This little stone figurine, which would fit in the palm of your hand, is a not uncommon archaeological find throughout southeastern Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East, going way, way back in time.
Archaeology is meant to be a science. When an archaeologist makes a claim, he is supposed to have evidence for it–inscriptions, pictures, whatever.
These figurines have long been thought to represent fertility goddesses. But in this month’s issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (November-December 2018, Vol. 44, No. 6), we have one from Catalhoyuk, a site in central Turkey which is billed as one of the oldest cities in the world, dating back to some 8,000 years ago. It’s more of a town than a city, with houses all jumbled together, no streets, cryptic paintings on some of the walls, and dead people interred within the floors.
We know very little about the people who once lived here. We don’t know what language they spoke, what they called themselves, what sort of gods they worshipped, what other people called them–hardly anything at all, beyond the mere physical remains of the town. It’s really hard to find out much about any vanished culture when they’ve left behind no writing.
But that doesn’t stop some of today’s archaeologists from generating a new “theory” that the figures represent “older women who had achieved a special status within their egalitarian agricultural community–with fatness as a sign of prestige and special respected status due to age.”
Whoa! We do not know any such thing. This is PC-infected archaeologists sweeping along in their search for a lost feminist Golden Age. Which they seem to have their hearts set on discovering, no matter what.
Wishful thinking and political correctness has become part of the scientific method, these days.
For all we know, the people of Catalhoyuk might have lived under a tyrant who told them when to go to bed at night. Maybe what we’re looking at is a lost civilization that really sucked to live in. Why did they bury their dead under the living room floor? We simply don’t know.
Take your “science” with more than just one grain of salt.