I think it may be going out onto a limb to state that one pornographic sculpture "shatters the belief that sex was a taboo subject in that era..."

Posted by: Paolo Thompson on April 5, 2005 3:59 PM

I am amused by the equation copulation = pornography. Everybody (except for a few oddballs) does it; not everybody considers it pornography to paint/sculpt/photograph it. Just possibly 7,200 years ago people didn't have our Victorian hangups.

Posted by: Sarah on April 5, 2005 5:16 PM

Now I'm pretty open-minded and all, but I have to wonder about the woman who was getting it on with the 7,200-year old remnants of a man.

Posted by: joebwan on April 5, 2005 7:08 PM

Who ever said sex was taboo in that era?

There are plenty of examples of pornography from the Victorian era. My point was that one statue does not prove that the era was what we would consider sexually liberated, just as Victorian pornography certainly does not "shatter the belief that sex was a taboo subject in that error." I think the journalist may wish it to shatter that belief, while at the same time making a backhanded jab at our silly "Victorian hangups" as Sarah has done above.

Posted by: Paolo Thompson on April 6, 2005 3:06 PM

I also blogged this at:

http://lightseekinglight.blogspot.com/2005/04/archaeology-pornography-we-report-you.html

My take on it is perhaps a bit more jaundiced than yours. I'm getting tired of the PR games archaeologists play with the press and my blogging shows it.

Having any opinion on what people might have been thinking 7,200 years ago seems kind of above and beyond even what sociologists could come up with, and I sure hope that it wasn't an anthropologist or archeaologist who came up with that idea.

However, Egyptologists can make that assumption for 4,500 or so years ago -- There is the most pornographic "comic book" I've ever seen in the Egyptian collection of the Turin museum. Everyone who likes sex should see it -- they might learn something!

It could of been worse, I seem to remember that the ancient Celts may well have copulated with horses in a similar manner in eligious ceremonies. Now a statue of that would have been pornographic by any standards