The secret story of the Venus of Willendorf

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Microscopic investigations on the world famous statuette from the Gravettian period (30,000 to 22,000 years ago) carried out at the Natural History Museum in Vienna revealed three incredible insights, and when taken together tell a secret story of this Palaeolithic figurine and her creators.

• The limestone from which the 11cm high Venus had been carved, comes almost certainly from the region around the Moravian city of Brno 136km to the northeast of Willendorf.
• The source of the flint blades discovered with the figure was North Moravia, a further 150km to the north.
• The Venus had once been completely painted with red ochre, and given the ritualistic associations of this material meant that the figure was more than likely a cultic object.

The limestone of Stránská Skala in Brno
After an extensive programme of comparison of a large dataset of various limestone types, the proverbial needle was located in the haystack. The limestone rock from which the Venus of Willendorf could have been made​​, came from an unexpected location. The limestone is often called 0olite, and is composed of millimetre-sized calcoliths (skeletons of tiny sea creatures). Only on the Stránská Skala, a limestone massif in the city area of Brno (Brünn), can an identical rock type be found. This places the origin of the stone for the Venus at this precise location. [...] pasthorizonspr.com (B&W3)


Actualización 11-03-14. La historia secreta de la Venus de Willendorf
(Traducido del inglés)