Iberian Peninsula to the indus

kourotrophos
of Perfugas, a 
small calcareous marl figurine (height 11 cm, width 6.8 cm at the pelvis and 6.6 cm 
at the shoulders) belonging to the volumetric-naturalistic iconographic repertoire. its 
distinguishing feature is its explicit maternal function, indicated by the presence of 
what seems to be an infant resting on his mother’s breast (
fig. 1, no. 6
). unfortunately, 
the statuette was found outside of its context and the arms in particular are fragmen-
tary. nonetheless, of this hypothetical child, there seems to be a small foot (analogous 
to the adult’s foot) at the base of the lower part of a mass that can be interpreted as 
a small bundled body. While this is a unique specimen within the repertoire of small 
sardinian and peninsular female statuary, the nurse-mother holding a child in her 
arms has been found in Balkan, Aegean-Anatolian and continental greek contexts 
within a chronological range that extends beyond the neolithic.
the 
baitylos
of sa mandara of samassi also merits discussion even though it falls 
outside of the repertoire under consideration here. the figure can be recognized only 
by the plastic definition of the trapezoidal face and by the orthogonal eye-nose pattern, 
while the body mass is identified by the pseudo-phallic morphology of the granite sup-
port. this artefact belongs within the repertoire of approximately two dozen incised 
bowls dating from the early neolithic and the transition to the eneolithic age.
the theory of direct Aegean and maltese influence over sardinian production, as 
proposed in outdated literature on the subject, is now commonly agreed to be ob-
solete. the most authoritative theory today identifies the certain undeniable formal 
and constructive affinities instead as the result of stylistic and aesthetic convergen-
ces generated by the extreme abstraction of the female body, composed through 
an essential geometric synthesis, in the context of a “precocious appearance of the 
anthropomorphic figurative tendency” in the sardinian neolithic (grotta Verde). this 
theory is corroborated by the chronological gap between the sardinian and Aege-
an-maltese cultural contexts.
the variability of the diverse formal groups of sardinian female statuettes, each 
further divisible into subgroups or variants, does not obscure the identity of the fe-
male character, who endures through the entire neolithic era until the dawn of the 
Copper Age with an irrefutable 
physiognomic constancy
. the three-dimensional 
images are conceived according to a hieratic vision that the viewer perceives in its 
complete metaphorical abstraction, as also occurs in mediterranean and Balkan con-
texts. the more than 130 examples exhibit a conceptual and symbolic unity which 
ensures that the female body structure (maternal or not) is identifiable, regardless of 
how naturalistic or geometric the language is or which formal solutions are adopted.
this confers an 
ontological constancy
to these statuettes which defies their dif-
ferences and the complex alphabet of the masses and volumes. it also creates an 
immediately perceptible 
symbolic substance
that overpowers the secondary differ-
ences in stylistic details. minimising the relative importance of these differences 
and highlighting the shared parameters makes it possible to recognize the 
symbolic 
constancy 
that managed to endure for centuries until the ideological, economic and 
artistic (in objects and constructions) transformations of the first metal Ages. the 
presence of a sort of iconographic archetype is confirmed by the recurrence of rep-
resentational parameters in diverse languages (geometric, schematic, more or less 
naturalistic), which resulted in the creation of a long-lasting iconic symbolic system.