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| A 20th century Antique beaded purse found in an Etsy shop. |
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Like many women, I find I have to steal time in order to create. I've stolen a lot of time in my day... but, despite my efforts to fashion a life around my creativity, I find that I continue to feel as if I am forced to steal time.
I stole time to write this post... have to steal more time to complete it. I am a woman. By a long-held tradition my time is not my own... especially if I chose to be a mother, a wife, or a caregiver... or a woman trying to survive. But, as life would have it, in some way all women are in danger of becoming sacrificial lambs.
But, maybe, not all.
Inset left is a blade fashioned from quartz crystal. Thousands of years ago it belonged to a woman we now refer to as the Ivory Lady. I wonder about her times. I wonder if her time was her own. It may have been.
And, so, sisters, with this tiny light in mind we'll tip our hats to our singular allotted day,
International Woman's Day... which, in terms of this foreword was yesterday. Oddly enough, during the past two days, the
Global Day of Unplugging took place. Talk about really bad timing... was the date chosen deliberately to undermine and inconvenience women?
In which case, I guess we may as well take a few days for ourselves. 3's the charm.
This post goes out to all the
archaeologists - especially the women - who made it possible or even feasible. As a little girl, I used to like to dig holes in the back yard when allowed. What was I digging for? I never really asked. Perhaps, I was looking for the vestiges of another little girl... who lived long ago... and made things.
(Make every day women's day.)
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Huge Collection of 270,000 Beads Unearthed in Copper Age Tomb in Spain
“Beads are a widespread and pervasive element of material culture produced by Homo sapiens, ”the study authors noted. “As excellent indicators of technology, social organization, exchange patterns, and even beliefs, beads are a topic of research in their own right.”
"Each was made by shaping a single seashell and boring a hole through its center. The huge number represents the largest single-burial assemblage of beads ever found in any grave site."
Buried in more than 270,000 beads, grave reveals women’s power 5,000 years ago
"The team found the majority of the beads in a large chamber of the Montelirio tomb, which held the remains of 20 people, including 15 women and five individuals whose sex wasn’t determined. A smaller chamber where two women were buried also contained beads.
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.. The researchers identified what they believe to be threaded beads that could have formed two full-body beaded tunics, skirts and other clothes or cloths of undetermined shape."“They would have been extremely glittery under the sunlight and that would have been a very powerful effect to see these women standing in front of a crowd performing whatever rituals they were in charge of performing.”
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Before the advent of the photographic image, artists and artisans provided visual documentation of their times. Regarding very ancient times such as the Copper Age, artifacts (and bones) are generally all that remain.
The featured artifact in this archaeological story is the humble bead; not one, but over 2 hundred thousand of them! Many of them were found draped over and around a group of 15 female skeletons in a prehistoric Spanish tomb - Tholos de Montelirio - near to that of the so-called Ivory Lady (who was originally determined to be male). Apparently, there are 5 additional bodies whose genders have yet to be determined because their bones were crushed.
But, while the beads and the majority of bones withstood the test of time, merely a few scraps of fabric were in evidence and while the beads are thought to have decorated clothing, there are few clues as to how the clothing was really fashioned... or what the beaded garments represented. What we can determine is that they were expensive and time consuming to create. And, by this, we can deduce that the entombed women were highly regarded; they were special in some way.
Many of the beads were created from scallop shells... which may have been devotionals for a marine goddess such as Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, or the moon goddess Innana to whom the hymn excerpt (below) was addressed.
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"The day is auspicious,
The priestess is clothed
in beautiful robes,
In womanly beauty,
As in the light of the rising moon."
- Via Enheduanna's Hymn to Innana (c. 2300 BC), reposted from an earlier Woman's Day article.
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And, there are some reasons to believe that the women were priestesses. For one, it would explain why they were all interred in one tomb, sporadically, over a period of years.
Then, too, we are given an interesting description of one of the bodies...
(Continued below the jump...)
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