The Forum

Do Archaeologists Own the Past?

As a loyal subscriber to Archaeology Odyssey, I write to protest the catty, gratuitous remarks made about me by David Soren in “TV Archaeology” (September/October 2004).

Professor Soren impugns my right to discuss “Stone Age mother-goddesses ... pyramid-builders, Greeks and Romans” because I am “hardly an expert in all these areas.” I had no idea that there was an Olympian professional elite who own these aspects of the history of humanity and who alone have the authority to speak about them to the general public.

The reason TV crews and journalists have asked to interview me about these and other matters is that I wrote about them in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990). The material in that book was fully vetted by outside scholars, including the chairman of the classics department at Yale University.

The principal thesis of Sexual Personae is that the Western tradition is driven by dynamic principles rooted in Egypt (to which I trace “the birth of the Western eye”) and in Greece, whose Apollonian and Dionysian polarities play out again in Renaissance art, High and Late Romanticism, and modern popular culture (the pagan “Age of Hollywood”). My analysis of the Stone Age statuette of the Venus of Willendorf, which I contrast with the bust of Nefertiti, plays a central role in the book.