Venus of Brassempouy

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Head of Venus de Brassempouy

The little head of Venus von Brassempouy (French: also La "Dame à la capuche" ) is just 3.65 cm high and is a fragment of an ivory statuette ( Venus figurine ) from the Upper Paleolithic . It was found in 1894 together with eight other statuettes in the “Grotte du Pape” cave near Brassempouy in France. This is the oldest known, more precisely executed representation of a human face and comes from Gravettian (presumed age: 21,000–26,000 years, estimates differ). Other figures from this period, also known as Venus , do not have such detailed facial features.

Find history

Brassempouy is located in the Landes department in south-west France. The "Grotte du Pape" was discovered there in 1880 during road construction work. It consists of two rooms, the one on the left is called the “Grande Galérie” and the one on the right is called the “Galérie des Puits”.

The Comte de Poudenx, who owned the cave, commissioned and financed the first excavation carried out by PE Dubalen in 1880. In 1881, Édouard Piette (1827–1906) first visited the site. In the same year, PE Dubalen published the findings of the first excavation, which had mainly produced objects from the Magdalenian period from the upper layers. In 1891 and 1892 the investigations by Joseph de la Porterie and AL Dufour were resumed.

In 1892, Édouard Piette brokered the site on request to the "Association française pour l'avancement des sciences" (AFAS), which wanted to conduct an excursion there on September 19, 1892. On September 15, 1892, workers began digging up the site to prepare it for the excursion. They dug unsupervised for two days. The objects discovered were collected in order to later show them to the participants of the excursion. On the day of the excursion, the 40 participants chose a place inside and outside the cave and began to dig there, convinced that they could keep whatever they found. Three ivory fragments were found: "l'Ebauche", "le Fragment" and "le bouchon à outre". Later, the fragment called "la Poire" became known, the circumstances of which have not been precisely clarified. The stratigraphy and exact locations are not known.

Professional excavations were carried out between 1894 and 1897 by Édouard Piette and Joseph de la Porterie. They examined and excavated both rooms of the cave. In 1894 the "lady à la capuche" was discovered in a layer that is now ascribed to Gravettia. The chronology of the layers, initially hypothesized by Piette, was later revised by Henri Breuil . Henri Delporte checked Piette's information and re-determined the stratigraphy in the cave in the years 1981-2000. Since then, the figurine has been counted as a Gravettian and therefore more than 21,000 years old.

From March 2010, the find was on display in a separate temporary exhibition in the Brassempouy Museum together with other prominent representatives of their genre, such as the Venus of Willendorf , the Venus of Malta and the Venus of Grimaldi . For conservation reasons, the fragment is normally kept in the depot at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye .

reception

  • The Venus of Brassempouy was chosen in 1976 for the motif of a 2-franc postage stamp and was used as a motif for a 15-franc stamp from Mali .
  • The Lady von Brassempouy is a subject matter in the novel Daughter of Fire by Barbara von Bellingen . ISBN 3499154781 , ISBN 3547712912 .

See also

literature

  • Edouard Piette, Joseph de Laporterie: Les fouilles de Brassempouy en 1894. In: Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris . IV. Series, Vol. 5, 1894, pp. 633-648, ( doi : 10.3406 / bmsap.1894.5558 ).
  • Randall White: The women of Brassempouy. A century of research and interpretation. In: Journal of archaeological method and theory. Vol. 13, No. 4, New York 2006, ISSN  1072-5369 , pp. 251ff, 257ff, 264.
  • Henri Delporte: Brassempouy - la grotte du Pape, station préhistorique. Association culturelle de Contis, Contis 1980.
  • Henri Delporte: L'image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique. Edition Picard, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-7084-0440-7 .
  • Claudine Cohen: La femme des origines - images de la femme dans la préhistoire occidentale. Belin-Herscher, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-7335-0336-7 .

Web links

Commons : Venus de Brassempouy  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 43 ° 38 ′ 2.2 "  N , 0 ° 41 ′ 39.2"  W.