This emphasis has been interpreted in many ways: as representing fertility, as representing female power or agency, as reflecting a cosmology in which femininity was symbolically central, or simply as a stylistic convention whose original meaning is now lost to us.

What is not in dispute is that the people of Mal’ta were capable of the kind of sustained, careful artistic labor that the figurines required.

Each figurine represents hours of work — selecting the right piece of ivory or antler, shaping it through cutting and scraping and grinding, bringing out the form that the maker envisioned within the raw material.

This is not craft in the diminished sense that the word sometimes carries.

It is art in the full sense: the application of skill and vision to the creation of objects that carry meaning beyond their physical form.