Venus of Parabita
The larger Venus of Parabita is 90 mm high and 20 mm wide, and is made from a splinter of bone from an aurochs or horse. There are no features on the face, while the chin and neck is crossed by two parallel curved incisions, creating the impression of a collar or hood. From here the two sloping shoulders continue into arms, which become thinner, then thicker, and finally come together under a prominent abdomen, perhaps indicating pregnancy. The breasts and the pubis are clearly shown, as well as the buttocks. The thighs are only indicated by a shallow groove, and do not continue past the knees. A second venus is smaller, 61 mm high and 15 mm wide, and has different stylistic features. The head is rounded, with no indication of features, the neck is indicated by a groove. The shoulders are hardly indicated, but from them come two arms, thin at the top, widening into much larger hands clasped under the abdomen. The breasts are pendulous and oval, the abdomen is flat, the buttocks barely indicated.
Venus of Parabita.
89 mm high and 21 mm wide, the venus is made from a splinter of bone from an aurochs or horse. There are no features on the face, while the chin and neck is crossed by two parallel curved incisions, creating the impression of a collar or hood. From here the two sloping shoulders continue into arms, which become thinner, then thicker, and finally come together under a prominent abdomen, perhaps indicating pregnancy. The breasts and the pubis are clearly shown, as well as the buttocks. The thighs are only indicated by a shallow groove, and do not continue past the knees.
Age: ca 17 000 BP
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Facsimile in the Venusium, a museum at Willendorf in Austria.
Text above translated and adapted from: http://www.trovasalento.it/informazioni/le_grotte_del_salento/index.htm
Venus of Parabita.
Photo:Jelinek (1972)
Venus of Parabita.
Photo: http://www.nihilum.republika.pl/Str_Parabita.htm
Source: Facsimile, Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Taranto
Venus of Parabita.
Photo: © mharrsch
Source: Facsimile, San Diego Museum of Man
Another version of the first Parabita Venus.
Photo:Autori vari (1974)
A second venus is smaller, 61 mm high and 15 mm wide, and has different stylistic features. The head is rounded, with no indication of features, the neck is indicated by a groove. The shoulders are hardly indicated, but from them come two arms, thin at the top, widening into much larger hands clasped under the abdomen. The breasts are pendulous and oval, the abdomen is flat, the buttocks barely indicated. The buttocks terminate in a kind of hook, indicating that it may have been a pendant.
Photo:
(left) http://www.myspace.com/xgitano/photos/3364978#%7B%22ImageId%22%3A3364978%7D
(right) http://www.maglie.cchnet.it/galleria-di-immagini/schede/atoggettoarcheologico.2008-08-01.5518771845/?
Text above translated and adapted from: http://www.trovasalento.it/informazioni/le_grotte_del_salento/index.htm
Another version of the second Parabita Venus.
Photo:Autori vari (1974)
Located about 2 Km north-west of Parabita in the Tufara locality, topped by an olive grove is the 'Grotta delle Veneri', or Grotto of Venus. The cave, previously known as the 'Grotta Nicola Fazzu', was changed to Grotta delle Veneri after the discovery of two Palaeolithic female figurines made of bone.
The cavity, which extends for a length of over a hundred metres in the Cretaceous limestones of the Melissano formation, can be divided into two sectors: the cave-shelter outside, the result of the progressive retreat of the roof over time, which has created a roughly circular area, in which are evident the enormous masses of the collapse that sealed the rest of the prehistoric deposits, and the inside the cave, in turn divided into a central passage and two side passages to the north and west.
Text above translated and adapted from: http://www.trovasalento.it/informazioni/le_grotte_del_salento/index.htm
Grotta delle Veneri plan.
Photo: http://www.leveneridiparabita.it/lagrotta.htm
The first systematic archaeological investigation following the discovery of the venus made it possible to define the stratigraphic sequences of the cavity and the chronologies of the prehistoric use of the cave. A burial of a man and a woman, partially destroyed by neolithic digging which destroyed the upper limbs and skulls of the dead, was discovered by Professor Giuseppe Piscopo in 1965. However the burial retained a pebble and a piece of flint coloured with ochre, as well as 29 perforated deer canines.
More than 4000 artefacts of art on stone were recovered, as well as bone fragments. The stones were decorated with geometric patterns. The designs tend to cover all of at least one face of the stone, extending to the edges, as well as onto the opposite face, and traces of ochre are sometimes preserved in the grooves of the designs. The breakage of most of these artefacts could be intentional, related to ritual events.
More than 18 000 ceramic pieces from the Neolithic and early Bronze Age makes this one of the most important prehistoric sites of Puglia, the 'heel of the boot' of Italy.
Text above translated and adapted from: http://www.trovasalento.it/informazioni/le_grotte_del_salento/index.htm
References
- Jelinek J., 1972:Das grosse Bilderlexikon des Menschen in der Vorzeit, Gütersloh. Bertelsmann-Lexikon-Verlag, P. 333
- Autori vari, 1974:Popoli e civiltà dell'Italia antica, Vol. I di Antonio M. Radmilli, Roma 1974
Recent additions, changes and updates to Don's Maps This page last updated: Thursday, 11th Feb 2021 14:32If you have any information which would be useful for Don's Maps, or if you have questions or comments, please contact Don Hitchcock atdon@donsmaps.com
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Note, however, that the Ägyptischen Museum München and the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel permit photography of its exhibits for private, educational, scientific, non-commercial purposes. If you intend to use any photos from these sources for any commercial use, please contact the relevant museum and ask for permission.
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My background
Some people have expressed interest in knowing a little bit about me. For those people, here is a potted biography:
I live in New South Wales, Australia, and I am a retired high school mathematics/science teacher.
The Donsmaps site is totally independent of any other influence. I work on it for my own pleasure, and finance it myself. I started before there was an internet, when I thought I could do a better job of the small map on the end papers of Jean Auel's wonderful book, Valley of the Horses, by adding detail and contour lines, and making a larger version. I have always loved maps since I was a young boy.
I had just bought a black and white '
fat Mac' with a whopping 512 kB of memory (!), and no hard disk. With a program called '
Super Paint' and a lot of double work (hand tracing first the maps of Europe from atlases, then scanning the images on the tracing paper, then merging the scanned images together, then tracing these digital scans on the computer screen), I made my own black and white map.
Then the internet came along, the terms of my internet access gave me space for a small website, and Don's Maps started. I got much better computers and software over the years, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for example, and my maps became colourised and had more detail. I did a lot of maps of the
travels of Ayla from Jean Auel's books, and I gradually included other pages with more and more photos available from the web, and scanned from books or from scientific papers, since I was not happy with the quality generally available. I became very interested in the Venus figurines, and set out to make a
complete record of the ice age ones. Along the way I got interested in archaeology for its own sake.
In 2008 my wife and I went to Europe, and when we arrived in Frankfurt at sunrise after the 24 hour plane trip from Sydney, while my wife left on her own tour with her sister, they visited relatives in Germany and Austria, I went off by myself on the train to Paris. Later that afternoon I took a train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, found a hotel and caught up on lost sleep. The next morning I hired a car, and over the next four weeks visited and photographed many of the original archaeological sites in the south of France, as well as many archaeological museums. It was a wonderful experience.My wife and I met up again later in the Black Forest, and
cycled down the Danube from its source to Budapest, camping most of the way, a wonderful trip, collecting many photos, including a visit to
Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic, as well as visiting the Vienna natural history museum. Jean Auel fans will realise the significance of that trip!
Luckily I speak French, the trips to France would have been difficult or impossible otherwise. No one outside large cities speaks English (or they refuse to). I was travelling independently, not as part of a tour group. I never knew where I was going to be the next night, and I camped nearly everywhere, except for large cities. I am a very experienced bushwalker (hiker) and have the required equipment -
a one-man ultra lightweight tent, sleeping bag, stove, raincoat, and so on, all of which I make myself for use here when I go bushwalking, especially down the beautiful gorges east of Armidale, though for Europe I use a commercial two person lightweight tent, since weight is not so much of a problem when cycling or using a car, and in any case my wife was with me when cycling, once along the Donau from its source to Budapest in 2008, and again from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and then up the Rhine from Köln to the Black Forest in 2014, both of which were memorable and wonderful trips.
In 2012 we went to Canada for a wedding and to visit old friends, and I took the opportunity to visit the wonderful Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where I took many photographs of the items on exhibit, particularly of the superb display of artefacts of the
First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
In 2014 my wife and I did another European cycling tour, from
Amsterdam to Copenhagen, then from Cologne up the Rhine to the Black Forest, camping most of the way in each case, and taking many useful photos in museums along the way, including the museums at Leiden, Netherlands, and
Roskilde in Denmark, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Again, I later hired a car and did more photography and visited many more sites in France.
In 2015 I made a lone visit to all the major museums in western Europe by public transport, mostly by train, and that went very well. I had learned a lot of German while travelling with my wife, who is a fluent speaker of the language, and of all the European countries, Germany is my favourite. I feel comfortable there. I love the people, the food, and the beer. Germans are gemütlich, I have many friends there now.
I repeated the visit to western Europe in 2018, to fill in some gaps of museums I had not visited the first time, because they were either closed for renovation the first time (such as the Musée de l'Homme in Paris) or because I ran out of time, or because I wanted to fill in some gaps from major museums such as the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, München, the Louvre, the Petrie and Natural History Museums in London, the Vienna Natural History Museum, the important museum in Brno, and museums in northern Germany. It takes at least two visits, preferably three, to thoroughly explore the items on display in a major museum.
I spend a lot of time on the site, typically at least a few hours a day, often more. I do a lot of translation of original papers not available in English, a time consuming but I believe a valuable task. People and fate have been very generous to me, and it is good to give back a very small part of what I have been given. With the help of online translation apps and use of online dictionaries there are few languages I cannot translate, though I find Czech a challenge!
Life has been kind to me, I want for nothing, and am in good health. Not many in the world are as lucky as I am, and I am grateful for my good fortune.
My best wishes to all who read and enjoy the pages of my site.
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And may rain on a tin roof lull you to sleep at night.
Webmaster: Don HitchcockEmail:don@donsmaps.com
Website last updated Monday 10 March 2025
