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The Women of Brassempouy: A Century of Research and Interpretation

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An Erratum to this article was published on 23 February 2007

Abstract

The discovery of female figurines at Brassempouy in the 1890's would launch more than a century of debate and interpretation concerning Paleolithic representations of women. The figurines emerged from the ground into a colonial intellectual and socio-political context nearly obsessed with matters of race. This early racial interpretive frame would only be replaced in the mid 20th century, when prehistorians turned to questions such as fertility and womanhood.

The first figurines were discovered in 1892 under rather tortured circumstances in which their very ownership was the subject of a heated dispute between Edouard Piette and Emile Cartailhac. Their toxic relationship would lead Piette, in his subsequent excavations, to be extremely precise about issues of stratigraphic and spatial provenience. Piette's publications and archives enabled Henri Delporte to confirm the Gravettian attribution of the figurines and have allowed the present author to create a map of their spatial distribution within the site.

Technological and microscopic analysis of the Brassempouy figurines resolves some lingering questions about the sex of certain of the figurines and suggests an original context of figurine fabrication and the abandonment of unsuccessful sculpting attempts.

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Notes

  1. Tomaskova (2003) has underscored the impact of such local histories on modern archaeological understanding.

  2. In the intervening years, another sculpted figure, much more abstract, was discovered by Dupont (in 1867) at Trou-Magrite in Belgium.

  3. As tragic as it was from a modern perspective, such uncontrolled digging in the context of congress excursions was standard fare right up to World War II when the law of 1941 imposed greater controls on the excavation process. For example, no less eminent an organization than the Société Préhistorique Française undertook precisely the same kind of sanctioned pillaging in an excursion to the abri des Merveilles (Dordogne) during its Périgueux congress in 1934 (Guichard, 1935).

  4. Not a single figurine is attributed with certainty to the AFAS trench in l'Avenue, although it remains possible that le Fragment was derived therefrom. Either none were found there, or those that were uncovered were never surrendered to the AFAS representatives.

  5. Eugène Trutat (1840–1910) was not an ordinary thief (Cartailhac, 1910). Indeed, he was a renowned photographer and geologist who, having been named Head Curator at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle de Toulouse in 1866, was Emile Cartailhac's boss!

  6. For reasons of space, I have not reproduced the original French quotations. Readers who wish to obtain them are invited to request them from the author.

  7. The nature of the agreement with the Comte de Poudenx is unclear. If it was a lease, then the objects according to common practice at the time, probably belonged to the AFAS.

  8. Yann Potin, the leading expert on the history of the Brassempouy excavations, provides a detailed account of Piette's accusations of theft, which, through the use of a pseudonym, targeted Magitot, Dubalen and Cartailhac (Potin, 2001, in press).

  9. During the four years of excavation, they also explored the interior of the grotte du Pape (Solutrean, Magdalenian), extending their excavations deep into the Grande Galérie (a deep bifurcation of the grotte du Pape) in 1896; and they excavated the frontal portions of the grotte des Hyènes (Aurignacian) further along the hillside.

  10. In his analysis, Piette seems unaware of the important structural differences within a single mammoth tusk.

  11. Author's note: this is the yellow steatite statuette from Grimaldi, with a kind of “French braid,” the publication of which would appear in 1898 (Reinach, 1898).

  12. To further explore this relationship between evolution, race, sex and the colonial context, the reader is referred to Wiss (1994), Brantlinger (1985), Comaroff (1989), Gilman (1985), Stepan (1982) and Stocking (1987).

  13. Confirming the opinion of my dear colleague, the late Marianne Govozdover.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the curators and librarians of the musée des Antiquités nationales at Saint Germain-en-Laye for generous access to the figurines from Brassempouy, Grimaldi, Sireuil and Tursac as well as the Piette archives. I am grateful to April Nowell, Yann Potin, Raphaëlle Bourrillon and Joanna Milk for commenting on different versions of this paper. I am truly privileged to have known and collaborated with two of the great contributors to our knowledge of Paleolithic female imagery: Henri Delporte and Marianne Gvozdover. This paper is dedicated to their memory.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Center for the Study of Human Origins, New York University, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Randall White

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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-007-9029-1.

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White, R. The Women of Brassempouy: A Century of Research and Interpretation. J Archaeol Method Theory 13, 250–303 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-006-9023-z

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