Narbonne. The Neolithic woman, a beautiful stranger unveiled by Jean Guilaine

Is this the first time that an archaeologist has taken an interest in Neolithic women? Why has this never been explored?

Books have been published in recent years on women in prehistory, but they focused mainly on women in Paleolithic times, or else general texts did not question the detail of the archaeological documentation of the Neolithic. This requires being a ”Neolithician” and dealing in depth with the various aspects of the study materials available.

Why are you dedicating it to Françoise Héritier?

Françoise Héritier, anthropologist, was my colleague at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and at the Collège de France. In her work she has insisted a lot on the ”masculine-feminine” dichotomy and on the way in which gender difference was constructed and thought about.

What did you discover about the place of women in the Neolithic period, during this pivotal period of changeover to livestock farming and agriculture? What can be said about their social position?

During the Neolithic period, that is to say when the first agricultural societies flourished, we very quickly witness the appearance of social inequalities: we see the emergence of the dominant and the dominated. However, if women can figure among the upper circles of society, we observe, more generally, a whole series of indices of male domination: behaviors of patrilocality (men inherit the land and women come to live with their husbands) , exclusion for women from using arms (i.e. instruments of domination), failure to obtain a decent burial, etc.

Are women represented in the fields? Currently working ? What can be said about the relations between women and men in society?

Rock art from the Spanish Levant (5th – 3rd millennium BC) shows women in the fields carrying out agricultural work. But other forms of art depict them in less constraining attitudes: enthroned, dancing, taking care of their child. Relations between men and women obviously depended on the social position of the individuals under consideration. The study of certain necropolises presents women as stakeholders from the privileged classes and, on the contrary, women at the bottom of the social ladder, subordinates, perhaps slaves.

We see asexual representations. Are they a sign of ”genderless” people?

Today, we are used to classifying society in a binary way: male or female. However, there are “asexual” subjects in Neolithic iconography. Perhaps we should see there the will of their author not to gender the character represented in order to make him play ”mixed” roles. Recall that there are also known representations of hermaphrodite subjects, that is to say endowed with both male and female sexual characteristics. Perhaps also in the Neolithic the notion of gender was more ”fluid”, more ”permeable”, less clear-cut than in our contemporary societies.

What evolution have you noticed in the representation of the female body?

In the multiplicity of Neolithic female representations (and let us remember that this period stretches over four to five millennia) there are no typical representations of the female body: all the cases of morphological expressions have been attested since the earliest schematization. abstract to representations of corpulent women, very naturalistic.

Was there a fashion? Were women appreciated rounder or thinner?

Admittedly, there could be ways of representing women according to the tastes of the time, but this was only valid for a region and a period without one having to generalize. For example in the 3rd millennium, the marble figurines of the Cycladic islands, in Greece, are rather rigid, flat, ”dry” whereas at the same time in Malta, plump and chubby women were appreciated.

The representations are very suggestive, as if it had taken centuries to dare to show a woman’s sex again (Courbet in the 19th). How to interpret this freedom of Neolithic artists. Were they men and women?

From the beginnings of body iconography, the Aurignacians (Editor’s note: the first modern humans, – 40,000 to – 25,000 BC) were content to represent humans by what differentiated them anatomically: the sex. The Neolithic, long after, were able to continue in this way. They represented women in a thousand ways, naked or dressed. It can be assumed that the authors of clay figurines were themselves women who represented their own gender. Conversely, some hunting scenes may have been painted by men. Each sex was thus staged.

What do we learn about women’s religion?

It has long been thought that Neolithic religions were based on the existence of one or more female deities and centered on the notion of fertility (mother earth, fruitful and fertile). The iconography does not confirm this hypothesis: there are very few figurines pregnant or giving birth. I believe that the Neolithic had the worship of founding ancestors who legitimized the very existence of their community. Rituals dedicated to natural forces were likely, but they in no way involved the physical personification of the revered powers.

When you finally finished this book, did your view of women change?

By exploring the paths of Neolithic archeology on the theme of women, we realize the strong prehistoric roots of male domination. The hypothesis of Neolithic societies in which women originally exercised fundamental social power (the “matriarchy” of 19th century anthropologists) is in no way demonstrated by the available documentation. This is the archaeological confirmation of Françoise Héritier’s theses.