Published in 2011
420 pages
Judy Foster is an art teacher and the author of books for primary school art teachers.
Marlene Derlet is a linguist with a background in anthropology and sociology. She formerly taught at the Monash Centre for Indigenous Studies and is the coauthor of Talking Up a Storm.
What is this book about?
This book is an opening to histories rarely written about in Australia. Based on several years research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster takes on the world. She argues that three million years of peace, a period when women’s position in society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war in which men have come to hold power.
Her work is based on close readings of archaeological evidence from around the world, much of it appearing in the last decade or two. She also writes about the academic resistance to these ideas and to the archaeological work of Marija Gimbutas.
Beginning with an examination of Old Europe, Judy asks questions about how archaeology is used. She looks at theories of matriarchy and the invention of writing and ‘civilisation’. The role of language and the transmission of mythic knowledge are looked at alongside visual and symbolic histories.
While the northern hemisphere prehistories are reasonably well-known this is not the case for the hidden prehistories in Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas. Even less known are the hidden prehistories of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia.
This is a ground-breaking work. While other books have explored these ideas, rarely is Australia and other parts of the southern hemisphere included in the evidence gathering.
