Thomas Cirotteau's Reading List

"Yes, it’s more academic and she did not focus on science as we do. We wanted to be with the researchers in the field, inside the laboratory, to understand how they work and their thinking about those discoveries. Claudine Cohen is not a field researcher; she’s working mainly on objects. She’s trying to find clues and evidence inside museums—looking at Venuses, at artefacts, at skeletons. So it’s quite a different point of view, sometimes."

"Yes. It’s only about Venuses. It’s also a very interesting point of view. So there are three or four periods of Venuses from this Paleolithic period. With this book, it’s possible to grasp the differences between them in terms of shape, form, maybe symbolical explanation, the material the Venuses were made off, where they came from. Also, the resemblances when they are from the same period, but are found in very distant places. It tells you something about the dispersal of these prehistoric groups. The book helps us to understand prehistoric culture through the art. For example, at Renancourt in France, near Amiens, they found the same figurine as one in Vienna, from Willendorf. It’s not completely the same, but the body of the woman is sculpted in the same way, with big breasts and a very generous figure and wearing a hat. There’s quite a big distance between Vienna and Amiens, more than a thousand kilometres. It tells you how this ancient culture evolved and spread all over Europe. Yes, the Venuses are small sculptures of a woman’s body. The oldest one that’s been found in Europe was in Germany, near the border with Switzerland, the Venus of Hohle Fels. It’s about 40,000 years old. After that, there are many more. So they date from the starting point of the Upper Paleolithic and go on until the end, but the shapes are always changing. Sometimes women are represented with very generous forms, with big breasts and bottoms. Sometimes they’re thin, just a few lines in a drawing. It makes you question what these women really looked like. Are these Venuses a portrait of these prehistoric women? Or are they some kind of symbolic way of representing them? We asked a paleoanthropologist what the bodies of prehistoric women found in the ground were like because the bones can tell us about their muscles and weight and also the strength of these women. The portrait that the bones give is not the same as the Venuses. So it seems that those Venuses are more symbolical representations of the power of women—maybe it’s about fertility or an amulet for luck. Or they’re just a symbolical way of thinking about femininity or maybe even a broader belief in some kind of cosmogony, a way of representing the world in its entirety. But the Venuses are not exact portraits. Yes, that’s what the skeletons say. That’s logical, if you think about hunter-gatherers. Even if they don’t move from place to place every day, they have a very, very physical everyday life. You’re gathering plants or hunting or preparing the skins of animals or making objects. You also carry your baby. They say that the territory hunter-gatherers moved in through a season was around 30 kilometres squared, so it’s quite a large territory. You’re searching for wood, for stone, for ochre to adorn your skin. It gives you an idea of how physical those times were. You have to use your muscles a lot. So the very generous forms of the Venuses doesn’t seem to fit with the hunter-gatherer way of living."

"Yes, that’s Marylène Patou-Mathis’s approach in this book: she’s trying to explain why we have these preconceived ideas about prehistoric women engraved inside our heads. She explains it from the starting point of Western culture, from Greek times, to the Christians, and to the time when the science of archaeology was born. In the 19th century, in Victorian times, women were mainly dealing with domestic matters. Men had political power, economic power, military power, and all the rights. Women at that time were treated like minors: they didn’t have the right to vote, or handle money. She explains why, because of this history, we have these representations like an anchor inside of our brain."

"I don’t have a lot of English books on my bookshelf, but I like books by Chris Stringer, who is a paleoanthropologist that works at the Natural History Museum in London. He has a lot of great books that tell the history of humanity. He is an anthropologist, so he doesn’t focus so much on everyday life, but his books are very interesting on how our species evolved from the start of prehistory—about 3 or 4 million years ago—up to today. Yes, approximately. You have a short period—called the Mesolithic—just before that, when people were using some techniques from the Neolithic period, but not all of them. The main change in the Neolithic period is that men and women became settlers. They built houses, they lived in villages, they planted crops, they raised animals. They’re agro-pastoralists. And the demography is exploding. During the Upper Paleolithic time, there were around 150,000 people on Earth. During the Neolithic period, after just a few 1,000 years, there are more than a million. Just because people settled down and grew cereals, the population exploded. There is a site in Ohalo, near Lake Tiberias in Israel, that raises a lot of questions. A lot of seeds from cereal have been found there that are still used today. They found more than 90,000 seeds from 142 different species. They also found an oven for cooking, that can make bread. It’s not a bread that rises, like the bread in our bakeries today, but more like galettes, this thin bread that you can eat. They settled at Ohalo for several years, as a seasonal occupation. It’s possible that those people understood the cycle of life, of growing things. That’s also what the ethnography and anthropology tell us. These people understand a lot because they live near nature—they are not away in cities in apartments very far from the growing fields. It’s scientifically impossible to be sure these people had a growing strategy—taking the seeds to put into earth and waiting for the plant to grow—but it’s unlikely they would use so many seeds just for cooking or for healing. You cannot be sure, but it could be the first agriculture."