The Worship of Goddesses? -hat were the religious beliefs of the residents of Europe between 26,000 and 23,000 B.C.E.? Over twenty female figurines have been found at sites in Austria, Italy, Ukraine, Malta, the Czech Republic, and most of- ten France. Made from mammoth ivory tusk, soap- stone, and clay, the figurines range in size from 2 inches (5 cm) to a foot (30 cm) tall. The wide distribution of the figurines poses an interesting problem: Did different groups learn independently to make similar objects, or did one group first craft a model, which was then diffused to other places? Modern archaeologists require striking similarities before they can be persuaded of diffusion. It seems likely in this case that people in different places crafted women according to their own conceptions and that diffusion did not take place. Some of the women are shown with extremely wide hips and pendulous breasts. Almost none have feet. They may have been placed upright in dirt or on a post. Their facial features remain vague, a suggestion that they are not portraits of particular individuals. Some appear to be pregnant, others not. Some have pubic hair, and one, from Monpazier, France, has an explicitly rendered vulva. Some have suggested that the figurines are fertility icons made by men or women who hoped to have children. Others propose that the images are self-portraits because no mirrors existed at this early time. If women portrayed their own bodies as they looked to themselves, they would have shown themselves with pendulous breasts and wide hips. Still other archaeologists take these figurines as a sign of a matriarchal society, in which women served as leaders, or a matrilineal society, in which people traced descent through their mother (as opposed to a patriarchal society, in which descent is traced through the father). Šince most of these figurines were found in the nineteenth century and were taken to museums or private collections, we do not know their original archaeological context and cannot conclude more about their function. The one exception is a cave site at Laussel in the Dordogne region of France, where five differ- ent pictures were carved onto the cave walls and could not be easily removed. One picture, Woman with a Horn, was carved into the face of a block of stone. This rendering has the large breasts and wide hips of the smaller freestanding figurines, but her right hand is unusual in that it holds a horn, perhaps from a bison. The Laussel cave has other relief carvings of a similar woman, a younger man in profile, a deer, and a horse. One relief showing a woman on top and another figure below has been interpreted al- ternatively as two people copulating or a woman giving birth to a child. Several vulvas and phalluses are shown in the same cave. The conjunction of these different images strongly suggests that the Woman with a Horn was worshiped, along with the other carvings and statues of body parts, probably to facilitate conception or easy childbirth.

How do archaeologists determine if an idea or motif diffused from one place to another or developed independently?