This is a paper written for an Archeology Theory and Method class in the Spring 1996. It portrays the debate over prehistoric "Goddesses" between scholars of women's spirituality and feminist archeologists. I synthesized the different perspectives, creating characters for each viewpoint and then used actual and paraphrased quotes to create a dialogue form of the debate.

The Setting: A panel discussion at a Women's Studies Conference somewhere in the United States this year.

The Cast:
Sue Smith -- Panel Facilitator
Shelly Britford -- Feminist archeologist, European prehistory.
(Based on work by Sally Binford, Lynn Meskell and Joan B. Townsend.)
Mary Concord -- Feminist archeologist, European prehistory.
(Based on work by Margaret W. Conkey and Ruth E. Tringham.)
Marlene Sternak -- Feminist art historian and religious scholar.
(Based on work by Merlin Stone and Charlene Spretnak.)
Diane Allen -- Feminist cultural anthropologist.
(A voice for my observations.)

Smith: Welcome. I want to thank each of our participants for being with us today. We will start today's panel with a brief statement by each participant. Then allow for an open discussion between the panel.

Britford: The reason I wanted to be on this panel today is that I am concerned by the growing misuse of archeology in some feminist circles. These pseudo-feminists who proclaim that archeological evidence proves the existence of a golden age of prehistoric matriarchy. In the many discussions I have had with partisans of this myth over the past several years, I am persuaded that logic, reason, and arguments based on knowledge of the data cut no dice at all. The only experience I have had as an analogous in its lack of susceptibility to reason is trying to argue the evidence for biological evolution with hard-core fundamentalists, whose faith also renders them impervious to information. This belief is grounded in the misguided thinking of "armchair" anthologists of the turn of the century and has done little to enhance the reputation of feminist thought. This belief has been combined with the assertion that there is a conspiracy against its acceptance, making those who question the faith subject to suspicion of being conspirators. I am the last to deny that anthropology -- perhaps even more than other academic enterprises -- is dominated by sexist males. I am, however, equally persuaded that if a male anthropologist discovered evidence of past matriarchies, he would publish his findings rather than suppress them. One of the basic objections to the mythic matriarchal past -- apart from the lack of evidence to support it and the consistent body of data that argues against it -- is the use of myth as history by the propagators of the faith. The assertion of a mythic past as history and questioning the goodwill of those who doubt its validity constitutes an attitude that has much in common with the orthodoxy of Freudian psychology, fundamentalist Christianity, and other religions based on blind faith (Binford 1982:542-544, 549). They do not aim for a more complete understanding of ancient societies. Rather, they provide altogether alternative historical projections of what certain groups see as desirable. Re-weaving a fictional past with claims of scientific proofs is simply irresponsible. Such "new and improved" histories are more telling of contemporary socio-sexual concerns rather than their ancient antecedents (Meskell1995:74).

Sternak: Entering into a discussion about whether or not ancient Goddess worship existed is much like inviting us into a discussion of whether or not World War II actually occurred. As long as the Britford and others choose to blind themselves to the evidence of seven thousand years of artifacts and the three thousand years of historical (i.e., written) material, as discovered, deciphered, and described by archaeologists and historians (those listed in the ten pages of bibliography of my book) -- how can her statements even be considered seriously? (Stone 1982:550). Her most serious error was to blur the crucial distinction between two separate areas of research: (1) Archaeologists, classicists, and historians of religion have amassed abundant evidence that Goddess religions pre-dated patriarchal religions in many parts of the world, (2) Whether or not those societies who revered a form of the Goddess were matriarchies is unknown. In Greece, for instance, the earliest artifacts, altars, and linguistic references to the pre-Hellenic deities (Hera, Demeter, Artemis, Athena, etc.) long pre-date the appearance of the Hellenic, i.e., Olympian, gods. However, most feminist Goddess-researchers share Britford's exasperation with "loose talk" of a "'Golden Age of Matriarchy" in Greece or elsewhere; nor is this belief common in the feminist population at large. The recognition that many of the standard translations concerning Goddess religions reflect the patriarchal bias of our society (e.g., 'holy women" translated as "temple prostitute") is quite different from Britford's sarcastic claim that feminist researchers believe there is a willful "conspiracy" among male researchers. I am also intolerant of women stretching the facts -- because we don't have to. In dismissing improbable fabrications of unqualified, universal matriarchy, Britford has often set herself against an imaginary foe. I emphasized in the introduction to my book that too many clues to our prehistoric past have been lost for us to reconstruct the totality of those cultures with any certainty. This recognition of the limits of our knowledge is a theme that has pervaded all the major books published on Goddess religion during the past few years (Spretnak 1982: 552-554).

Allen: What I find disturbing about the comments so far is the either/or dualism presented. Asking whether or not matrifocal and/or Goddess worshipping cultures existed and what forms they might have taken is not as simple as asking whether World War II happened. Nor is it an inappropriate question to ask of the "archeological record." As Sternak herself has pointed out, the archeological record has limits and must be based on informed interpretation. It doesn't "speak" to us in the same way a written record by or interview with someone from World War II. And even in our own time periods there are questions about authenticity of written and oral history. Another aspect that I find disturbing is the equation of feminist religious interpretations of the material with "fundamentalism." This seems to be deliberately inflammatory. Since Christian fundamentalism has been a consistent opposition to feminism, the use of this language seems a rhetorical device meant to dismiss any belief in "Goddess-worship," and its use as a "reclaiming" in feminist spirituality. I would add that Britford seem to fall into the same trap of universalizing all those who are interested in Goddess-spirituality in the same way that she claims Goddess-researchers have universalized those people who lived in early Europe. More useful would be a discussion of the specific claims, evidence and methods of the material that has been interpreted to support the existence of "Goddess-cultures."

Concord: I think the Goddess movement provides a challenge and an excellent opportunity for feminist archeology. Because proponents of the Goddess Movement make inferences about social and symbolic aspects of the past, because they use material culture, especially "images of females," to anchor their interpretations about past gender roles and relations, and because they invoke "origins" narratives and appeal to feminist archaeologies, the movement provides an important terrain on which to illustrate and probe the parameters of feminist perspectives in anthropological archaeology (Conkey & Tringham 1995:200). It also seems important to me that if we, as feminist archeologists, are unhappy with the way this material has been used, it is important that we provide non-inflammatory critiques and offer alternative gendered interpretations of the materials. I am concerned with the problematic line between speculation or assertion and "fact" as presented in many of the Goddess-movement works (Conkey & Tringham 1995:206). In one form or another some archeologists have provided authentication, intentionally or unintentionally, for many of the Goddess theories. My own investigation into the Goddess movement has opened my eyes to a rich literature, the complexity of the issues, and a variety of participants and views both outside and within the movement (Conkey & Tringham 1995:208-209). According to Magatrends, more than 500,000 people in the United States, mostly, but not exclusively women, now identify with aspects of this movement (Conkey & Tringham 1995:206). There is no one viewpoint among this diverse group of people and I feel it is a mistake to dismiss the viewpoints. The story that has been presented by some of the Goddess literature is neither the only story nor "the" story, despite its power and seduction for those who actively seek to reimagine the past and to create a "usable" past for contemporary contexts. Nor are any of the alternative interpretations the "true" one. Many of them, including that of many Goddess-researchers' can be considered plausible within the constraints of the material evidence (Conkey & Tringham 1995:223). Rather than dismissing any line of questioning, it is important to look at the use of methods and multiple interpretations of the material.

Smith: Now it is time to open up the panel to questions from the audience.

Audience Member: Professor Britford, how can you possibly ignore the hundreds of Goddess figures discovered from prehistoric times?

Britford: To assume that the representation of the female figure in art signifies matriarchal power is so fraught with fallacy that I find it difficult to take it seriously as an argument. Does Playboy's artwork imply that it represents a matriarchal cultural system? The Venus figures of the Upper Paleolithic appear to be the earliest example of a common human fascination with the female form. There exists, by the way, a great deal of cave art from the same period that is not discussed either by male art historians or by women seeking to document the existence of the Mother Goddess -- representations of female genitalia that would be right at home in any contemporary men's room.
Art always exists as an integral part of a cultural system, and it bears systemic relations to that culture's mode of production, to its political system, to its ideology. The method of assigning ones own meaning to certain symbols and then tracing them over broad geographic areas and through tens of thousands of years of cultural change is, to put it mildly, not a reliable means of reconstructing the past. It would be possible to take any artistic representation - cattle, for example - and construct a theory about a religion based on the worship of livestock. Enough cattle exist in prehistoric art and in all later periods for a plausible argument to be made that humanity once worshipped cattle but that the history of such worship has been suppressed. What sounds plausible, using such methods, is not necessarily true (Binford 1982:546-547).

Sternak: It is truly pathetic when a woman cannot perceive the difference between the powerful Paleolithic figures and current pornographic portrayals of women as coy, vulnerable toys (Spretnak 1982:557).

Allen: The problem I have with this argument is that Britford, and to some degree Sternak, are both ignoring that these images are not just different in some "feeling" but in their specific historical and cultural settings. I think it is irresponsible to compare figurines of thousands of years ago to a form of comodified fetishism that has everything to do with current gender power relations and capitalist economy.

Concord: I agree, Figurines, however, do not speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted to have meaning in any century. Since figurines have been and can be interpreted in many different ways, each interpretation is a clear indicator of where a writer stands both on the past and on feminism. The ways in which these figurines have consistently been described by a wide range of academic scholars and others reflect the primacy of the notion of "Woman" as both an erotic and aesthetic ideal and of contemporary pornographic views of the female body as sexual object. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors claimed that the female figurines-especially those of the Upper Paleolithic-with large stomachs and so-called pendulous breasts depicted pregnancy and/or lactation and therefore signified fertility and the magical desires for successful births in order to maintain the viability of the (supposedly precarious) population. Most traditional authors assume that the depiction of biological and essential female traits meant that females in the Upper Paleolithic were the objects not just of imagemaking but of social control and male desire; that their place and functions in Paleolithic society were biologically determined and determinative; and that women's status was therefore less cultural and less central to the highly valued arenas of artistic production, political control, and other domains of social and ritual power. In contrast, most Goddess authors view the fertility interpretation for both Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines as a positive attribution that highlights the cultural importance and centrality of female qualities and biological powers. Neither approach, however, problematizes the notion of 'fertility" (Conkey & Tringham 1995:214-215). Twentieth-century sexist notions of gender and sexuality are read into the cultural traces of "our ancestors" including gender polarity, the primary association of women with reproduction, the conflation of sex with gender, and the assumption that these images are unambiguously about femaleness of a limited nature. Sometimes the only difference between the androcentric and the gynocentric views of these artifacts is the low or high status assigned to the images.

Britford: That ignores the fact that these differing interpretations are not just differences in views of feminism, but in archeological methods. These figurines have been objectified, taken as devoid of spatial and cultural specificity; yet objects do not have inherent meaning divorced from historically specific context of production and use. For many figurines provenience and context are lost due to poor excavation or non-archaeological recovery. And diffusionist concepts prevail asserting that one Goddess was worshipped universally all over Europe with similar ceremonies, etc. Yet the figurines are not homogeneous. They are diverse and scattered temporally. There is not cause to interpret every figure from "old Europe" in this religious light (Meskell 1995:76-77).

Allen: Wait a minute, one minute you compare the figurines to Playboy and the next you say we have to look at the specific historical context of materials. Aren't you doing the same thing you are complaining about?

Britford: I am not saying that these figures ARE the same as Playboy images, I am saying that is another possible interpretation. And there are others. They could be toys, or amulets, charms. Or they could be icons to represent servants of the deity. Or they could be illustrating the proper positions for sexual intercourse or birth. They could be meant to insure conception or a safe birth. They could have many different meanings. If the various figurines found in Europe and the Middle East are iconographic, and if they are related to religious expression, they are symbols. And as such they may have similar form in different areas and still have very different meanings. The meaning of symbols often remains arbitrary (Townsend 1990:191-193).

Spretnak: So by that logic the figures can't be proven to be Goddess images, but they can't be proven not to be either. I have always been very clear in my work that this is one interpretation of the material. That we don't know what these figurines mean, but this is more likely that the sexist pornographic interpretations we have been handed that downplay the overwhelming evidence that women were important in these cultures and that Goddesses have been worshipped in the past (Stone 1982).

Concord: Britford is correct in pointing out that much of the work from which these figurines and other materials that are used as evidence by those in the Goddess movement were done before scientific archeological methods were in use. Because of that we have very little contextual materials such as associated stone tools, climatic information, or associated fauna that might indicate how a site was used, how long people were there, or what the group size or composition might have been. (Conkey and Tringham 1995:216). This is not to say that we cannot make any interpretations from the materials, just that we cannot make one single interpretation. We cannot confirm the hypothesis of many of the Goddess movement, but neither can we completely rule out these interpretations. Some aspects we can rule out is the idea that that European prehistory was a homogeneous unit from the point of view of religion or social organization. Their meaning probably varied both spatially and over time. It is a mistake to assign a single interpretation to and entire class of material culture such as these figurines (Conkey and Tringham 1995:217).

Britford: One of the basic objections to the mythic matriarchal past - apart from the lack of evidence to support it and the body of data that argues against it -is the use of myth as history by the propagators of the faith. We do not attempt to reconstruct biological evolution or the history of the universe by recourse to myth, and the data of cultural evolution are no more amenable to this kind of methodology than are these other attempts to understand evolutionary processes. Myths are not appropriate primary data for reconstructing the past. The Persephone myth, for example, elucidates little about either Greek history or the causes of seasonal variations in temperate zones. The story of Noah's Ark tells us nothing of past geological processes (Binford 1982:544).

Sternak: And this is one of the problems -- Britford's refusal to accept any historical references in mythology. We have ample evidence of the worship of Goddesses, and numerous classics scholars have noted that certain patriarchal elements, such as the rape of Persephone and the forced marriage of Hera, were not part of these Goddesses' mythology prior to the barbarian invasions. They concluded that these myths include historical references to the rape of the Goddess-oriented culture and to the trauma of occupation. These classics scholars were not idiots or propagators of any blind faith, but were and are women and men professionals (Spretnak 1982:555).

Britford: Those who support the Goddess Paradigm make a number of assumptions about the nature of early societies and the implications for the position of women within them. These assumptions are based on a hypothesized female-focused society, which is understood to have been matriarchal, matrilineal and matrilocal. First, matrilineality has nothing to do with political structure nor, necessarily, with matriarchy. Rather it refers to one of the three major kinship system types which determine lines of descent, allocation of people within a society to kin groups, and assignment of obligations for assistance. And there is no evidence that there ever has been a matriarchy (Townsend 1990:183). Moreover, it perpetuates the male/female dichotomy and merely replaces one sexist hierarchical model (the dominance of males and a male God) with another (the dominance of females and a female Goddess), and so perpetuates the insidious stratified dualism. If we build unity on a fabrication of an alleged Goddess of an alleged old religion and matriarchy, it is built on sand. If the sand of basic assumptions is eroded, as it easily can be with careful scholarship, the myth will collapse, and with it may go the unity and the strength of the movement associated with the assumptions (Townsend 1990:198).

Sternak: Here you are blurring the distinction between two separate areas of research: First, archaeologists, classicists, and historians of religion have amassed abundant evidence that Goddess religions pre-dated patriarchal religions in many parts of the world, and second, whether or not those societies who revered a form of the Goddess were matriarchies is unknown, yet some were clearly matrifocal (Spretnak 1982:553). And the second point is ridiculous, whether or not matriarchies actually existed or not is irrelevant. Their power as symbols is still an important part of the movement.
Britford: I take strong exception to the assertion that the facts are irrelevant. In order to cope intelligently with the present and the future, we must understand the past. We must come to terms with cultural processes that have caused male dominance to be so widespread and long-lived (Binford 1982:548).

Allen: I am concerned by the antagonism I see in these two positions. I am shocked to hear Britford imply that myths tell us nothing useful about the beliefs and history of culture. It seems that much of anthropology's theory would contradict this assertion. I also am concerned that Sternak implies the search for accurate information about these prehistoric cultures would be irrelevant to the movement, when they seem to be an important part of the search for women's history. Yet, I think that the problem here is actually one not just of differing intents, but of a historical division between classics and archeology and what counts as evidence within those two disciplines. Britford's work in American archeology places an emphasis on the material remains and careful, somewhat conservative readings of these remains. Sternak as a historian trained in classics sees the written records of myths as evidence and uses these to interpret the material remains. They are also both committed to the feminist movement and what their approaches can offer us. I feel Britford and Concord are both right in questioning the underlying assumptions of gender that are often "read" into these artifacts and the context in which this research was done. I also agree that Sternak is correct in that archeologists often dismiss the importance of these images as symbols to women today do not rest on their uses in the past, but in the present. Rather than dismissing the Goddess movement with such name calling as "fundamentalism," I think it would benefit feminist archeologists to consider the importance of their work to women today and take the responsibility for explaining their methods and results in a way that is accessible to these women.

Concord: Yes, I think one of the problems has been the reluctance of archeology to take up these questions sooner. This left a gap which has been filled by feminists from other disciplines. For us, the Goddess literature crystallizes some of the central issues of contemporary archeology and contemporary sociopolitics. It forces us to investigate how material culture is meaningfully constituted and mobilized in particular sociohistorical contexts, including our own. The historic and archeological evidence that can, and cannot, but found to support the Goddess religion has raised important questions about historical evidence and verifiability of written texts, androcentric symbols, language, and discourse (Conkey and Tringham 1995:205-206). The substantive issue at hand is not so much the continuing critique or deconstruction of the assertions that dominate the Goddess literature. Rather, the question is how would a feminist archeological treatment of the prehistory of Europe proceed? An engendered prehistory envisages women as thinking and acting people who affect the course of prehistory. In doing this we think of men as well as women, young and old, and we think of children. We also think about the action and perceptions of these people in their personal histories, both every day and during the course of their lives. The process by which the archeological record is interpreted and reconstructed by archeologists and by which it is given meanings that modern readers can relate to is a complex serious of inferential steps. In practice each step is fraught with its own challenge of ambiguity and problems of validation. To ignore the ambiguity and to work within the illusion of "proven facts" is to claim that one's interpretation is knowledge rather than a mode of transmitting knowledge. Feminist theory encourages a celebration and discussion of this ambiguity rather than its mystification. We suggest for example that the interpretation of the Goddess literature be presented in relation to, not in exclusion of, alternative interpretive narratives (Conkey and Tringham 1995:219-221).

Smith: Well, we have run out of time. I want to thank all our guests for being with us today.

References:

Binford, Sally R.
1979 Myths and Matriarchies. In Human Behavior (May):63-66.
1982 Are Goddesses and Matriarchies Merely Figments of Feminist Imagination?: Myths and Matriarchies and Counter-Response. In The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak (Doubleday, New York).

Conkey, Margaret W. and Ruth E. Tringham
1995 Archeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archology. In Feminims in the Academy, edited by Donna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Steward (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor).

Eisler, Riane
1987 The Chalice and the Blade (Harper and Row, San Francisco).

Gimbutas, Marija
1982 Women and Culture in Goddess-Oriented Old Europe. In The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak (Doubleday, New York).

Meskell, Lynn
1995 Goddesses, Gimbutas and 'New Age' archaeology. In Antiquity 69:74-86.

Spretnak, Charlene
1982 Are Goddesses and Matriarchies Merely Figments of Feminist Imagination?: Response and Post-Counter-Response. In The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak (Doubleday, New York).

Stone, Merlin
1982 The Great Goddess: Who Was She?. In The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak (Doubleday, New York).

Townsend, Joan B.
1990 The Goddess: Fact, Fallacy and Revitalization Movement. In Goddesses in Religion and Modern Debate, edited by Larry W. Hurtado (Scholars Press, Atlanta).