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