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Identifying Female in the Halaf: Prehistoric Agency and Modern Interpretations

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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.

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Notes

  1. For discussion of gendered roles in archeological fieldwork, publications, and analysis, see Cobb and Croucher, 2016.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

  4. 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).

  5. For a full discussion of Halaf seals, including anthropomorphic examples, please consult Denham (2013).

  6. 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.

  7. A full bibliography of preliminary reports and specialized studies on the excavations and material culture from Domuztepe is at www.domuztepe.org.

  8. 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.

  9. 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/.

  10. 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).

  11. 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).

  12. 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)

  13. This figurine pendant can be viewed on the Open Context dataset for the site of Domuztepe. http://opencontext.org/subjects/14259_DT_Spatial

  14. 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.

  15. Adopted by the Oxford English Dictionary in August 2015 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/manspreading

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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.

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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

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