'Palaeo-porn': we've got it all wrong
The idea that curvaceous figurines are prehistoric pornography is an excuse to legitimise modern behaviour as having ancient roots, says archaeologist April Nowell
Which Palaeolithic images and artefacts have been described as pornography?
The Venus figurines of women, some with exaggerated anatomical features, and ancient rock art, like the image from the Abri Castanet site in France that is supposedly of female genitalia.
You take issue with this interpretation. Who is responsible for spreading it, journalists or scientists?
People are fascinated by prehistory, and the media want to write stories that attract readers - to use a cliché, sex sells. But when a New York Timesheadline reads "A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock", andDiscover magazine asserts that man's obsession with pornography dates back to "Cro-Magnon days" based on "the famous 26,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statuette...[with] GG-cup breasts and a hippopotamal butt", I think a line is crossed. To be fair, archaeologists are partially responsible - we need to choose our words carefully.
Having studied Upper Palaeolithic figurines closely, what did you find?
They are incredibly varied beyond the few figurines seen over and over again: the Venus of Hohle Fels, the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Dolní Veˇstonice. Some are male, some are female; some are human, some are animals or fantastical creatures; some wear items of clothing, others do not. A recent study by my doctoral student Allison Tripp and her colleague Naomi Schmidt demonstrated that the body shapes of female figurines from around 25,000 years ago correspond to women at many different stages of life; they're a variety of shapes and sizes. All of this suggests that there are multiple interpretations.
Aren't other interpretations of palaeo-art just as speculative as calling them pornographic?
Yes, but when we interpret Palaeolithic art more broadly, we talk about "hunting magic" or "religion" or "fertility magic." I don't think these interpretations have the same social ramifications as pornography. When respected journals - Nature for example - use terms such as "Prehistoric pin-up" and "35,000-year-old sex object", and a German museum proclaims that a figurine is either an "earth mother or pin-up girl" (as if no other roles for women could have existed in prehistory), they carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and researchers, evolutionary psychologists in particular, to legitimise and naturalise contemporary western values and behaviours by tracing them back to the "mist of prehistory".
Will we ever understand what ancient art really means?
The French, in particular, are doing incredible work analysing paint recipes and tracing the movement of the ancient artists as they painted. We may never have the knowledge to say, "This painting of a bison meant this", but I am confident that a detailed study of the corpus of ice age imagery, including the figurines, will give us a window on to the "lived life" in the Palaeolithic.
Profile
April Nowell is a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her paper "Pornography is in the eye of the beholder: Sex, sexuality and sexism in the study of Upper Paleolithic figurines", co-authored with Melanie Chang, will appear next year
Some people look at prehistoric European figurines with exaggeratedly feminine anatomy and see pornography. Do you? Here April Nowell and Melanie Chang present the evidence – and the arguments.
This figurine, Europe's oldest known sculpture of a human, was carved out of mammoth ivory more than 35,000 years ago. When it was discovered in Germany in 2008, this is how the academic and popular media chose to talk about it… (Image: Cléo Uebelmann/miramann/Flickr)
Even as respected a scientific journal as Nature described the Venus of Hohle Fels as a "prehistoric pin-up". For the website LiveScience, the figurine proved that our "Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years".
Similar figurines have also been dubbed "palaeo-porn". One is this 11-centimetre-high statuette discovered in Austria in 1908 and known as the Venus of Willendorf. It is about 25,000 years old. Another, the like-sized Venus of Dolní Věstonice, is probably a few thousand years older and was found in what is now the Czech Republic. (Image: Imagno/Gerhard Trumler/Getty)
It was a similar story earlier this year when the discovery of a 37,000-year-old engraving in a rock shelter in Abri Castanet, France, supposedly of female genitals, was reported. The New York Times headline for the article announcing this was: "A Precursor to Playboy: Graphic Images in Rock". (Image: Raphaëlle Bourrillon/PNAS)
You might get the impression that our Palaeolithic ancestors were solely focused on the naked female form. However, figurines from this period are incredibly varied: some are human; some wear clothes, others do not. Some are animals or fantastical creatures, like this bear made from clay and bone powder from Dolní Věstonice.
A recent study by Allison Tripp of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and Naomi Schmidt of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces demonstrated that female figurines from around 25,000 years ago have bodies of all shapes and sizes, not just the exaggerated anatomical features of the famous "Venuses" (Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, vol 41, in press). This suggests that there are many interpretations of such artefacts, not just the pornographic one. (Image: DEA/A. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty)
What is considered pornographic has evolved considerably even over the past 60 years. Images considered titillating in the 1940s and 1950s seem quaint now. So why do we think we can interpret images of naked women that were created in a completely different cultural context tens of thousands of years ago? (Image: Eyeful Magazine)