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The Woman of Willendorf was discovered in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy. The sculpture is one of the greatest findings in art history and is considered a significant symbol of what we know about beauty from the past. The Woman of Willendorf was found in an Aurignacian loess deposit in a terrace about 30 meters above the Danube River (Witcombe 1). She was originally named the Venus of Willendorf because it was first suggested that the sculpture was a "Venus figure" or "Goddess," used as a symbol of fertility. Author Marilyn Stokstad indicates this "distortion" was made "by the names early scholars gave to the hundreds of small prehistoric statues of women they found. They called them by the Roman name "Venus".
In a short time, most similar works of sculpture from the Upper Paleolithic period came to be known as Venus figures. The name was repeated so often that even scholars began to assume that these had to be fertility figures and mother goddesses, although there......

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Approximate Pages: 7 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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