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Check out this 6000-year old storage jar from ancient Ukraine. Standing nearly 2½ feet tall, it's a product of the Copper Age Trypillian culture.

I saw this jar myself some years back at a traveling exhibit of artifacts from what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas calls the “Old European” cultures. What may look at first like abstract designs soon emerge as an owl—you can see the eyes and beak on the jar's upper register—and, strikingly, the back of the jar bears exactly the same patterns. This is a janiform owl, double, looking you directly in the eye no matter what direction you're coming from.

We don't know what was stored in the jar, but we can make a good guess. The people of ancient Trypillia raised all the staples of the Neolithic diet: wheat, emmer, barley, peas, lentils. The advantage of agriculture is that it produces lots of good, nourishing, storeable food with which to feed your family through long, cold Central European winters.

The disadvantage: stored grains and legumes draw rodents.

Hence the owl. Marija Gimbutas would have it that we are here in the realm of the Bird Goddess, Lady of Death. Perhaps. But, as my friend and colleague Helga Hedgewalker pointed out at the time, owls are good at keeping down vermin, whatever your mythology. Thank you, Mother Owl.

The breathtaking mastery of the ceramicist who made this jar is apparent only when you get close. From a distance, the patterns of the “head” and “body” of the jar look very similar. It's only when you get close that you see that they are, in fact, quite different. The owl's face—faces—are painted; the running spirals along the body are engraved. The potter has used two different techniques to achieve the same visual effect. Artistically speaking, it's a bravura performance.

We know from the house models that the Trypillians buried beneath their hearths that a row of just such storage jars stood along the side wall of every house: the Mother Jars that feed us through the winter.

The clay bowl on the coffee table could be in a museum, but it isn't.

What the potter in what is now Ukraine who, some 5500 years ago, painted the swirling designs on its surface, meant by them, we do do know. Possibly, nothing at all.

But when you look closely at the patterns, that's hard to believe.

This evocative bowl is an artifact of a remarkable culture known after the “type site” as Trypillian. (Named for the Ukrainian village nearest the original digging site, the word—appropriately enough—means “Three Fields.”) This is one of those glittering Old European cultures made famous in the English-speaking world by Lithuanian archaeologist (and feminist ideologue) Marija Gimbutas.

During the course of her career, Gimbutas handled thousands upon thousands of painted ceramics like this little bowl. She was convinced that the designs not only bore meaning to their makers, but that we can—to some degree, at least—read them today.

Hold this little clay bowl in your hands. Look closely. What do you see? Yonis? Buds? Antlers? Paired chrysalises? A butterfly? A woman, arms upraised?

We don't know what language was spoken by the Copper Age peoples of what Marija Gimbutas called “Old Europe.”

But whatever it was, we still—in a sense—speak it today.

English is an Indo-European language. The Indo-European languages all descend from a language spoken during the late Stone Age on the prairies (“steppes”) between the Black and Caspian Seas. This language was spoken by a milk-drinking, pastoralist people who domesticated the horse and invented (and named) the wheel. (Our wheel comes ultimately from their word *kwelkwlos, literally a “turn-turn.”)

Their nearest neighbors, to the southwest, in what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Rumania, were the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultures made famous by archaeologist and feminist ideologue Marija Gimbutas. These were settled farmers, eaters of bread and beans, whose bold, swirling designs, striking ceramics, and fetching little female figurines still speak directly to us today.

These two, the Indo-European and the Old European, were, in effect, our Father and Mother Cultures.

And we still speak their languages today.

You could call them the “Clay Ladies,” as our coven kid Robin did.

They exist in their tens—if not hundreds—of thousands across the world.

Goddesses? Fertility magic? Who can say?

Clearly, they're symbolic. Clearly, they're meaningful. We shouldn't expect that they meant the same thing to every culture that made (and makes) them. But to claim that they have no religious significance (as some academics have done) seems to me to fly in the face of general human experience. And if (incredibly) they never did before: well, they certainly do now.

And sometimes, I think, we can also say: this much, at least.

In the cash-strapped days following independence, a trio of Ukrainian businessmen watched in horror as illegal digging and the black-market antiquities trade threatened to denude Ukraine of its historical patrimony. The three began to buy up antiquities before they could leave the country, and so assembled the world's largest private collection of artifacts from the Copper Age Trypillian culture (4500-2700 BCE).

I saw a traveling exhibit from this collection at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis in early March 2011. What I saw there forced me to reassess my analysis of the work of Lithuanian-born archaeologist (and feminist ideologue) Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). Although none of the ceramics in the collection had been excavated before her death, I found that the analytic vocabulary of symbols that she articulated in her 1989 book The Language of the Goddess again and again produced cogent readings of the art.

Let me take one particularly striking example. The not-quite-life-sized (6¼ x 2½ inch) clay phallus and testes (shown above), from the Khmel'nitska region of Ukraine, dates from the Trypillian BI period, roughly 4500-3500 BCE. Above the testes is a small, inset cup; the clay wedge that supports the phallus gives the entire piece a rather droll, and probably not unintended, resemblance to a quadruped. (“I like the kickstand,” I overheard one visitor say.)

Note the engraved “decoration.” Twin spirals adorn the sides of the testes. There are parallel lines engraved along the phallus itself. Rows of evenly-spaced dots ring the top of the scrotum and run down the length of the shaft.