Venus Figurines Essay

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The Venus Figurines’ Importance Beyond Cave Walls The Venus figurines of the Upper Paleolithic period are the powerful symbols of females in the Gravettian period. These women are faceless, with enlarged breasts, abdomens, buttocks and thighs made into portable sculptures in caves throughout Europe. The question of these figurines is, who could have made them? Are they a product of the modern male human whom is rising in this time period or are they the art of the woman herself looking down upon her body? What is their significance in the hominin’s Upper Paleolithic world? Various archaeologists do research and look upon these various figures to try to grasp some knowledge of the artist who made the figures and what their world was like. The figurines portray a shift in the mental capacity of hominins and their ability to make art into a something symbolic. The cognitive fluidity was growing, so the female became something worth sculpting about. The struggle for many archaeologists is to see if the female was just a sexual object made for the eyes of men, or women who held a special amount of power in her hunter-gatherer world. It is through these figurines that one can attempt to discover the importance of the female in that time period. Was she a part of the spiritual movement that was occurring or was she just an observer who lived among powerful men? The venus figurine opens up the exploration of the female importance in the Upper Paleolithic. With the venus figurine comes the possibility the observation that women were not as absent from the artistic world as archeologists previously thought. The venus figurine is first seen on the walls of the Abri Castanet, the rock shelter in France. Firstly, the venus is adorned with her usual enlarged sexual organs. Secondly, the portable venus figurine makes one of its very first debuts in the German cave of

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