The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory

by Jake Page, J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer

Book Overview

Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. In fact, recent research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality. The field of archaeology has changed dramatically in the past two decades, as women have challenged their male colleagues' exclusive focus on hard artifacts such as spear points...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061170917
• ISBN13: 9780061170911
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Smithsonian Books (DC)
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Pre-historic Women: Coming out of the Darkness

I am impressed by the work of J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page in their innovative investigation of the work of pre-historic women. While they don't always agree with one another, the authors are always cordial and witty. The result is a book that tells a lot about women in prehistoric times, and a bit about the collaborative process of writing THE INVISIBLE SEX: UNCOVERING THE TRUE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PREHISTORY. The study is published by Smithsonian Books, under the aegis of Harper Collins, 2007. Growing and preparing food, working with fibers to create cord, birthing babies, honoring higher powers by carving goddess figures, fashioning tools: all these important aspects of communal life, as it was lived by women in collaboration with men, have been scientifically investigated and cleverly written, sometimes in story form, always in an engaging narrative style. Two of the authors are scientists, and one a journalist. It is a dynamic combination, and their book a fascinating read.

Very interesting and readable with some avoidable sexism

J.M. Adovasio is an archaeologist. Olga Soffer is an anthropologist, and Jake Page is a science writer. They have put together in "The Invisible Sex" a book that attempts to (1) Bring the general reader up to date on the latest developments in archaeology or paleo-anthropology; (2) Uncover the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (as in the subtitle); and (3) Provide a corrective to a male-dominated view of the prehistory. The main image they want to correct is that of the great male hunter bravely slaying mastodons and in general bringing home the bacon to an adoring and appreciative family or band. What the authors want readers to see is that women weren't just tag-alongs on the way to our becoming fully modern humans, but at least equal partners. The authors refer to nets, threads, garments, basket weaving, cordage, digging sticks, the famous "Venus" statuettes, and other cultural artifacts to demonstrate the enormous role that women played culturally. They speculate that women invented farming, that they too engaged in the hunt, as well as producing works of art as important as the famous cave paintings. The main method used by the authors is to infer the past from a study of recent hunter-gatherer societies while comparing ancient artifacts with more recent ones. This method certainly ought to provide insight into human life in prehistory, but of course there are some problems. The main one I think is that the "primitive" societies extant today or in the near past are not necessarily typical of those that existed in prehistory because today's tribes occupy marginal lands since the best lands have long been given over to modern societies. Personally, I never had any doubt about the significant role females played in the history of the species. Indeed, my feeling has always been that women are the default human being, and men an appendage, a necessary evil if you will. (Ha!) I don't think we need to study archaeology to understand that the central role in human culture is and was occupied by women. There is a sense of pandering and begging the question in the way the authors insist on the obvious. I think it stems from the fact that women in some of the sciences have and still do feel like second class citizens. But that is changing. As the authors point out, most anthropologists today are women. The old male-delusional interpretations of culture in paleo-societies or in modern gatherer-hunter societies are a thing of the past. Instead we are in danger of having female-delusional interpretations. Here are a couple of examples of "reverse" sexism in the text: From page 209: The authors imagine that "Aboriginal men" may have sniffed "contemptuously at the shell hooks and...strings that their women were using, making invidious comparisons of those little toys...with their mighty, multipointed, barbed, aerodynamic spears and other large instruments." Actually the men may have looked admiringly at such tools since such tools i

An Important Challenge to Many Assumptions About Our Origins

This is a stimulating and intriguing book and before I get into the review proper, I would like to include you in a discussion that is, I believe, very important for appreciating it. We have had a great many conferences about the origins of society with experts in many fields. Most believe that civilization develops as a kind of protection against chaos and fear. Therefore it is hard to believe that societies could have developed and prospered without leaving much in the way of artifacts. So in that view, history and pre-history are mapped by the weapons, forts, castles, cities and statues that have survived the centuries. My counter to that is to ask whether societies could have developed not as a response to fear, but out of cooperation: people working with the world around them, rather than being scared of it. After all, people right now are suggesting that we should leave less of a footprint in the world. So surely it is conceivable that highly advanced civilizations could have arisen in the past, but history fails to remember them because they did not leave monuments to their own glory. It reminds me of the comment in Chapter 23 of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons." This issue is at the center of this intriguing new book. James Adovasio is the founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania, Olga Soffer is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and Jake Page is a distinguished science writer. They begin by challenging the whole field of archaeology for its focus on hard artifacts such as stone tools and, they claim, systematically ignoring more perishable artifacts such as fishing lines, nets and string. They argue that around 26,000 years ago, somewhere in central Eurasia, a quiet but far-reaching innovation was born, that is often called the String Revolution, but which they rename the "fiber revolution." They point to arts of the world where dry caves have preserved these perishable artifacts, and then fiber and wood products can account for 95% of all the artifacts recovered. The book is broken into three parts and thirteen chapters, and it is worth mention some of the chapter titles because they give a clear flavor of the engaging way in which the book is written: Part One: The Beginnings 1. The stories we have been told 2. Origins 3. The importance of being upright 4. Who brought home the bacon? 5. Gray matter and language Part Two: The Road to Thoroughly Modern Millie 6. Leaving the African cradle 7. Almost altogether truly modern humans 8. The fashioning of women Part Three: Peopling the World 9. Cake

J. M. Adavasio and Jake Page Ride Again

J. M. Adavasio is an archeologist with the firm belief -- and research to prove it -- that people were on the American Continent far earlier than the 10,000 years that is "Gospel." Jake Page writes of Indian lore, flora and fauna, and mystery novels centered in the American West with equal verve. Here they discuss women's roles in developing tribes marvelously. Read this, and note the bibliography, and then seek out each's other works. You'll be richer for it.