The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a 3-meter-tall totem
pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian
museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border. As mysterious
as the huge stone figures of Easter Island, the Shigir Idol, as it is called,
is a landscape of uneasy spirits that baffles the modern onlooker.
اضافة اعلان
Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what’s
left of it, is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch. Scattered among
the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces,
each with slashes for eyes that peer not so benignly from the front and back
planes.
The topmost mouth, set in a head shaped like an inverted
teardrop, is wide open and slightly unnerving. “The face at the very top is not
a passive one,” said Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at
the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany. “Whether it
screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent
authority. It’s not immediately a friend of yours, much less an ancient friend
of yours.”
In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called “mobiliary
art.” With the miraculous exception of the Shigir Idol, no Stone Age wood
carvings survive. The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when
it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that
struck most scholars as fanciful. Skeptics argued that the statue’s complex
iconography was beyond the reach of the hunter-gatherer societies at the time;
unlike contemporaneous works from Europe and Asia featuring straightforward
depictions of animals and hunt scenes, the Shigir Idol is decorated with
symbols and abstractions.
In 2014, Terberger and a team of German and Russian scientists
tested samples from the idol’s core — uncontaminated by previous efforts to
conserve the wood — using accelerator mass spectrometry. The more advanced
technology yielded a remarkably early origin: roughly 11,600 years ago, a time
when Eurasia was still transitioning out of the last ice age. The statue was
more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by
many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art.
A new study that Terberger wrote with some of the same
colleagues in Quaternary International, further skews our understanding of
prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol by an
additional 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia.
“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when
early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial
Eurasia,” Terberger said. “The landscape changed, and the art — figurative
designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock — did,
too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging
environments they encountered.”
Written with an eye toward disentangling Western science from
colonialism, Terberger’s latest paper challenges the ethnocentric notion that
pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical
perceptions of the world, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming
communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago.
“Ever since the Victorian era, Western science has been a story
of superior European knowledge and the cognitively and behaviorally inferior ‘other,’
“ Terberger said. “The hunter-gatherers are regarded as inferior to early
agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the
archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and
neglected. For many of my colleagues, the Urals were a very terra incognita.”
The Shigir Idol, named for the bog near Kirovgrad in which it
was found, is presumed to have rested on a rock base for perhaps two or three
decades before toppling into a long-gone paleo-lake, where the peat’s
antimicrobial properties protected it like a time capsule. In the mid-19th
century, gold was discovered beneath the mire, and the landowner, Count Alexey
Stenbok-Fermor, hired laborers to mine the open-air site for ore. He instructed
them to save any other objects they unearthed.
Thirteen feet down the idol was discovered, and retrieved in 10
fragments. The pieces were carted 97km to Yekaterinburg, the city
where, 28 years later, the last czar of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas
II; his wife, Alexandra; and their children would be executed by the
Bolsheviks. In Yekaterinburg, the count’s donation was displayed with bone
arrowheads, slotted bone daggers, a polished elk antler and other ancient bog
finds at the Urals Natural Sciences Society, today known as the Sverdlovsk
Regional Museum of Local Lore.
The director of the museum allowed the railroad stationmaster,
Dmitry Lobanov, an aspiring archaeologist, to assemble the main fragments into
a 3-meter-tall figure with legs crossed tightly in a pose that potty-training
parents of any epoch might recognize.
“It was not a scientific construction,” said the archaeologist
Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a co-author of the new
study. The idol stayed locked in that uncomfortable position until 1914, when
archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev suggested incorporating the remnants into the
finished work — increasing its height to almost 6m. Much of the bottom
half later went missing; Tolmachev’s sketches of the section are all that
remain.
Svetlana Savchenko, the artifact’s curator and an author on the
study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information
about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth.
Although the monument is unique, Savchenko sees a resemblance to the stone
sculptures of what has long been considered the world’s oldest temple, Gobekli
Tepe, whose ruins are in present-day Turkey, some 2494km away. The
temple’s stones were carved around 11,000 years ago, which makes them 1,500
years younger than the Shigir Idol.
Marcel Niekus, an archaeologist with the Foundation for Stone
Age Research in the Netherlands, said that the updated, older age of the Shigir
Idol confirmed that it “represents a unique and unparalleled find in Europe.
One could wonder how many similar pieces have been lost over time due to poor
preservation conditions.”
The similarity of the geometric motifs to others across Europe
in that era, he added, “is evidence of long-distance contacts and a shared sign
language over vast areas. The sheer size of the idol also seems to indicate it
was meant as a marker in the landscape that was supposed to be seen by other
hunter-gatherer groups — perhaps marking the border of a territory, a warning
or welcoming sign.”
Zhilin has spent much of the last 12 years investigating other
peat bogs in the Urals. At one site he uncovered ample evidence of prehistoric
carpentry — woodworking tools and a massive pine plank, roughly 11,300 years
old, that he believes had been smoothed with an adze. “There are many more
unexplored bogs in the mountains,” Zhilin said. Unfortunately, there are no
ongoing excavations.
During a recent video conversation from his home in Moscow,
Zhilin asked his interviewer in the United States: “What do you think is the
hardest thing to find in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?”
A pause: Sites?
“No,” he said, sighing softly. “Funding.”
