/
EN
MESOLITHIC, NEOLITHIC, CHALCOLITHIC 9.700 – 2.200 BC

Only a few objects of art have survived from Mesolithic compared to the amount of findings from the Neolithic. The nutrition of humans changed due to climatic changes. In this period people mainly hunted forest animals and fishes instead of big animals. There were gathered other objects, thanks to the formation of forests it was possible to cultivate new roots and hazelnuts.[1] Humans began to settle down and founded permanent areas of settlement. Scientists assume that in this epoch women and men had equal rights and deduce this assumption from an equal way of sepulture for both sexes.[2] In the neolithic there was a change from the hunter-gatherer to producing cultures. People built houses and lived in village-like communities. Animals were domesticated, agriculture was practized. The way of life and the social structure changed. Findings of skeletons show that the life expectance of women was drastically reduced, but remained constant for men. Siegfried Vierzig presumed, that this was due to the fact that women got pregnant several times.[3] Thanks to their settledeness and the availability of animal's milk women got pregnant more often, and in addition to that they had to work the fields. The burial rituals differing between women and men witness that the women's role had changed. This could be an indication for the inequality between the sexes, that according to Vierzig cannot be proved, but is imaginable.[4] The changed social structure caused the development of individual and stylistic characteristics within social groups. Vierzig talks about "regional individual cultures" standing in contrast to the consistent culture of an epoch.[5] This can be seen in the engravings on ceramics. There is no proof that these engravings and paintings have symbolic, magic or ritual character. The scientist Marija Gimbuta interpretes the often used V-engravings as representation of the pubic triangle.[6] "Frequently pitchers were made in form of women, it was shaped in the form of the face or the entire body", continues Vierzig. He presumes that this was the inherited tradition of the woman being the symbol of cyclical cosmic rejuvenation[7], such as the vulva engravings or the explicite depiction of vulva and pubic triangle in the European Old Stone Age. In this period (Chalcolithic) also the use of chopper developed further, strongly differing from region to region.[8] The material was used in a standardized way from the Bronze Age on.[9]


2-7-Goettin auf dem Leopardenthron-Vorsch 2-8-Frauenfigur Pazardzik-Vorsch 2-9-Frauenfigur fruehkykladisch-Vorsch  leer-1 leer-1 leer-1 leer-1  leer-1
 leer-1