,鈥� says Conkey.

The new findings challenge our thinking about what technologies characterise
advances at this critical time in human evolution. 鈥淚t may be that the explosion
of weaving was one of the signature technological elements of our species,鈥� says
Adovasio. For Soffer, the work has a personal side, too. Before becoming an
archaeologist, she was a fashion promoter and coordinator for Federated
Department Stores in New York. 鈥淵es,鈥� she says, 鈥渋t closes the circle for me
very nicely.鈥�