[WW] Women in science: Archeology, anthropology & the string revolution

[WW]

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 3, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
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WOMEN IN SCIENCE, PART 2: 

ARCHEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY & THE STRING REVOLUTION

By Joyce Chediac

What was human society like in the Stone Age? Were men 
really brutally dominant, and women cowering and submissive? 
Did cavemen really kill giant mastodons, then drag them back 
to camp in order to feed helpless women and children?

Fred Flintsone move over. New research in archeology and 
anthropology suggests that Stone Age women brought home most 
of the bacon and the vegetables to go with it, and may have 
contributed 70 percent of the calories consumed by Stone Age 
peoples. Stone Age society was communal. Women were not 
passive, and men not aggressive and dominant. Everyone's 
labor was needed and appreciated.

THE OLD VIEW

Dolni Vestonice is an Upper Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) site 
in the Czech Republic. For five decades archeologists sifted 
through a huge pit of charred and butchered mastodon bones 
and broken stone tools there to come up with a view of Stone 
Age life.

They concluded that camps like Dolni Vestonice "were once 
the domain of hardworking male hunters and secluded, 
pampered women who spent their days in idleness like the 
harem slaves so popular in 19th century [Western] art," 
explains Heather Pringle in "New Women of the Ice Age" 
(Discover, April 1998). Men provided the main source of 
food, according to this view. Using clubs and short-range 
spears, they killed huge tusked mastodons, then dragged the 
meat back home to feed their dependent families.

But this view didn't seem right to Dr. Olga Stoffer, now one 
of the world's leading authorities on Ice Age hunters and 
gatherers.

Stoffer and her team went to Dolni Vestonice and nearby 
Pavlov, another Old Stone Age site. Based upon previously 
overlooked evidence, they reconstructed something very 
different. They saw a society depending largely on women, 
plants and a technique of hunting previously invisible in 
the archeological evidence--net hunting. Stoffer explains, 
"Net hunting is communal, and it involves the labor of 
children and women."

Stoffer and her team did their work after the women's 
movement of the 1970s. This movement laid bare much of the 
prevailing patriarchal, capitalist and class prejudices 
concerning women, and created a new social receptivity to 
women's issues. At the same time, this mass movement pried 
open the door so that more women could become scientists and 
bring their experience and questions to research.

Stoffer's findings exposed the "caveman" interpretation as 
an embarrassing projection that says much more about the 
gender bias of the researchers than the subject being 
studied.

Previous investigators merely assumed that women were 
immobile and dependent because they had to take care of 
infants. They never looked into what Stone Age women 
actually did. "When they talked about primitive man, it was 
always 'he,'" says Stoffer. "The 'she' was missing." Stoffer 
and her colleagues, Drs. James M. Adovasio and David C. 
Hyland, made an active search into women's work.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

"The data do speak for themselves," Stoffer explains. "They 
answer the questions we have. But if we don't envision the 
questions, we're not going to see the data."

"Scholars had been looking at these things for years, but 
their minds had been elsewhere," explained Adovasio.

Elsewhere, indeed. Take the hundreds of small statues of 
full-figured naked women discovered throughout Europe and 
dating back 20,000 years and more. With their large breasts 
and hips and often well-defined vulvas, these "Venus" 
statues were seen as men's prehistoric erotica. In the 1980s 
paleontologist Dale Guthrie wrote a scholarly article 
comparing the statues to Playboy centerfolds.

When Elizabeth Wayland Barber looked at these same statues, 
she did not dwell on the size of the body parts. She was 
struck that the women were clothed, if very scantily, in 
hats, bands, string skirts and other forms of woven 
decoration carved on the statues in great detail. When she 
asked for more information on prehistoric weaving, male 
archeologists told her "nobody could have known how to weave 
such complicated textiles so early."

But Barber, who had learned to sew and weave from her mom, 
recognized the stitching. Since so little research was done 
on this subject, she did it herself and wrote "Women's Work, 
the First 20,000 Years," detailing women's long relationship 
to textiles and weaving.

In the chapter "The String Revolution," Dr. Barber explains 
that people who made the skirts on the Venus statues knew 
how to twist string. This "opened the door to an enormous 
array of new ways to save labor and improve the odds of 
survival, much as the harnessing of steam did for the 
Industrial Revolution."

>From string came "snares, fish lines, tethers and leashes, 
carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a way 
of binding more complex tools." With string early humans 
could weave baskets, make slings to carry babies, thereby 
making women mobile, and make nets to catch game and fish, a 
highly successful and low-risk hunting method.

String, says Barber, is "the unseen weapon that allowed the 
human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out 
into every econiche on the globe during the Upper 
Paleolithic. We could call it the String Revolution."

Since it is not disputed that women first domesticated 
plants and were the first weavers, it is likely that women 
discovered string and made the first nets, although they 
were used by the entire population. But how important were 
nets, and how widely were they used?

SEARCHING FOR STRING

Taking into account Barber's findings, Stoffer, Adovasio and 
Hyland sifted through hundreds of tiny clay fragments 
excavated from a site at Pavlov, a short walk from Dolni 
Vestonice. They found imprints of textiles and basketry 
going back to at least 29,000 B.C., the oldest ever found. 
They found casts of nets strong enough to capture large Ice 
Age rabbits, birds and foxes. They saw that bones of rabbits 
and foxes littered the camp floors at Pavlov and Dolni 
Vestonice. They determined that 46 percent of the individual 
animals found at Pavlov were small game, and thought they 
were likely caught in nets.

Exploring further, they found that Ice Age camps throughout 
Europe were littered with small game bones, suggesting that 
nets were widely used. Right there on the camp floors were 
bone fragments that looked like the awls and net spacers 
used by traditional hunting societies of the last century. 
All this had been missed in the previous five decades of 
excavation.

To test their findings, Stoffer and her team turned to 
anthropologists who observed women in the few remaining 
hunter-gatherer societies and studied written descriptions 
of recent hunting peoples. Pringle explains that, "Women and 
children have set snares, laid spring traps, sighted game 
and participated in animal drives and surrounds--forms of 
hunting that endangered neither young mothers nor their 
offspring. They dug starchy roots and collected other plant 
carbohydrates essential to survival. They even hunted, on 
occasion, with the projectile points traditionally deemed 
men's weapons.... Anthropologists have come to realize how 
critical the female half of the population has always been 
to survival."

Nets are one of the most efficient hunting systems, and are 
far more valued in present-day hunting societies than bows 
and arrows, according to Adovasio. Researchers living among 
the net-hunting Mbuti in the forests of the Congo report 
that they capture game every time they set their nets, and 
catch half the animals they encounter.

Net hunting is communal. For example, Native peoples in the 
U.S. placed nets on poles across a valley floor, "Then the 
entire camp joined forces. Everybody and their mother could 
participate," says Stoffer. "Some people were beating, 
others were screaming or holding the net. And once you got 
the net on these animals, they were immobilized. You didn't 
need brute force. You could club them, hit them any old 
way."

MAMMOTHS DIED AT WATERING HOLES

If most of the meat was caught in nets, then what was the 
significance of those charred and whittled piles of mammoth 
bones found in Russia and Eastern Europe and so long studied 
by previous archeologists? Stoffer found that the bone piles 
contained 220-pound skulls, which hunters would have no 
reason to bring back to camp. The bones showed a wide range 
of weathering, and the sex and age distribution of the 
animal remains was similar to the death pattern of animals 
found at African watering holes.

It seemed improbable that these were the remains of meat 
dragged home by brave male hunters, and much more likely 
that Ice Age humans pitched camps near water holes, and 
scavenged the remains of the exhausted animals that died 
there.

Studying traditional societies in Asia and Africa, Stoffer 
learned that no tribal hunters made their living from 
killing elephants, the modern equivalent of the mastodons, 
until the advent of metal weapons. "If one of these Upper 
Paleolithic guys killed a mammoth, and occasionally they 
did," says Soffer, "they probably didn't stop talking about 
it for ten years."

How could the previous archeologists have been so mistaken? 
"Very few archeologists are hunters," said Stoffer, "so it 
never occurred to most of them to look into the mechanics of 
hunting dangerous tusked animals. They just accepted the 
ideas they'd inherited from past work."

MYTH OF THE ALL-MEAT DIET

Besides, humans could not have survived on a diet of 90 
percent meat, as the old school maintains. According to 
recent nutritional studies, humans who get more than half 
their calories as lean meat will die from protein poisoning. 
Carbohydrates are needed to promote human life.

Linda Owens, who specialized in the microscopic analysis of 
tools, took a closer look at those Upper Paleolithic tool 
piles and found among the spear heads and clubs large 
quantities of pounding stones and other tools used to gather 
and process plants. Researchers agree that women harvested 
and prepared plants. At question is how much this 
contributed to the diet.

Archeobiologist Sarah Mason sampled remains from a 26,000-
year-old hearth at Dolni Vestonice. She found fragments 
indicating that women had dug roots and cooked them.

Owens estimates that if Ice Age females collected plants, 
bird eggs, shellfish and edible insects, and if they hunted 
or trapped small game and participated in the hunting of 
large game (as Inuit women did in the last hundred years), 
they probably brought in 70 percent of the consumed 
calories.

And those Venus statues? They were hardly male pornography. 
The new view is that the statues were probably made by women 
to use in rituals recognizing the huge contribution made by 
women's work.

"Those terribly stilted interpretations with men hunting big 
animals all the time, and the poor females waiting at home 
for these guys to bring home the bacon--what crap," Adovasio 
exclaims. (New York Times, Dec. 14, 1999) "To this day in 
Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such 
boldly wonderful things as thrusting spears into wooly 
mammoths, or battling it out with other men. We've 
emphasized the activities of a small segment of the 
population--healthy young men--at the total absence of 
females, old people of either sex and children. We've 
glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense 
of all the other things that made that life way successful."

It took a women's movement and women researchers to expose 
the blatant gender bias of archeology and anthropology. What 
more will we learn about true human history when class 
relations are overturned and national oppression ended? When 
all oppressed people can come to science as equals, 
contributing their community's history, insights and 
perspective?

- END -

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