Written by There is a small carved figure in the Natural History Museum in Vienna that is approximately thirty thousand years old.
She fits in a palm. She is made of oolitic limestone. A fine-grained stone that doesn’t come from anywhere near where she was found, which means someone carried her, or carried the raw material to carve her, across some considerable distance. Her features are exaggerated in specific ways: the belly, the breasts, the hips. Her face is not individualised. She does not appear to be a portrait of a particular person. She appears to be a portrait of a principle.
She is called the Venus of Willendorf, and she is one of the oldest human figurines ever found. And she has been appearing on Pagan altars for decades.. A
The Objects That Survived
We do not know what the people who made the Venus of Willendorf believed. We do not know what they called her, or what they did with her, or whether she was held by many hands over many generations or made for a single purpose and then lost.
What we know is that they made her.