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pot, the Lepenski Vir figure was a sculpture of a woman actively displaying her vulva.
Since Victor had always maintained that the cultures of the world are interrelated, he started to look for parallel representations elsewhere in an attempt to find corroborating evidence. It was not long before he discovered them in the Sheela na gigs of Ireland. His purview was further broadened when, in June and July of 1990, he attended the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, “Perspectives on the Ancient Indo-European World,” held at the University of Texas, Austin. At the Institute, Victor had the privilege of attending lectures delivered by Professor Marija Gimbutas of the University of California at Los Angeles. He was astonished to learn from these lectures that artifacts far older than the Sheela na gigs of Northern Europe and even earlier than the Machang pot from China bore representations of women and zoomorphs in virtually identical postures. The fact that the figures shown by Professor Gimbutas were distributed widely over an area that extended from Anatolia to Ukraine to South-Central Europe and that they exhibited remarkably similar attributes to the later manifestations of women in the display postures led Victor to conclude that they must have been connected in some fashion.
Not long after returning home from the Texas NEH Institute, Victor began compiling materials in a folder that he labeled “The Eurasian Iconography of Vulva Exposure.” It was his intention to write a substantial article or book on this subject. When he actually sat down and began making drafts of sections of the manuscript, he soon realized that the topic was too large for him to cover by himself, despite the fact that he was a Sinologist with extensive familiarity concerning Indo-European languages and cultures.
Miriam Robbins Dexter has been translating Indo-European texts on ancient female figures for over thirty years and Near