Dolni Vestonice

"Where the two rivers came together and the wet ground sustained the tender grasses of spring, the woolly mammoth...grazed, and the people...hunted and lived on the swamp." -James Shreeve

Dolni Vestonice was an Upper Paleolithic habitation in Czechoslovakia on a swamp at the joint of two rivers near the Moravian mountains. In the spring of 1986, near the village of Dolni Vestonice, the remains of three teenagers were discovered in a common grave. Approximatley 27,640 years had passed from the time of the burial until they were found. Two of the skeletons were heavily built males while the third was judged to be a female based on its slender proportions. Archaeologists who examined her skeletal remains found evidence of a stroke or other illness which left her painfully crippled and her face deformed. The two males had died healthy, but remains of a thick wooden pole thrust through the hip of one of them suggests that the death didn’t happen naturally. On the ground surrounding the burial site, red ocher powder was splashed, which was thought to be for protection.

Dolni Vestonice is also the site of the earliest known potter’s kiln. For acres around, the fertile clay soil is seeded with carved and molded images of animals, women, strange engravings, personal ornaments, and decorated graves. In the main hut, where the people ate and slept, two items were found: a goddess figurine made of fired clay and a small and cautiously carved portrait made from mammoth ivory of a woman whose face was drooped on one side.

The goddess figurine is the oldest known baked clay figurine. On top of its head are holes which may have held grasses or herbs. The potter scratched two slits that stretched from the eyes to the chest which were thought to be the life-giving tears of the mother goddess.

Above the encampment in a small, dry-hut, whose door faced towards the east, was the kiln. Scattered around the oven were many fragments of fired clay. Remains of clay animals, some stabbed as if hunted, and other pieces of blackened pottery still bear the fingerprints of the potter.

Sources

The Neanderthal Enigma by: James Shreeve (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1995)

Aunt Molly’s Bead Street, "The Goddess of Dolni Vestonice" <http://www.flash.net/~mjtafoya/projects/goddess/dolni.htm>

Plains of Passage "Did you know the S'Armunai lived in Dolní Vestonice (Moravia) in the Czech Republic?" <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6293/series/bk4moravia.htm>

Chad Bisek