Again is spring and time to recall how the different archaic cultures celebrated and conceptualized the cyclical rebirth of nature. Vital knowledge provides prehistory since the archaic communities had built the foundation of the modern civilization. Did they really believe in Great Goddess? The research below and the archaeological exhibit that continues till April 25 at Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th St., New York, NY 10028 may help the readers and visitors to have their own position.
The prehistoric people are the ones who created, produced and reproduced skeletal components of the modern models of households, social grouping, villages and cities, feasting, rituals, cyclical cultural thinking, etc. The paradox of social history is that in some cases the contemporary society has been repeating beliefs and concepts, which were born in different social and cognitive context or that might have never existed in past although applied to some archaic cultures.The concept of “Great Goddess” became popular in the anthropological literature and beyond thanks to the works of Marija Gimbutas, a Professor at ULCA. Gimbutas had academic erudition and a good archaeological knowledge on the prehistoric cultures. Her personal author’s problem came from the willing to have made “big theories” and generalizations that in some cases departed from academism. For instance, a keystone of her writings became the Indo-European invasion to Europe that destroyed “Old Europe” of “Great Goddess” (or "Mother Goddess") in the fourth millennium cal BCE.
Among the factual background of the Great Goddess sedentary concept was a female figurine from Çatalhöyük (Turkey) accompanied by lions New findings include very small pieces. Accordingly, the Anatolian figurines might have been an artistic metaphor of nature as femaleness, since in that period of transition the biological productive abilities of women were crucial for the successful biological and cultural reproduction. But some of them may have been an artistic expression of sociality, without specific mythological or religion notion.
With reference to the Balkans, one of the archaic world cultural centers where the prehistoric figurines were most popular, the female clay miniature figurines appear to be also artistic works and pieces of information about mythology, ritualism and everydayness but not as a serious record of monotheistic concept of Great Goddess. It was the stage of Vinca culture (Late Neolithic – Early Copper Age, later sixth – early fifth millennium cal BCE) when the sitting female figurines became popular in the Balkans. The sitting figurines were also emblems of Krivodol culture in the Northwest Bulgaria from later 5th millennium cal BCE. Are they icons of Great Goddess?
We do not have written records and any interpretation is a hypothesis without direct evidence. So, the answer depends on the methodology of research. The common between Vin?a and Krivodol cultures is that both continued the line of flourishing of the prehistoric communities in the northwest Balkans, as a result of the accumulation of experience in the agricultural-stockbreeding subsistence and graduate development of the copper metallurgy. If one believes that this success would have been secured by ideology of superpower, then, the prehistoric figurines would be interpreted as an evidence of whole series of symbols and rituals to secure the community success. This system of symbols would be hierarchically structures or as segments of a whole without symbolic layering, with possibly priority of the ancestral idea.
Although the idea of prehistoric Great Goddess does not have grounds in archaeological records, it is still attractive for modernity. Human mind just naturally likes the touch with unusual, sacred or exotic that makes ordinary people to overwhelm easier the problems of controversial, difficult, boring, or even dramatic everydayness. However, keeping the term of Old Europe, the exhibit in New York, accompanied by the research conclusions of Douglass W. Bailey in the published catalog, expands the opportunities for richer and more adequate understanding of prehistoric past of humankind.
Exhibit "The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC", through April 25, 2010. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th St., New York, NY 10028.
Source: Examiner