Flora Unveiled

72 i Flora Unveiled

alone, especially if, as Colin Renfrew has suggested, Mesolithic hunter- gatherers initially
spoke a variety of non- Indo- European languages and became PIE speakers around the time
of the adoption of agriculture.^14 Based on these and other considerations, there is a growing
consensus that agriculture, along with PIE, spread throughout Europe during the Neolithic
by a patchy, mosaic mechanism, involving both demic and cultural diffusion.^15

Plant– Female Associations in European Neolithic Figurines

The Neolithic period in the Aegean (mainland Greece and surrounding islands) extends
from ca. 6800 bce (Aceramic Period) to ca. 3200 bce (Final Neolithic). Accompanying
the transition to agriculture in the Aegean was the production of a large corpus of anthro-
pomorphic figurines, the vast majority of which (84%) were modeled in clay. Archaeologist
Maria Mina has classified the total corpus of the published Aegean figurines into catego-
ries according to gender.^16 She found that female and probable female figurines account for
about 60% of the total, whereas males and probable males represent less than 3%. Clearly,
the genre of anthropomorphic clay figurines from the Aegean Neolithic was dominated by
images of women at this time.
In addition to their greater numbers, Mina also reported that female figurines differed
stylistically from male figurines. For example, female figurines were frequently shown “with
hands resting on the breasts and breast area or with hands below the breasts.” Another
stylistic difference was the presence or absence of decorations, such as applied paint or
inscribed motifs representing “body decoration, attire, and jewelry.” About 43% of the figu-
rines were decorated, all of which were either female or asexual. None of the male figurines
was decorated. Colored paints were sometimes used to highlight specific anatomical parts
of the female figurines: “Red was applied on the breasts and pubic area, black demarcated
the abdomen and pubic area, with white being restricted to the pubic area.” During the
late Neolithic, blue and green were added. In one late Neolithic female figurine, green was
used to mark the pubic area, suggesting a possible analogy between women’s fertility and
“agricultural lushness.” According to Mina, such decorative elements generally emphasized
reproduction and fertility:

Overall, the predominance of Female figurines implies the strong preoccupation

of Neolithic people with women’s bodies and, no doubt, physical aspects related to

them, such as pregnancy, birth, and menstrual cycle. The close parallelism of the

female body and the phenomena of nature cannot have escaped Neolithic people,

the physical body acting as a common metaphor to explain the natural and social

world.^17

As noted here, the use of green paint to indicate the pubic region of an Aegean female
figurine from the Neolithic is a possible example of the association of women and agricul-
ture. Similar symbolic associations between plants and women appear to have accompanied
the spread of agriculture from the Near East to Europe beginning around 7000 bce. In
the Upper Dneister Valley, for example, cereal grains were sometimes pressed into the wet
clay of female figurines, leaving a pattern of grain impressions (Figure 4.1). Such terracotta
figurines date from the mid fifth millennium BCE.