Research into the origin of the Venus of Willendorf

Investigators regularly conduct scientific research on Prehistoric Art items in a quest to understand the composition of the artifacts, their origins, their ages, construction techniques, and utility. In this series I will report on recently published research on a subset of these artifacts beginning herein with the Venus of Willendorf.

The Venus figurine was discovered in 1908 during the course of archaeological excavations on the left bank of the Danube in Willendorf, Lower Austria. The map below shows the location of the village in which the Venus was first located as well as the city (Vienna) in which it is now housed.

Red blob indicates the village of Willendorf, the
location where the Venus was discovered

The figurine was carved from oolitic limestone ("made up of small spheres called ooiliths that are stuck together by lime mud. They form when calcium carbonate is deposited on the surface of sand grains rolled (by waves) around a shallow sea floor" -- assignmentpoint.com), a formation not local to the Willendorf area. This fact dictates a non-local origin for the Venus. A search for those origins was the basis of the study led by Gerhard Weber and titled "The microstructure and the origin of the Venus of Willendorf."

The first order of study business was determining the structural composition of the Venus. "Because of the unique value of the Venus from Willendorf, one of the most famous signs of early modern human symbolic behaviour, invasive investigations have been impossible since its discovery in 1908. The availability of micro-computed tomography provided the first chance to radiograph the figure in 3D in a resolution close to thin-sections and microscopy, which paved the way to explore the interior of the raw material" Weber, et al. Analysis of the scan data allowed researchers to establish a profile of the material comprising the Venus and to date the oolites as originating in the Mesozoic age (251 - 66 mya)

The second step in the process was to compare this baseline against oolitic limestone samples drawn from France, Ukraine, Crimea, Germany, Sicily, and Sega di Ala, a location in a side valley of Lake Garda. According to the authors, the samples from Sega di Ala were "indistinguishable from samples drawn from the Venus material." The researchers continue: "Even if we cannot  claim with absolute certainty that the raw material of the Venus originates from a particular locality, the match between the Venus and the Sega di Ala samples is almost perfect and suggests a high probability for the raw material to come from south of the Alps."

The authors simulated travel along two prospective paths from Lake Garda to Willendorf: a 730-km path through the Alps and a 930-km path which bypassed the Alps. 

Simulated potential paths for Venus: Red for the northern path through the Alps, black for the southern, non-Alps route

The authors surmise that the shorter path would only have been undertaken under some type of duress and consider the longer path the most likely route along which the Venus (or its material) was carried. Further, such a journey could have taken years, or even generations, but, in the authors' view, the material was handled carefully along the way.

Key findings here are as follows:

• The Venus is not local to Willendorf
• The material from which it was crafted was sourced from an area south of the Alps and relatively proximate to Sega di Ala
• It is not known whether the Venus was manufactured at its point of origin, somewhere along its travel route, or at its final destination. What is known is that great care was taken of the material/artifact during its transit
• It is quite likely that the transit period was lengthy.

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