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The Emergency of Patriarchy?
Material Arts as Evidence
Who invented farming?
• Observations of plant behavior--recognition of young seedlings/seeds
• Over time--connections between rain and growth
• Awareness of where certain plants grew
• Worked out how to grow and tend crops
Why change?
• Easier access to tasty grains/reliable food supply (no need to carry food with them)
• Cereals only ripen once a year but seeds could be kept and eaten--storage? Accidental planting?
• Slow change to sedentism
• Increased population (Why?)
Evidence
• 20,000 BCE women had discovered food value of einkorn
• A single good strand could feed a family for a year• Grains had 50% more protein than wheat today• It easily plants itself--ancients could return to
same site each year• Eventually the small band might decide to stay
longer or not move at all
So Women had it easier now?
• Hunter/gather men hunted about 4 days a week and women spent 2.5 days gathering to feed family
• Rest of time was leisure (visiting, being, rituals, games, informal education/raising kids)
Eynan
• Three layers of 50 stone houses
• Small stone domes
• Storage pits
• Huts had hearths
• Child and infant burials
• A settled hunting/gathering band (huh??)
And with farming (horticulture initially and then agriculture)
• Women’s world-mark fields for planting-used fire hardened pointed digging sticks-harvest time--all including children bring in grain- children watched sheep/goats-but gathering continued--fruits/nuts-women did milking and cheese-making-children’s work increased (age 3 =chase birds away)
Horticulture---> agriculture
• Men would help to clear fields using slash/burn methods
• Women would tend fields, complete household chores and tend children
• And build stone/mud brick homes, make tools, containers (1st pottery around 8000)
Textile production
• Why would it be a women’s task?
-domestic spinning and fiber production could be done while children were underfoot (unlike plowing, hunting, sea fishing etc)
Evidence of Increased Distinction in Tasks
• Liulin site in China’s Yellow River Valley• Males were buried with stone adzes and
chisels• Women were buried with spinning whorlsIn Syria (Abu Harewa)--female skeletons had deformed toe bones
and powerful upper arms (not found in males)
Why would religion develop?
• In some societies, religion may have been an early form of social control--a way of encouraging certain standards of conduct as people learned to live together
• Viewed nature as imbued with supernatural powers
• Settled agriculturalists tended to emphasize the Female Principal of Life (Fertility)
--the earth as the womb out of which their crops grew/life depended on this rite
1. Venus of Willendorf2. Catalhayuk--Great Mother Goddess
3. Mother Goddess with Child, Uttar Pradesh, Gupta period, 575-625