 In this brief study, this case study, we're going to look at a very famous paleolithic sculpture called The Woman from Villendorf. And what you see here is an excavation photograph. She was found purely by accident by railroad workers in Austria, in Villendorf, Austria, as they were building a new railway line. And the man who found the figure is the one in white, as I understand it, standing toward the center of the image. And this is a particularly interesting figure that if you take any sort of survey of art history, you will encounter her without a doubt. Here are two views of The Woman from Villendorf. She stands just a little over four inches high, and she was made out of limestone. You might notice that she has no visible facial features, and very little in the way of arms or hands. There are actually hands, but it looks like sort of a ridge at the top of each one of her breasts is actually an arm with a hand, but there's not a whole lot of detail given to the fingers. The major interest here is in her obese belly, her large bulging breasts, and she also has a very exaggerated sexual area with a pelvic triangle and pudenda. And you might notice that she's obese overall. She has kind of a basket-like thing on her head, and some people have argued that this is cornrows, other people have argued that this is a hat, and there are a number of really interesting arguments that would be covered in detail in another type of art history course. What we're going to be concentrating on, though, is the fact that she was made of limestone. She has reddish stains on her because she was covered in red ochre at one point, and we'll be learning about ochre later on in the course, but we'll talk about the limestone. When archaeologists and geologists studied the woman from Villendorf, they realized that she was not from Villendorf at all. Rather, that she was made out of a limestone that came from Berno, or Brun, which is 136 kilometers away. And to further complicate things, and I'm showing you the map and then a rock outcropping of that same sort of limestone, the tools that were found in digs accompanying the woman from Villendorf, those were Nordic flint that came from about the same distance away again, so another 136 kilometers away. So we have a tremendous distance that this tiny four to four and a half inch figure would have traveled. And so we know that she must have been important, but of course, what's so difficult about looking at prehistoric works of art is that we have no written record to tell us what these people were thinking and why they did what they did. When the woman from Villendorf was first discovered, she was jokingly called a Venus figurine. And this was kind of a 19th century sort of snide way of looking at this obese figure and comparing her to the Venus figures of Roman and Greek art, of course in Greek art it's Aphrodite. But this notion that she should be seen as a goddess of love is a response to her exaggerated sexual organs, to her nudity, and also, like I said, kind of a nasty dig at her that she doesn't look the part of a present day Venus. But there might be a little bit of something to this. The exaggeration of all of these sexual organs and these areas associated with child bearing and child rearing could be references to fertility. And it's very possible that this Venus also represented a sort of ideal in the Paleolithic world because, of course, remember that Paleolithic peoples are hunter-gatherers. They don't have really permanent places to reside. They're following herds, they're gathering what food they're able to gather. And I would imagine that childbirth would be incredibly dangerous. I mean, even today at least 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, I think. There are dangers even with modern medicine in childbirth. And of course, infant mortality would be an issue. And so here we're seeing a figure that very well could be pregnant, certainly seems to show all the signs of a pregnancy or perhaps recently having given birth. And those would be desired qualities. Also her obesity represents abundance in a time of food insecurity for humankind. So there is something to that. I want to finish by coming back to that limestone. Part of the reason that that limestone is so very important for our understanding of this object is the fact that that limestone came from so far away. If this were merely a local material and this was a work that had been created and discarded in the same general area, it would still be important. But we wouldn't have that extra piece of significance. And we can't entirely tell what that means, that the people who made her chose to carry her for such a long distance. But clearly something about this figure was important. It's also possible that the material itself was considered important. And we may never know the answer to these questions, but here's an example of material having a crucial role to play in what we can understand about this very early work of art.