4. WOMEN IN THE STONE AGE

And she does appear to be fat rather than pregnant; a condition, it has been suggested, due to eating large quantities of fat and marrow, and a sedentary life.

Whatever it was she was eating that caused her to become so fat, the suggestion that she must have led a life of relative leisure in order to gain so much weight offers a clue to her status. The question is: Is this what women in the Stone Age looked like? Or did they look more like Raquel Welch in the 1960s movie "One Million Years B.C."?

If what the archaeologists tell us is true, that Stone Age societies survived through hunting and gathering, the chances are the women looked more like Ms. Welch than Ms. Willendorf whose obesity would have greatly impaired her ability to move around foraging and gathering.

The chances are, a Stone Age woman, much like the women in hunter-gatherer tribes today (such as the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa), would not have had the opportunity to get that fat, unless, of course, she had some special status. She evidently did not need to gather, or hunt, but must have been catered to and had her needs met by others.

Significantly, none of the few Paleolithic male figures in sculpture or in engraved images is shown corpulent. If the woman of Willendorf was a special female, who might she have been?

The life-like treatment of both the overall form of a fat woman and such details as the figure's knees and the dimples where the upper arm meets the chest, has caused at least one writer to suggest that a real women served as the sculptor's model.

If this were in fact the case, that the "Venus" of Willendorf is not an idol or a goddess but an actual woman, then she was clearly a woman whose specialness is indicated by her obesity and also by the fact that someone, a man or a woman, went to great pains to produce a likeness of her. But the likeness, if such it is, is noticed only in the torso and perhaps in her hairstyle; otherwise she has no face, unnaturally thin arms, and no feet.

The fact that numerous examples of this type of female figure, all generally exhibiting the same essential characteristics - large stomachs and breasts, featureless faces, miniscule or missing feet - have been found over a broad geographical area ranging from France to Siberia, suggests that some system of shared understanding and perception of a particular type of woman existed during the Paleolithic.

Images of women, mostly figurines of the same type as the "Venus" of Willendorf, all dating to the Paleolithic period, far outnumber images of men. This has lead to speculation about the place of women in Stone Age society.

Some have argued that these female figures denote the existence during this period of a prominent female deity identified usually as the Earth Mother or the Mother Goddess. On the basis of this assumption, it has been suggested that, unlike today, women played a considerably more important, if not dominant, role in Paleolithic society; that possibly a matriarchy existed and women ruled.

The "Venus" of Willendorf may be a representation at once of the Mother Goddess and a special living woman; one represented in the form or guise of the other, although which came first is impossible to know. Lacking written documentation, such claims are difficult to support or refute.

5. MOTHER GODDESS