Venus figurines of Zaraysk

The Venus figurines from Zaraysk are two paleolithic sculptures of the female body.[1] They both consist of mammoth ivory. The age of these Venus figurines is about 20.000 to 14 000 years BC; they stem from the Gravettian. The statuettes were excavated in 2005 by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev. Finds from Zaraysk show features of both the Avdeevo culture and the Kostenki culture.

Venus figurine No. 1 from Zaraysk
Venus figurine No. 2 from Zaraysk

The sculptures are kept in the museum Saraiski Kreml near Moscow. The so-called figurine No. 1 is 16,6 cm high, shows a female body without a face. Presumably, the woman is depicted pregnant.[2] Figurine No. 2 is not finished and 7,4 cm high. Both figurines were found near each other and were covered with the scapula of a mammoth.[3] Both were bedded in fine sand, near the head was placed red ochre.[4]

The location of the excavation is near Zaraysk, a town in Russia in the Oblast Moscow, 162 Kilometer in the south east of Moscow at the Ossjotr.

See also

Literature
  • Amirkhanov H., Lev S., 2008: New finds of art objects from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Zaraysk, Russia, Antiquity 82 (318), p. 862–870
  • Cook, Jill 2013: Ice Age Art: the Arrival of the Modern Mind, London: British Museum Press. (p. 85 f., picture) ISBN 978-0-7141-2333-2

References
  1. Venus of Zaraysk / Зарайск Венера, part of the Kostenki-Willendorf culture
  2. Cook, Jill 2013. Ice Age Art: the Arrival of the Modern Mind; London: British Museum Press, p. 84.
  3. Cook, Jill 2013. Ice Age Art: the Arrival of the Modern Mind; London: British Museum Press, p. 84.
  4. Amirkhanov H., Lev S., 2008: New finds of art objects from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Zaraysk, Russia, Antiquity 82 (318), p. 865.
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