PALEOLITHIC WOMEN, FOR GENDERED LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS: ALEXANDER MARSHACK – THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION – REVISED AND AUGMENTED EDITION – 1991 – A REVIEW by Jacques COULARDEAU

Author:Jacques COULARDEAU [COULARDEAU, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Éditions La Dondaine
Published: 2020-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Now if we assume as some facts show that 75% of the artists who left their handprints in the caves were women if we assume that women in their collective labor as the mothers of the community, those providing the community with children and adults free of inbreeding and able to live a full adult life, we can start wondering if the meaning of these pictures is properly understood with Marshack’s assumptions. It is at least a lot more complicated. What vision a woman would project into the previous hunting scene from Lascaux that kills the bison for sure, but also the hunter, and what are these six dots presented in these two rows of three perfectly aligned horizontally and vertically? Then there is no need to get out of the picture to analyze the bird-head of the dead hunter or the bird itself in the picture. The real point is the connection between the bird-head of the dying man and the bird perched on a stick or ready to fly away. Actually, Marshack comes close to what could be hypothesized, though with some unwarranted assumptions that lead him to open a fair number of possible interpretations based on them. The bird is “probably a sign and symbol… of an equation that recognized flight, disappearance, and return.” Then, he assumes the whole situation is a ritual of some type performed by a shaman or sorcerer who is a man, and he asks questions: “Was this bird on a stick… the image of the shamanistic spirit, or did the bird carry or lead the spirit of the shaman on a journey? Was it a messenger of the four-fingered ‘bird-god’ in some seasonal myth related to the bison? … is this the image of a seasonal sacrifice or periodic rite?” (page 280) Altogether seven hypotheses are stated but all centered on the concept and presence of a shaman who cannot be the man in the picture since he is dying, which means the bird-headed man is not the bird, the bird is not his spirit. Marshack transfers the picture onto a shaman performing a sacrifice or a rite, but what sacrifice and what rite? Note though that all these characters are entirely mute, and the images have no names though we know the Hominins concerned spoke Turkic agglutinative languages. So, each item, each character, each symbol had names and the rites must have used some “mantras” using these names.

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