Archaeology Magazine — March-April 2018

14 ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2018

A

15 , 000 -year-old bone pendant found at

Vlakno Cave in Croatia may be a late type

of Venus figurine, such as the famous Venus

of Willendorf, which dates to more than 24 , 000

years ago. The Croatian Venus is a more slender and

abstract human figure than the zaftig woman of Wil-

lendorf. The geometric pattern on the bone is similar

to patterns found on other pieces of art from the

Epigravettian period, during which sea levels were approximately

400 feet lower than they are now. What is today the northern

Adriatic Sea was a broad plain that supported large herds of game

animals hunted by the people at Vlakno. Other than the Venus

pendant, however, no art produced by the Epigravettian people

has turned up. Some perforated deer teeth and seashells are the

only other symbolic artifacts found at the site.

—Zach Zorich

FROM THE TRENCHES

GODS OF THE GALILEE

THE VENUS OF VLAKNO

W

hile excavating three Byzantine churches in Galilee,

archaeologists from Kinneret College on the Sea of

Galilee uncovered seven intact mosaic inscriptions

that are beginning to fill in the story of small-village life in the

fifth century A.d. The inscriptions are in Greek,

and by virtue of mistakes in the language, Morde-

chai Aviam, who directs the project with historian

Jacob Ashkenazi, who read the inscriptions, believes

that the town and surrounding area was populated

during the Roman period by a local Semitic people

who were pagans. By the mid-fifth century, they had

converted to Christianity. One inscription, one of

the longest found to date in western Galilee, gives

the names of donors and the names and positions

of church officials, including Irenaeus, the bishop of

Tyre in 445. “The first importance of these mosaics

is that they give us good, dated inscriptions,” Aviam

says. They also connect this small, unknown village

to the larger Byzantine world.

Another mosaic mentions a woman named

Sausann (or Shoshana) as a donor to the church’s

construction. This inscription, the first in the

region to mention a female donor, “tells us that

even in the smallest villages in rural Galilee in the

Christian period, women supported ecclesiastical structures

and that there were women who had strong personal, social,

and financial positions,” says Aviam.

—Jarrett a. LobeLL

Sausann mosaic, Galilee, Israel

Donor inscription, Galilee, Israel

Venus figurine