Old Europe

Nice article by John Noble Wilford in the NY Times about the "Copper Age" civilization in southeastern Europe, from about 5000 to 3500 BC. Many of the best discoveries I have made in European museums have been artifacts from this era, which I find fascinating but which doesn't generate headlines or make collections famous. I remember in particular the contents of several whole tombs dropped into display cases, skeletons and all their gold and copper ornaments and weapons splendidly laid out. This era is fascinating partly because I always wonder how much of the civilizations we know date back to this period. Did the makers of these objects have gods like Demeter, Pluto, Apollo, or Artemis? Did they have stories of werewolves, or night-flying witches?

We know a fair amount about how the people of "Old Europe" lived. Their houses were small and simple, tightly clustered together in villages that could be quite large. They did not have large temples or other public buildings, and their settlements were not fortified. They were farmers, herders, and fishermen. But to understand how they thought, we have to look at their art. Fortunately they were avid artists, decorating their everyday pots with elaborate designs and making many figurines. The most famous are the "goddess" images. These stylized women may have been goddesses, but we really don't know. Many have been found in trash pits, rather than tombs or ritual deposits, which suggests that they may have been simple toys. Even if they are goddesses, I find the notion that this implies matriarchy silly; the 17th-century art of Scandinavia was almost all of Jesus and his apostles, but in practice women there had much stronger legal rights than in Italy or Spain, where religious art focused on the Madonna.