What the Smallest Artifacts Reveal About the Ancient Cultures That Created Them

Around 27,000 years ago in current-day Czechia, give or take a few thousand years, a person took a handful of earth and sculpted a female figurine. They gave her big drooping breasts, a waist that narrows over a fleshy tummy: a soft-looking muffin-top with a deep belly button poked in its middle; there is a vertical line across her broad hips. Her head is small, simplified, pea-like; her shoulders are narrow with pronounced collarbones. Her arms finish at the elbow, her legs at the shins. She has a voluptuous heart-shaped ass, and her concave spine has dashes cut on either side. Above one of these dashes there is a partial fingerprint left by a child—perhaps her maker, perhaps not.

She is not without emotion. Her eyes are two straight slits like accents—acute and grave—or eyebrows on a person in despair. What’s not often visible in photos of her are the fine marks made by a tool dragged down her noseless and mouthless face, leaving faint lines like tear tracks. She is in two pieces, and has been varnished to protect her since she was excavated almost a century ago, meaning she looks shinier now than she ever would have when she was made. She is the oldest ceramic object that has ever been found, pre-dating the pottery found at the Xianren site by around 7,000 years.

She is called the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, named after the site where she was found. She may be a sculpture, an offering, a goddess, or a portrait, but she is not alone.

Other Venus figurines have been found from this period, the Gravettian industry (33,000–21,000 years ago), carved from mammoth ivory, bone and limestone. What’s unusual about the Venus of Dolní Věstonice is that it appears she was thrown into a fire while still damp. She was found in the ashes, broken into two pieces flung about 10 cm apart by the force of the explosion. Excavated along with her were more than 5,000 other ceramic artifacts, including miniature models of bears, lions and rhinos, as well as thousands of lumps of grey fired matter (but notably, no pottery or other vessels that have an obvious practical or domestic purpose) that represent the oldest known instance of humans making with clay.

For decades it was thought that she was made of clay mixed with bone ash for structure, but more recent analyses have confirmed she is largely made from local loess, a silt deposit that contains traces of clay and sand.

Some archaeologists speculate that she was thrown into the hearth with the express intention that she explode, perhaps as part of a ritual or ceremony. My experiment with the pinch pots and figurine in the log burner may have been an unwitting reenactment of this scene from 27,000 years ago. In what appears to have been a purpose-built kiln or hearth, she was baked at around 500–800 degrees Celsius, meaning that she survived through to being excavated on 13 July 1925 just south of Brno at Dolní Věstonice.

This is about all we can know about her. The silences around her form a cacophony of questions. Did she tell fortunes? Was she connected to sacred rituals around life, death, harvests or seasons? Did she signify health, was she the discarded work of an artist? Or just a sculptor who didn’t understand what would happen when wet clay met hot fire? Whoever formed her made creative decisions: they had to choose a tool to poke a belly button; they spent time on the perfect curve of an ass, but not on extending the arms into hands, or the legs into feet. These are acts of creative choice equal to brushes on canvas and chisels on stone.

Her modern honorific—as a Venus—is an archetype only a few thousand years old. The place she comes from—Czechia—has borders less than a century old. In the scope of her existence, the erection of Stonehenge and the birth of Jesus are recent events. Between us and her are tens of thousands of years, but how many people even saw her before she was unearthed nearly a century ago? In the time since she was made, much has changed, but what has not is the impulse to make images of ourselves.

Dwelling on her raises the question of how, when and why we began making self-portraits. Was ‘what shall I make?’ a question we asked as soon as questions could be asked? The puzzle turns in upon itself like the whorl of a seashell and she vibrates with the power of millennia: a woman formed from a lump of clayey loess. There is not much I can really know about her, but what I can know is tied up with her material presence: by what it was like to make her, and what it is like to hold a form like her in my hand. I need to make my own.

*

In the studio, I drop a fresh bag of clay on the desk with a slap. I peel back the plastic, plunge my hand into the cold reddish block and pull out a handful. I squeeze it to make a rough sausage. I pinch a head, shape stubby arms and draw the clay into a full bosom and the belly beneath. I add more clay, use my fingers to give her full breasts and push in her waist with a wooden tool; I pull and sweep my fingers over the clay to gift her a fat belly and big bum. I find that 27,000 years of human development has not made me a better sculptor than her maker.

I struggle to get her rear rotund enough; I notice how perfectly the tummy falls on the original Venus: the fat sits anatomically accurately, a tire bulging around the hips. I smooth and sculpt her elegant décolletage, poke a belly button and slits for eyes, and make shallow chevrons on her back. The surface of the clay begins to crack, so I dip a finger in water and run it over her curves. When I finish, I have an imitation: a pocket-sized model of a woman. She is not a girl: she has lived to our middle age at least; her body suggests the bearing of children. She is not starving: her muffin-top makes her look well nourished. She looks strong. I leave my fingerprint on her back, just as someone else did back in the Gravettian industry, and set her on the shelf to dry.

*

When I come back the next day and pick her up, she sits pleasingly in my palm. I am moved in a way I did not anticipate. I was interested in the process, but now I feel swamped by the emotional resonances of creating her. My hands have the same number of fingers and thumbs as her maker; I eat, sleep and breathe like they did. My motions and this material represent a connection of sorts, all the way back. My basic intent—to make a female form—is as present in me as it was with them, but between us are millennia, and the meaning of the Venus, the rituals she was part of, are wholly lost.

*

Female figurines, heads and other humanoid figures form a pantheon of ancient and prehistoric clay objects that proliferated in cultures and societies now extinct. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice is roughly contemporary with the Venus of Willendorf, carved from oolitic limestone and colored with red ochre. She is preceded by other Venuses, the oldest being the Hohle Fels figurine dated to 41,000 years ago, carved from mammoth ivory and covered in slashes and incisions. She is possessed of an impressive shelf-like bosom and a muscular back, and has a tiny head (which may be so she could be worn as jewelry). She is a proud and busty ur-Venus—pointed stubby legs, a deep gash carved between them, a huge bosom supported by her arms. She is not so rudimentary as to be expressionless, despite her tiny head and absence of a face. I see a figurine that is proud, joyful, lusty. Before her are even older, stranger, more uncertain Venuses—crude maybe-figurines that are not always even humanoid, like the Venus of Berekhat Ram or the Venus of Tan-Tan.

I first became interested in a different sort of clay figurine, from Mycenaean Greece. These simplified goddess figurines were painted in wavy lines of slip decoration, with headdresses, fluted skirts like serifs, and simplified faces with noses pinched by thumb and forefinger. They have tiny ball-shaped breasts pressed onto their chests, and arms that were sometimes hidden in gowns, or reached up to the sky in praise, or were folded in front of their bodies.

I had started to make copies of these figures when the idea for this book was still forming. I made multiples, because they were so numerous, forming their faces and skirts over and over again. I wanted to know not just what it was like to make one but what it was like to make lots of them; what I could learn from repetition. Now, a group of them line my mantelpiece and watch over me. I still make them and give them away to friends, one of whom has a toddler who swiped it as his favorite toy. They often come out of the kiln reminding me of someone, and I put them aside to pass on as familiars or protectors.

*

For many years the Mycenaean figurines were little studied: they were found in such great numbers they were not considered useful or interesting. They have been interpreted as votive offerings, possessed of divine power, as fertility talismans, or as representative of either the worshipper or a goddess. They were found in what appear to be both sacred and domestic settings: around burials and in shrines, but also in storage areas, used as bottle stoppers when they broke.

In the early 1940s, an archaeologist named Arne Furumark divided them into types using the Greek alphabet—Phi, Psi and Tau. The Phi goddesses are flat and round, arms apparently tucked under gowns; Psi have arms upstretched and open, the figures I make most often and what two friends call my ‘yea-sayers,’ since they seem to be saying yes to the world. Tau describes those standing in a T shape, their arms open in a warrior stance rather than cosmic affirmation.

They were first properly researched by an archaeologist and former director of the British School at Athens called Elizabeth French, who wrote the defining academic work on the subject; she is sometimes called the ‘grandmother’ of Mycenaean figurines. She drew up a typology of how the designs had changed over time, and placed them in an existing Mycenaean chronology, meaning that the figurines could be used for dating of archaeological sites.

Until French, figurines were used to inform what sort of site an archaeologist was looking at, but she inverted this and said that it was the site that was more likely to inform the purpose of the figurines—a shrine would suggest they had religious significance, a domestic house might suggest they were toys. I called French once to arrange an interview that never happened. She was elderly, surprised by my call, and denied she had done any important work on the figurines, telling me simply that “they were pieces of clay that you play with.”

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From Clay: A Human History by Jennifer Lucy Allan. Copyright © 2025. Available from Pegasus Books.