The Goddess Diffracted: Thinking about the Figurines of Early Villages1

Small ceramic figurines representing predominantly human females are characteristic artifacts of many of the world’s earliest settled villages. A long‐standing interpretive tradition links these to “fertility cults” or “mother goddesses,” but recent feminist scholarship suggests that such interpretations simply perpetuate our own society’s preconceptions about gender, nature, and culture. Such critiques have stimulated a burgeoning literature on figurine traditions in early villages, with an emphasis on diversity in styles, representations, and meanings. But because general frameworks for interpreting figurines have been torn down, we lack analytical approaches for understanding the similarities between different cases or even evaluating different interpretations. This paper describes a new framework for comparative analysis in figurine studies and explores the question why figurines in the Neolithic Near East and Formative Mesoamerica seem to have been predominantly female.