托福托福【阶段测试-5】-2017服务一体化阅读人类学 New Women of the Ice Age 题目解析【小站备考】

The status of women in a society depends in large measure on their role in the economy. The reinterpretation of the Paleolithic past centers on new views of the role of women in the food-foraging economy. Amassing critical and previously overlooked evidence from Dolni Vestonice and the neighboring site of Pavlov, researchers Olga Softer, James Adovasio, and David Hyland now propose that human survival there had little to do with men hurling spears at big-game animals. Instead, observes Softer, one of the world’s leading authorities on Ice Age hunters and gatherers and an archeologist at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, itdepended largely on women, plants, and a technique of hunting previously invisible in the archeological evidence—net hunting. “This is not the image we've always had of Upper Paleolithic macho guys out killing animals up close and personal,” Softer explains. “Net hunting is communal, and it involves the labor of children and women. And this has lots of implications."

Many of these implications make her conservative colleagues cringe because they raise serious questions about the focus of previous studies. European archeologists have long concentrated on analyzing broken stone tools and butchered big-game bones, the most plentiful and best preserved relics of the Upper Paleolithic era (which stretched from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago). From these analyses, researchers have developed theories about how these societies once hunted and gathered food. Most researchers ruled out the possibility of women hunters for biological reasons. Adult females, they reasoned, had to devote themselves to breast-feeding and tending infants. “Human babies have always been immature and dependent,” says Softer. “If women are the people who are always involved with biological reproduction and the rearing of the young, then that is going to constrain their behavior. They have to provision that child. For fathers, provisioning is optional.”

To test theories about Upper Paleolithic life, researchers looked to ethnography, the scientific description of modern and historical cultural groups. While the lives of modern hunters do not exactly duplicate those of ancient hunters, they supply valuable clues to universal human behavior. In many historical societies, Soffer observes, women played a key part in net hunting, since the technique did not call for brute strength nor did it place young mothers in physical peril. Among Australian aborigines, for example. Women as well as men knotted the mesh, laboring for as much as two or three years on a fine net. Among Native American groups, they helped lay out their handiwork on poles across a valley floor. Then the entire camp joined forces as beaters. Fanning out across the valley, men, women, and children alike shouted and screamed, flushing out game and driving it in the direction of the net. “Everybody and their mother could participate,” says Soffer. “Some people were beating, others were screaming or holding the net. And once you got the net on these animals, they were immobilized. You didn’t need brute force. You could club them, hit them any old way.”

People seldom returned home empty-handed. Researchers living among the net hunting Mbuti in the forests of the Congo report that they capture game every time they lay out their woven traps, scooping up 50 percent of the animals encountered. “Nets are a far more valued item in their panoply of food- producing things than bows and arrows are,” says Adovasio. So lethal are these traps that the Mbuti generally rack up more meat than they can consume, trading the surplus with neighbors. Other net hunters traditionally smoked or dried their catch and stored it for leaner times.

Soffer doubts that the inhabitants of Dolnf Vestonice and Pavlov were the only net makers in Ice Age Europe. Camps stretching from Germany to Russia are littered with a notable abundance of small-game bones, from hares to birds like ptarmigan. And at least some of their inhabitants whittled bone tools that look much like the awls and net spacers favored by historical net makers.

Although the full range of their activities is unlikely ever to be known for certain, there is good reason to believe that Ice Age women played a host of powerful roles. And the research that suggests those roles is rapidly changing our mental images of the past. For Soffer and others, these are exciting times.

托福托福【阶段测试-5】-2017服务一体化阅读人类学 New Women of the Ice Age 题目解析

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