Abstract
This article considers ways that representations of anthropomorphic imagery in the form of figurines from prehistoric village communities have been interpreted and provides a new framework for analyzing figurines. It has been long suggested that prehistoric figurines should be interpreted as representations of female gendered qualities related to ritual, fertility, and motherhood combined into a concept called “mother goddess.” The impetus for the adoption of this interpretation and evidential association with prehistoric figurine assemblages and bound to binary gender is briefly critiqued. The methodology for studying figurine assemblages presented here utilizes typological, archaeological, and comparative analysis and is cognizant of inherent ambiguities in the object biographies of the full assemblage. This study applies this methodology to a corpus of figurines excavated from sixth millennium settlements associated with the Halaf material culture. This approach is then operationalized with case studies of figurines excavated from Domuztepe (Turkey) and Chagar Bazar (Syria) as examples of engagement with those who conceived, made, used, and discarded them. The Halaf figurine corpus is shown as nuanced, displaying sexual difference and humanness on a spectrum from overt to ambiguous. Considered as a whole, the Halaf corpus is shown to have had mundane and mutable use lives related to embodied identities entangled with culture and community, unconnected to gender binaries, ritual, fertility, or motherhood.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For discussion of gendered roles in archeological fieldwork, publications, and analysis, see Cobb and Croucher, 2016.
Fogelin and Schiffer recently published an ethnographic study of “rites of passage” between quite similar points of human engagement in object use lives (2015, 819).
I thank Timothy Taylor for rightly advocating that we need to consider the thing aspect of prehistoric figurines apart from the human form that they represent when I presented a version of this analytical framework at TAG-Bradford, UK, December 2015.
Approximately 200 individual figurines and fragments are known from sites in Iraq, these are the subject of a future study. A preliminary survey of these examples shows that the percentages of male/female/unsexed/unknown, whole/fragment, and clay/stone are similar to the 197 examples studied from sites in Turkey and Syria (Belcher 2014 and Belcher, The Halaf figurines project. (Data Publication Project) Open Context, http://opencontext.org, Forthcoming).
For a full discussion of Halaf seals, including anthropomorphic examples, please consult Denham (2013).
The Chagar Bazar figurines found in the 1935 sounding are now in the Aleppo Museum, Syria; The British Museum, London, UK; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, UK and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. All are cataloged in Belcher 2014 and Belcher, The Halaf figurines project. (Data Publication Project) Open Context, http://opencontext.org, Forthcoming.
A full bibliography of preliminary reports and specialized studies on the excavations and material culture from Domuztepe is at www.domuztepe.org.
The Domuztepe figurines are all in the Kahramanmaraş Museum in Turkey and cataloged in Belcher 2014, Belcher, The figurines. In S. Campbell, & E. Carter (Eds.), Prehistoric Domuztepe, I., Forthcoming and Belcher, The Halaf figurines project. (Data Publication Project) Open Context http://opencontext.org, Forthcoming.
For example, a May 2015 search on the phrase mother goddess yielded 82 examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog http://www.metmuseum.org/collection, 120 examples in the British Museum catalog http://www.britishmuseum.org/research.aspx, and over 1000 examples in the Brooklyn Museum catalog http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/, which also had an exhibit critiquing interpretations of prehistoric figurines as goddesses http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/fertile_goddess/.
In addition to Chagar Bazar, figurines of the LH.1A type are known only from the late Halaf levels at Tell Kashkashok, Tell Halaf, Tell Aqab, Yarim Tepe, Tepe Gawra, Arpachiyah, Tell Hassuna, and Tell Hassan. They are not known from Halaf sites in Turkey. For locations of these sites, see map (Fig. 1).
The most distinctive decorated pudenda known from the late Halaf figurine corpus is on a figurine vessel from Yarim Tepe II (Merpert and Munchaev 1987, plate VII).
A conservation report on this figurine shows that it was very difficult to stabilize for museum exhibition. Department of Conservation and Scientific Research, British Museum (4 September, 1990). Object registration number 1935,1207.364 (record available at: www.britishmuseum.org/collection. British Museum Online)
This figurine pendant can be viewed on the Open Context dataset for the site of Domuztepe. http://opencontext.org/subjects/14259_DT_Spatial
I was the trench supervisor and excavated the Death Pit and surrounding areas in the 1998 and 1999 seasons that these two figurines were discovered.
Adopted by the Oxford English Dictionary in August 2015 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/manspreading
References
Adams, W., & Adams, E. (1991). Archaeological typology and practical reality: a dialectical approach to artifact classification and sorting. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Appadurai, A. (1986). The social life of things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bahrani, Z. (2001). The women of Babylon: gender and representation in Mesopotamia. New York: Routledge.
Bailey, D. (1994). Reading prehistoric figurines as individuals. World Archaeology, 24, 321–331.
Bailey, D. (1996). The interpretation of figurines: the emergence of illusion and new ways of seeing. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 6, 281–307.
Bailey, D. (2005). Prehistoric figurines: representation and corporeality in the Neolithic. New York: Routledge.
Bailey, D. (2013). Figurines, corporeality, and the origins of the gendered body. Chapter 12. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Companion to gender prehistory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1111/b.9780470655368.2013.00013.x.
Belcher, E. (2011). Halaf bead and seal ‘workshops’ at Domuztepe: technological and reductive strategies. In E. Healy, S. Campbell, & O. Maeda (Eds.), The state of the stone: terminologies, continuities and contacts in Near Eastern Lithics. SENEPSE 13, (pp. 135–143). Berlin: ex-Orient. URL: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_pubs/72/.
Belcher, E. (2014). Embodiment of the Halaf: Late Neolithic figurines from Northern Mesopotamia. Unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University.
Belcher, E, & Croucher, K. (2016). Exchanges of identity in prehistoric Anatolian figurines. In R. A. Stucky, O. Kaelin, & H. P. Mathys (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (9th ICAANE) (, Vol. I, pp. 43–56). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. URL: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/jj_pubs/57.
Berns, M. C. (1993). Art, history and gender: women and clay in West Africa. The African Archaeological Review, 11, 129–148.
Bolger, D. (2013). Introduction: gender prehistory—the story so far. Chapter 1. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Companion to gender prehistory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1111/b.9780470655368.2013.00001.x.
Bolger, D., & Wright, R. P. (2013). Gender in Southwest Asian prehistory. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Companion to gender prehistory (chapter 18) (pp. 372–394). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118294291.ch18
Brilliant, R. (1991). Portraiture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, B. (2001). Thing theory. Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 1–22. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344258.
Cauvin, J. (2000). The birth of the Gods and the origins of agriculture. Translated by T. Watkins Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, S. (2004). Domuztepe 2004 excavation season. Anatolian Archaeology, 10, 4–5.
Campbell, S. (2007). Rethinking Halaf chronologies. Paléorient, 33(1), 103–136.
Chapman, J. (2000). Fragmentation in archaeology. London.
Chapman, J., & Gayarska, B. (2006). Parts and wholes: fragmentation in prehistoric context. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Cobb, H., & Croucher, K. (2016). Personal, political, pedagogic: challenging the binary bind in archaeological teaching, learning and fieldwork. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 23(3). doi:10.1007/s10816-016-9292-0.
Conkey, M. W., & Tringham, R. E. (1995). Archaeology and the goddess: exploring the contours of feminist archaeology. In D. C. Stanton & A. J. Stewart (Eds.), Feminisms in the academy (pp. 199–247). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Croucher, K. (2008). Ambiguous genders, altered identities: alternative interpretations of figurine and mortuary evidence from the ‘PPNB’—‘Halaf’ periods. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Gender through time in the ancient near east (pp. 21–52). Lanham, MD: Alta-Mira Press.
Croucher, K. (2012). Death and dying in the Neolithic Near East. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croucher, K., & Belcher, E. (2016). Prehistoric Anatolian Figurines. Chapter 20. In T. Insoll (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of prehistoric figurines. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dames, A. (2008). Evaluating patterns of gender through Mesopotamian and Iranian figurines: a reassessment of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic period industries. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Gender through time in the ancient near east (pp. 77–117). Lanham, MD: Alta-Mira Press.
Dames, A., & Croucher, K. (2007). Artificial cranial modification in prehistoric Iran: evidence from crania and figurines. Iranica Antiqua, 42, 1–21.
Davidson, T., & Watkins, T. (1981). Two seasons of excavation at Tell Aqab in the Jezirah, N. E. Syria. Iraq, 43, 1–18. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200130.
Denham, S. (2013). The meanings of late Neolithic Stamp Seals in North Mesopotamia. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, UK.
Eller, C. (2000). The myth of matriarchal prehistory. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ferrer, M. (2016). Feeding the community: women’s participation in communal celebrations, western Sicily (8th–6th centuries B.C.). Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 23(3). doi:10.1007/s10816-016-9293-z.
Fowler, C. (2004). The archaeology of personhood: an anthropological approach. London/New York: Routledge.
Fowler, C. (2011). Personhood and the body. In T. Insoll (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of ritual and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232444.013.0011.
Fogelin, L., & Schiffer, M. E. (2015). Rites of passage and other rituals in life histories of objects. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 25(4), 816–827. doi:10.1017/S0959774315000153.
Gaydarska, B., Chapman, J., Raduncheva, A., & Koleva, B. (2007). The châine opératoire approach to prehistoric figurines: an example from Dolnoslav, Bulgaria. In C. Renfrew & I. Morley (Eds.), Image and imagination, a global prehistory of figurative representation (pp. 171–184). Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute.
Gero, J. (2007). Honoring ambiguity/problematizing certitude. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 14, 311–327. doi:10.1007/s10816-007-9037-1.
Gimbutas, M. (1982). The goddesses and gods of old Europe: 7000 to 3500 BC: myths, legends and cult images. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gimbutas, M. (1989). The language of the goddess: unearthing the hidden symbols of western civilization. London: Thames and Hudson.
Goodison, L., & Morris, Y. (1999). Ancient goddesses: the myths and the evidence. London: British Museum.
Goodison, L., & Morris, Y. (2013). Goddesses in prehistory. Chapter 14. In D. Bolger (Ed.), Companion to gender prehistory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1111/b.9780470655368.2013.00014.x.
Gosden, C. and Marshall, Y. (1999). The cultural biography of objects. World Archaeology, 31(2), 169–178. URL:.http://www.jstor.org/stable/125055
Hamilton, N. (2000). Ungendering archaeology: concepts of sex and gender in figurine studies in prehistory. In M. Donald & L. Hurcombe (Eds.), Representations of gender from prehistory to present (pp. 17–30). Houndsmills: MacMillan.
Hamilton, S., Whitehouse, R., & Wright, C. (Eds.) (2007). Archaeology and women, ancient and modern issues. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Hill, J. D. (1995). Ritual and rubbish in the iron age of Wessex: a study of formation of a specific archaeological record. Oxford: BAR British Series 42.
Hodder, I. (2003). Archaeological reflexivity and the “local” voice. Anthropological Quarterly, 76(1), 55–69. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318361.
Hutton, R. (1997). The Neolithic great goddess: a study in modern tradition. Antiquity, 71, 91–99.
Ingold, T. (1993). The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology, 25(2), 152–174.
Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 91–102. doi:10.1093/cje/bep042.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Irving, A., & Heywood, C. (2004). The ceramics from the ‘death pit’ at Domuztepe: conservation and analysis. Anatolian Archaeology, 10, 6.
Joyce, R. (2005). Archaeology of the body. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 139–158.
Joyce, R. (2008). Ancient bodies, ancient lives: sex, gender and archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson.
Joyce, R., & Gillespie, S. (2015). Making things out of objects that move. In R. Joyce & S. Gillespie (Eds.), Things in motion: object itineraries in anthropological practice (pp. 3–20). Santa Fe: S.A.R. Press.
Joyce, R., Hendon, J., & Lopiparo, J. (2014). Working with clay. Ancient Mesoamerica, 25, 411–420. doi:10.1017/S0956536114000303.
Kansa, S. W., Kennedy, A., Campbell, S., & Carter, E. (2009). Resource exploitation at late Neolithic Domuztepe. Current Anthropology, 50(6), 897–914.
Kingery, D. (Ed.) (1996). Learning from things: method and theory of material culture studies. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: commoditization as a process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–91). Cambridge University Press.
Kuijt, I., & Cheson, M. (2005). Lumps of clay and pieces of stone: ambiguity, bodies and identity as portrayed in Neolithic figurines. In Pollack & R. Bernbeck (Eds.), Archaeologies of the Middle East (pp. 52–183). New York: Routledge.
Lesure, R. G. (2002). The goddess diffracted. Current Anthropology, 43(4), 587–610.
Lesure, R. G. (2011). Interpreting ancient figurines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemonnier, P. (2012). Critical cultural heritage series: mundane objects: materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Mallowan, M. E. L. (1936). The excavations at Tall Chagar Bazar, and an archaeological survey of the Habur Region, 1934–5. Iraq, 3(1), 1–85. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/4241586.
Mallowan, M. E. L., & Cruikshank Rose, J. (1935). Excavations at Tall Arpachiyah, 1933. Iraq, 2(1), i–178. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/4241576.
Mauss, M. (1950). The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, trans. W D. Halls [New York, 1990].
Merpert, N. Y., & Munchaev, R. M. (1987). The earliest levels at Yarim Tepe I and Yarim Tepe II in northern Iraq. Iraq, 49, 1–36. doi:10.2307/4200262.
Meskell, L. M. (1998a). Twin peaks: the archaeologies of Çatalhöyük. In L. Goddison & C. Morris (Eds.), Ancient goddesses: the myths and the evidence (pp. 46–62). London: British Museum.
Meskell, L. M. (1998b). Oh my goddess! Archaeology, sexuality and ecofeminism. Archaeological Dialogues, 5, 126–142.
Meskell, L. M. (2007). Refiguring the corpus at Çatalhöyük. In C. Renfrew & I. Morley (Eds.), Material beginnings: a global prehistory of figurative representation (pp. 143–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meskell, L. M., Nakamura, C., King, R., & Farid, S. (2008). Figured lifeworlds and depositional practices at Çatalhöyük. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18, 139–161.
Miller, M. A. (2002). The function of the anthropomorphic figurines: a preliminary analysis. In Y. Garfinkle & M. A. Miller (Eds.), Sha‘ar Hagolan volume 1: Neolithic art in context (pp. 221–233). Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Mina, M. (2007). Figurines without sex; people without gender? In S. Hamilton, R. Whitehouse, & K. Wright (Eds.), Women in archaeology, women in antiquity (pp. 263–282). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press..
Mina, M. (2008). Anthropomorphic figurines from the Neolithic and early bronze age Aegean: gender dynamics and implications for the understanding of Aegean Prehistory (BAR International Series 1894). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
Moorey, P. R. S. (2004). Idols of the people. Miniature images of clay in the ancient near east. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morsch, M. (2002). Magic figurines? A view from Nevalı Çori. In H. G. K. Gebel, B. D. Hermansen, & C. H. Jensen (Eds.), Magic practices and ritual in the near Eastern Neolithic (pp. 145–162). SENEPSE 8. Ex-Orient: Berlin.
Morales, V. B. (1990). Figurines and other clay objects from Sarab and Çayönü. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago/O.I.C. 25.
Nakamura, C., & Meskell, L. M. (2009). Articulate bodies: forms and figures at Çatalhöyük. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 16, 285–230.
Peregrine, P. N. (2001). Cross-cultural comparative approaches in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 1–18.
Renda, G. E. (Ed.). (1993). Woman in Anatolia: 9000 years of the Anatolian woman. Istanbul.
Shanks, M. (2012). Archaeological imagination. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Shanks, M., & Tilley, C. (1992). Re-constructing archaeology. London: Routledge.
Talalay, L. E. (1994). A feminist boomerang: the great goddess of prehistory. Gender and History, 6, 165–183.
Tobler, A. (1950). Excavations at Tepe Gawra II: the earlier levels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Voigt, M. (2000). Çatalhöyük in context: ritual in early Neolithic sites in central and eastern Turkey. In I. Kuijt (Ed.), Life in Neolithic farming communities: social organization, identity and differentiation (pp. 253–293). New York: Kluwer/Plenum.
Voigt, M. (1983). Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran: the Neolithic settlement. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.
Strathern, M. (2004). The whole person and its artifacts. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 1–19.
Von Oppenheim, M., & Schmidt, H. (1943). Tell Halaf I: Die Prähistorischen Funde. Berlin: De Gruyter & Co..
Ucko, P. (1963). The interpretation of prehistoric figurines. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 92, 38–54.
Ucko, P. (1968). Anthropomorphic figurines of predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete with comparative material from the prehistoric Near East and mainland Greece. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 24, London: Szmidla.
Ucko, P. (1996). Mother, are you there? Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 6(2), 300–304.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Walls, M. (2015). Making as a didactic process: situated cognition and the chaîne operatoire. Quaternary International. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2015.03.005.
Watson, P., & LeBlanc, S. (1971). Explanation in archaeology: an explicitly scientific approach. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wendrich, W. (Ed.) (2013). Archaeology and apprenticeship: body knowledge, identity, and Communities of Practice. Tucson, AZ, USA: University of Arizona Press.
Wylie, A. (2002). Thinking from things: essays in the philosophy of archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have improved this paper considerably. Thanks also go to the organizers of the original conference session in September 2014, who became careful, patient, and steadfast editors of this special issue. Appreciation goes also to Brian Boyd, the Columbia University Center for Archaeology, Karina Croucher, Bradford University, and Philipp Rassmann for their support as well as their comments and critiques on earlier versions of this paper. This article is much better as a result of this feedback; I take full responsibility for all remaining problems and errors in this paper. I am grateful also to the many museum curators and excavations directors who allowed me to study the Halaf figurine assemblages under their care. Travel to Istanbul both to present this paper at the European Archaeologists Association in 2014 and to conduct the research presented here was supported by John Jay College and The Research Foundation, City University of New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Belcher, E.H. Identifying Female in the Halaf: Prehistoric Agency and Modern Interpretations. J Archaeol Method Theory 23, 921–948 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-016-9291-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-016-9291-1