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I have written about this before, but new developments justify revisiting this now… In the early 2000s, I was involved in the design and construction of the permanent exhibition in the @MuseumHalle in Germany. You can read about it here (in German): 1/
https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/dauerausstellung.html?switch=normal&cHash=11192809d9c5df6a5db37705b607c754
https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/dauerausstellung.html?switch=normal&cHash=11192809d9c5df6a5db37705b607c754
For this, we reanalysed the rich Early Mesolithic burial of Bad Dürrenberg and found some interesting features on the skeleton that made us argue that this burial should be interpreted as a shaman’s burial. We published about it in 2004. Here is a link /2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230005625_The_Burial_of_Bad_Durrenberg_Central_Germany_Osteopathology_and_Osteoarchaeology_of_a_Late_Mesolithic_Shaman%27s_Grave
For this exhibition, Karol Schauer made this beautiful painting that accurately incorporates most of the finds from the burial. The arrangement of the individual pieces, however, is not exactly known. You can read about it here (in German): 3/
https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/dauerausstellung/menschenwechsel/die-schamanin-von-bad-duerrenberg.html?switch=normal
https://www.landesmuseum-vorgeschichte.de/dauerausstellung/menschenwechsel/die-schamanin-von-bad-duerrenberg.html?switch=normal
A few years later, it seems that @playmobil decided that Karol’s image is so appealing and powerful that they used it as inspiration for a set depicting a Palaeolithic shaman or protector of the fire. It is part of a Palaeolithic series, which is pretty cool 4/
And now it gets interesting… In 2018, I watched the movie Alpha, which is set in the Solutrean period (ca. 23k – 19k years ago) in Southern France. It is actually a solid depiction of European Palaeolithic life. I enjoyed it. /5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(2018_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(2018_film)
And guess what? The shaman makes a new appearance. The images below are screenshots from the movie, and it is an almost exact reproduction of Karol’s painting /6
Here is another screenshot, the shaman only makes a short appearance, but it is pretty clear that the took a lot of inspiration from the Landesmuseum design. Funnily enough, most animal species of the teeth and bones from the burial would not have existed during the Solutrean 7/
Now it gets even more interesting. A few days ago, I watched a new series on @netflix, which is called Barbarians/Barbaren. It is a German production about the battle in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE in which a Germanic army destroyed three Roman legions 8/
Guess what? In episode 5 of season 1, our shaman makes another appearance. Here are some screenshots from the marriage ceremony of Thusnelda and Arminius 9/
And here are some more images 10/
Needless to say, there is no archaeological justification for the re-use of the original image and design. Karol Schauer’s reconstruction is as accurate as possible for only one context, the Burial of Bad Dürrenberg, which is ca. 9,000 years old. Here it is again: 11/
As brilliant and powerful as it is, it was not meant to establish the authoritative design of a shaman’s ritual gear across multiple times and places. As far as we know, ritual specialists in the historical contexts mentioned above were very different 12/
So, we just have to be conscious of the inspirations behind representations of the past in popular media. I am a great fan of historical informed fiction but they can also easily create false narratives and understandings in the public imagination. 13/
Images and reconstructions of the past can be very powerful and they can be difficult to counter once they have entered the public imagination. Therefore, archaeologists, historians and people in the media should be aware of these processes. 14/
