ABSTRACT
This chapter deconstructs some texts in a narrower sense, using the example of the Venus figurines to demonstrate that introductory textbooks of archeology and physical anthropology produce gender metaphors which, by ignoring much of the scholarship on the figurines, reaffirm the folk model of gender preferred by our culture. It is deserving of some comment that breasts are equated with eroticism in the textbooks, more by juxtaposition of words than by explicit statements. The chapter suggests that culturally constructed gender roles, and our attitudes and beliefs about sex and reproduction, enter into the selectivity of reporting on the Upper Paleolithic figurines. Several archeologists have commented on the problems of reading our unconscious assumptions about the present into the past. 'History and prehistory constitute bodies of knowledge used to legitimize social policies and to validate social trajectories'. This tendency has been traced to the dominant paradigm in archeology.
