01-08-2025
Women left their mark on prehistoric society
The reconstructed face of the Cap Blanc woman who carved the heads of deer, bison and horses. IMAGE: COURTESY OF PAUL BAHN
One of the main textbooks on archaeology when I began studying the subject years ago was entitled. This gender bias reflected the fact that most archaeologists were men and prehistoric women were virtually invisible. It took a woman, Jane Goodall, to find that female chimpanzees make tools.
A lesson I have learned from excavating the graves of well over 1000 prehistoric humans, is that where I work in Southeast Asia, prehistoric women were socially very prominent. This is seen in how they were honoured in death, interred in their graves with, to cite just one example, gold and agate beads, fine ceramic vessels and bronze ornaments. We can reconstruct the feasting and rituals that accompanied this woman's last journey. In September 2021, this very point was taken up in a French television documentary entitled Lady Sapiens. Two years later, it was published in English, and it has generated a strong debate on the role of women in early hunter gatherer societies.
A second book,has taken up the same theme and posed an issue that some see as intractable: how do we actually know what the daily activities of women were so many thousands of years ago. Is it a safe assumption that men hunted mammoths while women collected berries and roots? Let us take a test case: the renowned cave art of the last Ice Age. There is a site called Cap Blanc in the Dordogne region of France, where someone carved the heads of horses, bison and deer. By examining the directions of the chisel cuts, the sculptor must have been left-handed. The investigation took an interesting turn when a burial was found under the frieze. It was a female and the muscle ridges on her left hand were particularly well developed, so she was probably left-handed and responsible for the carvings. Finding a skull is one thing, but reconstructing the face is another. Elisabeth Daynes has provided us with such an image, so we can gaze on the face of the woman who lived about 15,000 years ago, with the bead headdress she wore when she was buried. She is not the only example of a ritually impressive burial of a woman.
At the Spanish cave of El Miron, a woman who lived about 19,000 years ago was buried covered in red ochre laced with sparkling haematite crystals. And one can also look at surviving hunter gatherers, such as the Agta of the Philippines, where the women are just as adept as men at hunting pigs and deer.
