Mesolithic Dildosity: Ancient 'Sex Toy' found in Sweden

Last month excavations at the Mesolithic site of Motala in Östergötland, Sweden, turned up this, ah, stimulating artifact made of antler bone:

Swedish National Heritage Board

Martin Rundqvist at ScienceBlogs describes the dig:

Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended.

The articles note that relatively few phalluses are known from the stone age (mesolithic, neolithic) compared to the number of artifacts showing voluptuous female forms. Of course, if phalluses were usually carved in bone or wood, they wouldn't survive like clay or stone. The site at Motala is unusual because organic material is preserved so well.

Was it used for chipping stone tools? As a dildo? Both?!?!?! The coverage is very cautious:

"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape," said archaeologist Gšran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. "But if that's the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can't say."

Part of science is not jumping to conclusions, but jeez, let's not overdo it.


Another look (SNHB).

Whether it's a dildo or not is a different story. Dildos have a pedigree going back at least to Classical Greece - see the jokes about lost dildos in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, or Herodas Mime 6, where we learn that shoemakers sometimes also took orders for custom-made toys (red leather!)¹ I find the idea of much older dildos totally unsurprising perhaps because I assume that ancient people were just as creative (and sex-obsessed) as we are. Another instance of archaeological optimism, if you will!

Of course, any kind of decoration is a problem for archaeologists. Does the decoration mean it was 'symbolic' and not functional? If we're not sure what it was, it must be a ritual item! At least the archaeologists here have a functional hypothesis - or as one commenter jokes, maybe using a dildo for flint-knapping gave the owner 'plausible deniability'. It's true that we can't say for sure. But the guys interviewed in this Livescience article sure are trying hard to avoid the idea that this thing is even penis-shaped, much less a sex toy.

That seems kind of weird to me. But of course, most of the world's archaeologists come from cultures with a strange attitude toward representations of sex. By which I mean the Judeo-Christian-Islamic strain of monotheism, which has a conspicuous lack of festivals celebrating giant penises. In a lot of cultures such things are normal and fun: a Dionysian phallus-fest in a modern Greek village, various Japanese fertility festivals, or the veneration of the lingam of Shiva are just things people do. And then there's this unforgettable description of a Dionysian procession in Alexandria sponsored by Ptolemy II (mid-200s BC):

In another [cart] was a gold phallus one hundred and eighty feet (55m) long, painted in various colours and bound with fillets of gold; it had at the extremity a gold star, the perimeter of which was nine feet.²

Oops, not supposed to see that.

It might be stretching the article too much to say that the dildo-skepticism is part of some kind of Christian cultural baggage. But how much does cultural 'common sense' affect our interpretation of objects, archaeologically? Would Japanese or Indian archaeologists approach this find less cautiously? Would it even be newsworthy in a culture that wasn't still afraid of sex? Given that relatively few countries dominate world archaeology, how much of what we think we know about the past is colored by our cultural conditioning?

1 One could do a blog full of nothing but archaeological penises. I'll even let you claim credit for the idea if you start it.
2 From Callixeinos of Rhodes, quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 413D.

The origin of Myanmar is Myanmar

Feng Yingqiu of Xinhua News brings us this strangely tautological lede from Burma. Bear with this long quote until its weird end:

Myanmar archaeological experts have been making research in cooperation with international primate experts to prove the proposal -- "The origin of Myanmar is Myanmar."

These experts have been working together yearly to find out the fossilized remains of Pontaung primates in Pontaung rock layers.

The findings of the primates on the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, gained from the archaeological research in Meiktila and Yamethin districts in Mandalay division over the past decade, stood some evidences for the Bronze Age and the Iron Age as well as for the Myanmar culture and history, according to research report.

Over the weekend, Myanmar's Ministry of Culture organized a paper reading session on archaeological evidences in Nay Pyi Taw with the belief that the findings through the archaeological research add to the Myanmar history.

The research paper reading session involved resources persons from Myanmar Historical Mission, National Culture and Fine Arts Universities in Yangon and Mandalay, Archaeology, National Museum and Library Department as well as a foreign academician.

Doing archaeological research on the Myanmar history from the origin of the race to date through the prehistoric period and Pyu period, Myanmar claimed that it has been able to discover the origin of Myanmar people who were born and who migrated from one place to another in the Myanmar soil along with the Myanmar civilization.

Minor explanation: Burma was renamed Myanmar by the current military dictatorship. I'm being politically correct by continuing to call it Burma, which the pro-democracy campaigners prefer.


Myazedei Temple, Pagan (AOMAR)

Even allowing for the vagaries of English as a second language, something is peculiar here. The article claims that because there are Myanmar people in the archaeological record, therefore Myanmar people are from Myanmar. The statement is grandiose and meaningless at the same time. Of course, the archaeological record has no ethnic identity, since it's a collection of stones and bones and earth. But the habit of reading ethnicity into the record is persistent, not least since it's politically useful. This is an especially weird instance, but not alone in the Burmese context. This article from Prof. Dr. Khin Maung Nyunt, the former director-general of the Myanmar archaeology service (from government's webpage) adds yet another strange dimension to the whole thing:

Archaeological and historical evidence has proved that Myanmar's pre-history dates back 50 million years and history to the 1st century A.D. Paleontologists who in the past as well as recently made a field study in the Pondaung area of Myanmar further confirmed the archaeological date by means of the fossils of Primate they discovered in situ. Historical sites in the country abound in ancient monuments above ground and artifacts underground which indicate that civilisation of not later than the first century A.D. had flourished there.

Usually we think of pre-history as 'people doing stuff, but before writing was invented'. The notion that there was anything remotely resembling 'people' 50 million years ago is crazy, but these two articles distinctly imply that these ancient primates represent the first Burmese people. Connecting a current culture to the 1st century CE is enough of a stretch, but 50 million years takes us practically to the Cretaceous - long before beasts that looked even remotely like us evolved. (The great apes, for instance, branched off the primate tree just 18 million years ago).


Goodies from the early iron age in Burma (Halin Museum)

Many peoples in history - from ancient Greek poleis to North American First Nations - have legends that they somehow emerged from the nearby earth, or a mountain, or a river, or the sky. Us Classics nerds call it 'autochthony' (auto=self, same; chthon=earth). It's certainly true that Burma's history is long and rich - from interesting mesolithic sites documented here to the amazing temples of Pagan. (I had a nice time today scouting through a blog from the Association of Myanmar Archaeologists, which posts a lot of research excerpts that do a great job of teaching the totally ignorant [i.e. me] something about the history and archaeology of the country.) But this idea of Burmese as autochthonous is couched in weirdly scientific language that smells political to me.

Burma is has suffered under an Orwellian military dictatorship for most of the period since independence. The generals took over after the first and last free election (in 1989) didn't go their way. Opposition parties are banned and the press is totally state controlled. The military has embraced a strain of totalitarian capitalism, using slave labor to conduct rainforest clearcutting and build oil pipelines for western oil companies like Unocal. The military controls almost all of the economy directly or indirectly and is said to be deeply involved in heroin production. Then there's the repression of non-Burmese ethnic groups (about 30% of the population), which has led to an ongoing low-level civil war and several million people displaced within Burma or in refugee camps over the Thai border. (Full disclosure: I was involved with the Free Burma Campaign some years back. Go to their website and read more.)


Protests in 2007 were led by thousands of Buddhist monks. The military dictatorship met the protests with gunfire and mass arrests (Burma Campaign UK)

So even using the name 'Myanmar' makes a political statement whether you like it or not. It's associated with 20th century-style ethnic supremacism and fascist politics. Since there's no media in Burma that don't toe the official line, even a comical headline like "Myanmar makes archaeological research to prove origin of Myanmar", becomes a deadly serious exercise in political legitimation.

What exactly the foreign archaeologists named in the above article are doing working in a country with a government like this I don't know. A lot of people have this "science is apolitical" mentality but I think that's bullshit. It's always political. The hard question is what level of association with a stupid government you are willing to take. Lending international credibility to a system that combines all the worst characteristics of extreme bureaucracy, ethnic nationalism, and military dictatorship in my view is a poor moral decision, even if it's good for one's academic career. It ain't Stalin or the Khmer Rouge, but it is on the level of North Korea. Certainly more horrific in most ways than Iran, which we hear so much fuss about in the American press.

Of course, it's easy to sit here in a relatively democratic country (presently Turkey) and pass judgment about what people should or shouldn't do. Reading the blog of the AOMAR is a little poignant. Living in a stupid dictatorship doesn't mean that life stops. There's young people who are excited about their country's archaeology, and they should study it and do their best to keep the discipline going under terrible political conditions. People have to make the best lives they can with the cards they're dealt, and I by no means want to suggest that doing archaeology in Burma per se is always immoral (but I don't rule out the possibility that it can be, sometimes). And it seems from the articles on that site anyway that some good professional research is happening there - I'm fascinated by these photos of Mesolithic tool scatters! I hope I can go there someday when it's under less Orwellian conditions.


A Mesolithic tool scatter! (U Win Kyaing)

Nonetheless, I keep coming back to the bizarrely tautological title, which is an obvious ploy to confuse the reader with nonsense. In a real sense, the 'origin of Myanmar' is the current military junta, which chose the name for the country and is now trying to project its rule into the past. I'm sure the 50 million year old primates from 'Pontaung' (gratuitous chuckle) are much cuter or charismatic than a posse of elderly paranoid generals, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't see this for what it is: a horror story dressed up as an article from the Onion.