ABSTRACT
About twenty-five thousand years ago, people living in and around the caves of the magnificent Balzi Rossi cliffs at Grimaldi, on the French/Italian border, were producing and using figurines of naked people, mostly representing women (often apparently pregnant, or, at least, with exaggerated sexual features) but including sexually ambiguous and dual-gendered (hermaphroditic) images (Mussi et al. 2000: 105-124;White & Bisson 1998: 95-132) that seem to act as powerful and intellectually sophisticated metaphors of transformation and as explorations of multiple layers of reality, including the abrupt transition from one being (the pregnant mother) to two (mother and newborn) (Haaland & Haaland 1996: 297-298).This group of images is of considerable significance on many counts, not least because they form part of a Gravettian (Upper Palaeolithic) tradition spanning a huge region from Russia to France, a distribution that argues convincingly for a shared artistic and – perhaps – a shared cosmological perception.
