21.04.2010

World-historic defeat of women

Should the Neolithic be celebrated as a 'farming revolution'? Or mourned as a male-led counterrevolution against matrilineal communism? Lionel Sims wields the archaeological evidence against the archaeologists

Marxists are inclined to agree with Engels that humanity is a revolutionary species that emerges through egalitarianism. Engels labelled this early stage of human development ‘primitive communism’. We may want to argue about his use of the term ‘primitive’: modern anthropology might refer to egalitarian, matrilineal, matrilocal clans to define the social constructs from which we emerged.

However, we now live in a society which is totally rotten, corrupt, stratified and crippled by war and pestilence, as we all know. So, if you see humanity as a revolutionary species, the transition between where we began and where we are now can clearly be deemed a counterrevolution. But the question is, when and how did it begin? Or, to put it more bluntly, as Marx did - when did all the old crap begin?

When you listen to debates on the left, overwhelmingly the discussion focuses on how capitalism is to blame, or how colonial penetration into pre-state societies led to the collapse of those roughly primitive communist societies. That is the way the debate goes. Particularly in the organisation I am a part of, the Socialist Workers Party. This approach is barren, as it leaves out all of what anthropology and archaeology have to say about what happened prior to capitalism. Clearly there was a counterrevolution long before.

On the left today we stay on safe ground. We talk about what we know and what we experience, and that is fair enough. But when it comes to a scholarly defence of Marxism, and perhaps a rehabilitation of Engels, it will not do. However, finding out what happened way back in the past involves hard work, especially as we have no written data relating to pre-history.

The archaeologists take a very different approach to that propounded by Engels. They say civilisation and culture began with agriculture. Just like most Marxists, they say that class, civilisation, mathematics, culture, writing, reading and much more all began with agriculture. In the words of one leading British archaeologist, “nothing much happened” before agriculture - implying that hunter-gatherers have no culture and no civilisation, and therefore hold little interest. Of course, for an archaeologist hunter-gatherers are not that interesting, because they leave little material culture under the ground to be dug up. But that is an argument that flows from their method: site excavation. Yet from an anthropological point of view hunter-gatherers are as cultured, as civilised, as human as we are today, if not more so.

So the archaeologists take pretty much the opposite view to Engels. He argued that the collapse of matrilineal clans represented the world-historic defeat of women. This was when cattle-owning, wealthy, authoritarian men took over, and from this initial dynamic of male oppression over women all subsequent stratification emerged. The destruction of women’s leadership role in the original matrilineal clans resulted in the proto-class relationship from which all subsequent types of oppression emerged. That was the way Engels argued it.

The left has never picked up on that argument in considerable detail, but for us in the Radical Anthropology Group this is a key issue - it tries to bring anthropology into Marxism in order to rearm the Marxist argument about where things went wrong. If we can work out where things went wrong we can learn about how things were before, and therefore how, as a species, we are capable of being egalitarian and democratic, as we once were. Therefore, we rearm ourselves by locating the counterrevolution as an historical moment, as the consequence of material and historical factors - not something innate in our being. This completely changes the argument.

Sex strike

The sex-strike theory, as outlined by Chris Knight and Camilla Power, can explain how we overthrew animality and established human culture. The sex-strike model is one of a lunar-scheduled, ritual system, in which dark moon is the trigger for women to seclude themselves, to be inviolate, and thereby to motivate men as husbands to remove themselves and prepare for a logistical big-game hunt in which they call upon their brothers. Therefore, men have two sides to them: husbands and brothers; as do women: wives and sisters. This sexual economic system rotates around a lunar cycle between dark moon, when ritual power is switched on, and full moon, when ritual power is switched off.

The optimum conditions for this model are mass, big-game plenty and it appears that the big-game animals died out about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Palaeolithic. It may have been earlier, but that is a rough estimate. So, the optimum conditions for sex strike theory collapsed around 10,000 years ago. There then followed a period known as the Mesolithic, when our ancestors continued to hunt, but in much smaller bands, as the game was smaller and less plentiful.

The Neolithic begins around 6,000 years ago in north-west Europe, and that is the moment archaeologists beat their drum and claim farming began. But this is not the case. In fact, the hunter-gatherers still carried on hunting, but they also herded cattle and occasionally planted crops. That is what is now being debated among British archaeologists - whether or not the term ‘farming revolution’ is appropriate, and if so what its properties are.

Whereas in the sex-strike model the cosmic calendar is the moon, the monument-building cultures of the Neolithic give symbolic significance to the sun. This provides an important clue as to how we can interpret the pre-history of north-western Europe.

A counterrevolution in pre-history, coming out of a previously egalitarian system, will not look like a modern counterrevolution in class societies. In the French revolution, for example, the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy - one ruling class replacing another - and this was a very sharp class conflict concentrated within a narrow historical period. By contrast, a counterrevolution against the egalitarianism of the collapsing big-game hunting societies of the Palaeolithic would have been incremental and very gradual, and it would not declare itself a counterrevolution until the very end of the sequence, clearly. So throughout the 4,000-5,000 years of the Mesolithic and the 3,000-4,000 years of the Neolithic we would predict that the counterrevolution would be building, gradually infiltrating different spheres of society, and in particular where oppressive gender relations are being introduced.

Lunar and solar

Paradoxically, Stonehenge was designed so that when looked at from the Heel Stone it appears as a solid wall of stone apart from two gaps - one at the top and one at the bottom. It was designed specifically so all the gaps were filled except those two. The lower gap is exactly aligned with winter solstice sunset, and the upper gap with what is called the southern minor standstill moonset. Therefore there is an alignment of identity, with the sun below and the moon above, and it so happens that when they are both in their ‘windows’, the moon is dark. Therefore Stonehenge is designed to synchronise winter solstice sunsets with dark moon once every 19 years - when southern minor standstill moonsets occur.

It so happens that the lunar disc is half a degree in diameter, as is the solar disc. The original Palaeolithic lunar template is synchronised around dark moon. If you want to have a male usurpation of female power, what do you do? Have light rather than darkness. You can pretend you are still respecting the moon, whilst simultaneously displacing it by linking it to the sun. If there is also a need to cut down the monthly ritual seclusion of women, what do you do? Have it twice a year at the solstices. Why then? Because lunar standstills were discovered, almost certainly in the Orkneys and/or Ireland, when the phases of the moon could be synchronised to the solstice suns.

It was an amazing discovery that we still have difficulty in understanding because of our different thought process. We think about spheres in space. But they thought in terms of horizon astronomy, and worked out that twice every 19 years the dark moon would exactly coincide with winter and summer solstice. Thus Stonehenge and all other monuments in north-west Europe during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age were built to take advantage of the coincidence.

Even more amazingly, this astonishing discovery of archaeoastronomy was made by a man called Clive Ruggles, who hates his own data and discourages extensive discussion of the moon. We have arrived at a position where we on the left can take these arguments and use them to point to the power of Engels’ theory of primitive communism and the counterrevolution, but the people who actually made this discovery cannot handle its magnitude. They do not want to discuss them at their conferences.

Silbury Hill is the largest man-made structure in European pre-history, located in Avebury, Wiltshire. It is a truncated pyramid of chalk and stone, and from the Avebury circle it appears as a cropped little rise just peering over the horizon of the adjacent Wadden Hill - of course, the view would have been of pure white chalk. My argument is that Avebury circle is specifically designed for a ritual to be run at winter solstice sunset. Both this and Stonehenge exemplify the monument-building cultures of the Neolithic.

Gender of power

But remember what Engels said. The counterrevolution began with gender oppression. So how does this discussion of the sun and moon get us close to Engels’ point?

First of all, we must take a step back. Camilla Power has developed out of sex-strike theory something called the ‘gender of power’ model. This model is very good, and gives us a completely different way of understanding gender. She followed through the consequences of Palaeolithic women rejecting men’s approaches for sex, which would have been a problem in all pre-cultural situations. She asked how the animal mate-recognition system works, and posited that it works by animals signalling to each other that they are of the right species and the right sex, and that this is the right time for intercourse. These are the three channels for the animal mate-recognition system.

Therefore, at the most minimal the signal given by primordial women, bonded together in coalitions to reject the advances of men for intercourse, is (without assuming language): I am the wrong species, I am the wrong sex, and this is the wrong time. Symbolically this could be represented by horns, suggesting animality, or a zebra penis strapped around the waist, and by covering oneself in blood, suggesting it is not the right time to be making sexual advances. The model argues that there is a power mode to enter, and this applies to men as well. In their role as brother, men would also have colluded with their sisters in the masquerade, where they would have expressed that they are not in heterosexual mode. This is the sacred way to portray oneself as untouchable by marital expectations. This is the way to seclude oneself.

We still do this today and we call it carnival. There is nothing so boring as to attend carnival with your marital partner. Carnival is the time when we divest ourselves of marital obligations, we engage in merging ourselves with the collective; and there is nothing as playful as crossing gender.

So we would predict that gender of power would be the medium through which women, in strong coalition with their brothers, would have colluded to establish themselves as powerful. If we are to talk of a counterrevolution, then we would predict that women’s role in the gender of power would have been diminished and men would have appropriated its signature as a way to usurp the power of women and monopolise it for themselves.

In matrilineal clans these rituals would be playful, as in carnivals. Moral men would have laughed and enjoyed the joke of women covered in blood and dancing as animals or as men, and joined in. That would have been how it was under an egalitarian system. If we switch to a counterrevolution, in which men are monopolising power, then it would be different. Women would be branded as polluted and excluded from the charade, and the men themselves would have taken over that charade, made themselves close to animal, and close to blood, in particular controlling the point at which blood would be spilled, and also closer to the opposite sex, despite the fact that they are monopolising power. These are the assumptions the gender-of-power model would make for a counterrevolution.

Notice the way I have phrased it. Under egalitarian conditions there is symmetry, where men as brothers would masquerade as women. Therefore we would expect to find equivalence in the archaeological record, where men and women are equally involved in this gender-of-power metamorphosis. This can be termed ‘symmetrical gender of power’.

However, in a counterrevolution we would predict the evidence would become skewed. Men would monopolise the ritual. Pollution concepts would marginalise women - under the ultimate threat of gang rape or death. Shaman priests would take over the role of managing and organising order. Men must be cultural heroes and carry the burden of organising the cosmos, as women cannot be trusted. Men would dominate public spaces, and take on animal characteristics. We would also predict that lunar logic would be appropriated and subsumed to the solar rhythms, and that there would be male cults of specialist knowledge - secret, inner knowledge, restricted to the men alone. The more that knowledge is an inversion and an appropriation of women’s knowledge, the better their ability to undermine primordial women’s power.

Neolithic

We can now test our thesis. Think of arguments advanced by some feminist archaeologists, that the Neolithic was a lovely, fluffy, egalitarian society, where everyone loved each other. If this was the case, we would predict that there would be a symmetrical gender of power, in which men and women would be equally marked, there would be some indication of women’s leadership role, there would be no human sacrifice (or at least we would be worried if we found evidence of it). There would be no monuments, as hunter-gatherers very rarely built monuments. Instead they enjoy themselves, tell stories and dance.

But there is clear evidence of numerous monuments built during the Neolithic. The more archaeologists dig, as they attempt to uncover evidence of farming, villages and houses (which they never find), the more they find evidence of monuments aligned with the sun and the moon. And they hate their own discoveries.

However, if we just predict this, we are not going to get at the details of a counterrevolution. I would predict that we would find asymmetry in the way gender-marking is made in the Neolithic, if men are displacing women as powerful elders within the monument-building cultures. In that case we need specific markers of gender in the Neolithic. But this is pre-history, so it is difficult.

For archaeologists the shapes of stones used in monuments are an indication of gender. The stones at West Kennet Avenue at Avebury, for example, have been classified as either lozenge or pillar stones, depending on their shape. The former denotes a female stone, the latter a male. There is a consensus amongst archaeologists on this. But these monuments were built in about 2,500 BC - the late Neolithic or the early Bronze Age. The monuments are located in a particularly unusual position, distributed across a landscape with hills all around them. Very different to the way we would think of displaying monuments, in a centrally organised fashion.

Here is a quote from Isabel Smith, the archaeologist who wrote up the results of the original excavating team working at what is known as the occupation site: “If the A and B stones in the circles and avenue do indeed represent male and female symbols, the implication must be that the monuments were dedicated to a fertility cult.”

If this is correct, then the gender-of-power theory is wrong, because it argues that a male pillar stone will be a little bit female, while the female lozenge stone will be a little bit male. But here we have stereotypically male and female stones representing a fertility cult. According to the gender-of-power theory, fertility comes, paradoxically, from mixing up your gender, not from being female or male. Only when you are sacred and powerful are you the source of fertility. This occurs when women masquerade as men, and men as women - quite the opposite of what we predict in our culture. So, if the archaeologists are right, then Camilla Power’s theory is wrong.

Now let us assess the occupation site in greater detail. What do the holes within it actually contain? In other such sites debris from an occupation has been found. But these holes contain nothing of the sort. Instead they contain exotic stones, very special, unusual tools, and animal and human remains. All this is atypical of occupation debris.

Julian Thomas conducted an extensive study of these Neolithic holes. He claims they have nothing to do with occupation debris. Instead he posits that they are ritual deposits representing a complex syntax designed to relay some sort of message. When we do find holes which were storage pits, or occupation debris, they look quite different from these, so the holes in the occupation area cannot be used as evidence to support the claim that it is an occupation area.

In the middle of the occupation area is stone position 30b. Protestant bigots smashed up most of the Avebury monuments in the 18th century. When the monuments were excavated, remains of the stones that had been smashed up were found, along with the holes where the stones had been placed. Concrete markers were placed where stone pillars and lozenges had stood. The excavators believed position 30b must have contained a stone, as that was what the pattern dictated, but their excavations found no hole, no pit and no remains. Nevertheless, they were so convinced that there had to have been a stone pillar that they placed a marker there regardless.

As Smith states, “… the holes … cannot be interpreted as adjuncts of normal habitation. It is difficult to evade the conclusion that this site has a direct connection with the avenue and it is a coincidence worthy of remark that no evidence could be found for the existence of a stone opposite stone 30a ... the coincidence is a curious one.” So what is the point here? Essentially that the occupation area was not an occupation area. They have a marker at 30b where there was no stone.

Now we ask the question, what is the sequence of pillar and lozenge stones along the avenue? Until recently I had repeated the claim that all these stones are pillars and lozenges, that they are all opposite each other, and that they alternate all along the length of the avenue. But this is not actually the case.

I decided to assess the site in a way that was as generous as possible to the orthodox argument. I classified the stones according to whether they were pillars or lozenges, but pillar and lozenge stones are not opposite each other, nor do they alternate along the length of the avenue. In fact there are only four instances where that happens. There are also four instances where pillar is opposite pillar, and lozenge opposite lozenge. So you may just as well say that this set-up represents gay and lesbian bonding as conclude it is evidence of a heterosexual fertility cult. Heterosexual opposition is chosen because it is convenient to the modern arguments about the source of fertility. This is the logic of the archaeological theory, but there is no actual evidence for it.

In total there are 15 pillars and 11 lozenges, but instead of the 11 possible paired opposites, there are only four. So what is going on? It is not that they were short of stones. The fertility model simply does not work - the entire argument is flawed once it is assessed in detail.

Lunar rhythm

So let us rescue the gender-of-power model from the archaeological flame. We shall firstly assume the builders knew what they were doing: that they placed these stones in this formation for a reason. We shall also use a prediction from gender-of-power and sex-strike theory, and assume the missing stone at 30b is meant to be missing.

Would that be useful? Yes, it would, because 30b is the 29th-and-a-half pairing of stones from the Avebury Circle and 29.5 days is the average length of the lunar month. Now, if you recall, sex-strike theory predicts that ritual and economic cycles follow a lunar rhythm. It is a hypothesis, not proof, but it is interesting, as sex-strike theory is the only theory that would predict it.

So how can we test its accuracy? I am going to say something a little crazy now. Where there is no stone, that represents ritual power, compared to the stones which are stereotypically male and female. I will argue that they are weak and irrelevant, compared to where there is nothing, which is powerful. It seems a paradoxical argument to make, but it is the road I am going to go down, because sex-strike theory would predict this. The method is to stick with a theory that works, and make predictions in order to determine whether the oddest of hypotheses can have any basis at all.

Looking at the plan of the West Kennet Avenue so-called occupation area, you can see that the missing 30b is pretty much in the middle. Here there were two artificial pits dug, and 10 natural holes, each filled with a complex combination of materials - probably originally stored in bags and subsequently placed there. The holes were shallow - about two-and-a-half feet deep, three feet in diameter - and oval in shape. Round about position 30b the line of holes comes to an end - there is a shift from left to right if you are walking towards Avebury Circle, pivoted around position 30b.

Notice, there are 12 holes: 10 actual holes, two pits, and one place where a stone was not placed. Twelve plus one makes 13, and 13 is the number of full or dark moons in one year. Now you are going to say Lionel Sims has gone crazy - you can make numbers mean anything you like. Nevertheless, this is another interesting coincidence, because 29-and-a-half is the average length of the lunar month, and 13 the number of full or dark moons in one year. So now we have two numbers with lunar-solar properties.

What about the shift from left to right? In anthropology left versus right symbolises female versus male, and this symbolism is nearly universal in all of Earth’s cultures. Left becomes synonymous with being wretched and polluted, and right with being powerful and male. Now we are building up evidence which is leading us toward some sort of possible conclusion.

We must offer our gratitude to the archaeologists. They have done a lot of work. They dig in all weathers and write meticulous reports of their findings, which provides us with useful evidence. So we are able to enquire into the specifics of what their findings tell us about point 30b. Here there is a marked concentration of flint artefacts, in fact thousands of pieces of cut flint right next to 30b. Not only that: around position 32, and hole 10, we find the butt end of a polished stone axe, and at hole 7 we find the other piece of that same axe: the sharp bit. So therefore we have on the right, when walking toward the Avebury Circle, implements of cutting and death - knives, razor sharp flints and axes. When we switch over to position 29, we find a sacrificed man, and further down in most pits we find dismembered animal remains - products of blood and death, and all pivoting around 30b.

Other than that there are the oddest proportions of charcoal from wild plants and trees in these holes. The archaeologists did a brilliant job of working out the proportion of hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, oak and elm in each hole. From Celtic mythology we know certain trees carry certain meanings. And when we assess the archaeologists’ evidence about the proportions of each of these trees, we find a very specific pattern - particularly as to the proportions of hazel and hawthorn, but also in relation to the smaller amount of blackthorn, oak and elm that are organised in these holes.

We find that there is a sort of diacritical opposition, in which hazel is dominant in one and hawthorn is minor, and then, switching to the other side, hawthorn is dominant and hazel is minor. It is as though each are reflecting and opposing the other from the left and right sides of the avenue. The systematic properties of hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, elm and oak, in terms of their seasonality, seem to be referring to white and red, wet and dry, water and fire, death and rebirth, systematically organised as cyclical seasonal markers.

Therefore, when we add together all the themes - the flint, the bone remains, the charcoal - and assess what we have got, we see female versus male, moon versus sun. These are the themes that emerge from the material culture which is organised around and within the occupational area.

Now, remember, the stereotypical heterosexual model of fertility would predict that there would be the greatest ritual elaboration around the most fertile couple. For archaeologists this would be a male and female couple. From that assessment we would predict that the greatest ritual elaboration would be around stones 13, 14 and 15, not around 30b, which, as the missing stone, appears to be of no gender according to the archaeologists’ model.

If, however, position 30b is dark moon, because that is where blood is spilt, then positions 13, 14 and 15 represent full moon 15 or so days later. Therefore the archaeological model fits a full moon location, whereas 30b fits a dark moon location. Only if you accept the gender-of-power model can you come up with a worthwhile argument about 30b. Position 30b, where there is no stone, must be the place where blood was being spilt.

There are no artefacts whatsoever around stones 13, 14 and 15. No holes were dug around their base and there is no ritual elaboration. This gives us confidence that position 30b is ritually potent because it is the place that marks dark moon. And this is exactly what sex-strike theory would predict. Dark moon is the place where blood is spilt. In egalitarian, Palaeolithic, big-game-hunting societies, this blood would have been naturalised, menstrual and synchronous. This is playful blood. You do not have to do anything awful for that blood to emerge. On the contrary, it is the signal for sororal solidarity.

By contrast, in the Neolithic we have human sacrifice as a way to manufacture blood. We have, along the length of the avenue, at least five male sacrifices, mostly teenagers. But these are monuments of human sacrifice. So where there was no stone perhaps that is where someone stood and that is where their blood was spilt, before being processed and integrated into the holes along the avenue. And perhaps that is the reason why there was no stone placed at 30b.

I am trying to both confirm and test Camilla’s gender-of-power model. Where are the male burials along the left of the avenue placed? They are all placed on the north-east side of these stones, and are shaped, if anything, like lozenges - certainly not pillars. They are therefore female stones. The archaeological evidence shows that these male sacrifices were cut along the length of their long bones, meaning they would have bled profusely before they died. One of them even has a humerus rammed into his skull. It is not pretty. It is human sacrifice, where as much blood as possible is spilt.

Remember what the model predicts: ritual power is mobilised at the point at which blood is spilt. This is playful during the Palaeolithic, with the use of menstrual blood or red ochre. In the Neolithic it is sacrificed blood - animals or humans, or both. They are placed at the base of female stones - which also fits the theory - but now we have authoritarianism, perversity entering the equation. Boys are being sacrificed. And notice no women are here. In fact, throughout the Avebury monuments we have only one piece of evidence of a woman - a very short woman with a bent spine - being sacrificed. Among all the burials at Stonehenge and Avebury, victims are overwhelmingly male. Therefore, men are being symbolically and ritually marked in their death and are being associated with female stones.

This is exactly what the gender-of-power model would predict. That at the moment that blood is spilt there is a metamorphosis of gender. You are both male and female, then you are ritually powerful. But what is new is the perversity of human sacrifice and the authoritarianism of monument-building cultures.

Seven dimensions

Now to the conclusion. From the archaeology and archaeoastronomy, I have come up with seven dimensions to show that there is an asymmetric appropriation of the logic of gender of power, seven dimensions of counterrevolution, in which it is men that monopolise ritual in the Neolithic.

One, we have child sacrifice in the Neolithic. At Woodhenge, a three-year-old girl had her head cleaved in two by an axe blow. Fluffy ideas about the Neolithic just do not fit the evidence of child sacrifice.

Two, that the gender of power is monopolised by males. The evidence for that is clear, some of which I have discussed.

Three, that monumental architecture - masses of chalk and stone - is a signal to outsiders, a signal of strength and power, as well as a signal to insiders: follow this cult, follow this religion; look how big this monument is, look how small you are alongside it. It is a way to intimidate the people within your own group to make them loyal to this or that religion.

Four, there are overwhelmingly male burials - burials that are few in number, compared to the size of population necessary to build these monuments. Thus they are elite burials, and within these burial grounds are rich grave goods - gold, silver and other exotic stones.

Five, there is hardly any evidence for the burial of women - almost certainly they were cremated and their ashes dispersed in local rivers. That is the best explanation we have of how the bodies of non-elite men and most women were disposed of.

Six, lunar symbolism is attached to solar symbolism. The archaeoastronomy of West Kennet Avenue is overwhelmingly focused on winter solstice sunset, and on southern minor standstill moonset, which is another way of doing what happens at Stonehenge.

Seven, lunar standstills become secret, male cult knowledge, in which there is another version of the moon, now spread over the course of one year, and lunar phases coincide with solstice suns. Not only that, but the lunar phases go in reverse order to the way in which the lunar phases go in the sky. I have labelled this ‘asymmetric gender of power’, denoting the way in which elite males monopolise ritual in the late Neolithic.

The monuments are lying machines. They lie to outsiders and insiders about how the moon really works. They are fabrications, claiming the moon was appropriated through the male solstice rhythm, and not according to a naturalistic lunar rhythm that would coincide with the cycles within which we were born as a revolutionary species.