Ooh! I’m so excited about the research work that I’m sharing with you during the month of July! I can hardly contain my excitement!

My regular followers know that in my day job, I’m a school librarian. What do librarians teach kids in the 21st century? We use computers instead of old fashioned Dewey decimal card catalogs for research these days. So as a school librarian, I teach kids how to find information both from books…

and from trustworthy online resources like World Book Student, the Library of Congress, and various online Museums.

But I also teach them how to discriminate between online sources that you can trust and others that are sort of sketchy. So during this series of blog posts, which will be available every Tuesday during the month of July, please make a mental note whenever I mention that I may not fully trust one of my online sources.

With my background in library research, I’ve put together a series on the history of the oldest dolls on earth, and this has taken quite a bit of research time so I hope you enjoy the resources I’ve put together for you.

Each blog post will include links to the online resources I’m using, and if I find books that are helpful too, I will be sure to link to those as well.

Today, to launch the project, I’m sharing what little is known about the stone age “male puppet” of Dolní Věstonice. A lot of the facts that I found regarding today’s “oldest doll” come from Don’s Maps, which is a secondary source (although he does cite his own sources nicely). So there’s that.

There are very few online resources on the topic of the male puppet of Dolní Věstonice (AKA Dolni Vestonice). The most reliable resources, including museum websites, are written in Czech, so I really had to do a ton of research to learn more about this little puppet.

And in fact, I could not find any copyright-free images of the male puppet of Dolní Věstonice, so the images I’m sharing with you today are my own drawings of the remnants of this tiny little human-looking figurine.

Dolní Věstonice, according to Wikipedia, “is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site near the village of Dolní Věstonice in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic” (1). So this tiny object literally dates back to 25,000 BCE or possibly even earlier (different sources dated it earlier).

Yes, you read that correctly. This object existed twenty-five thousand years before Jesus did. Holy time travel, Batman! That’s OLD!

But before we go on, you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about a puppet, when this is supposed to be a research project on dolls, right? So let’s look at what constitutes a doll…

WorldBook Online defines a doll as “a toy that looks like a human being.” It also says that dolls can “vary in size from smaller than 1/2 inch (1.3 centimeters) to larger than life-sized. Dolls can be made of nearly any material, including cloth, porcelain, wood, wax, and plastic”(2).

Does the male puppet of Dolní Věstonice qualify, according to this definition? Well, it certainly looks like a human being, but we’ll never know if it was ever played with as a toy because it was buried with an adult man.

Does that mean he only used it ceremonially? Not necessarily.

What do we know about the person who was buried with the little puppet?

Again, I’ve had a difficult time finding trustworthy sites on the topic, but a website that is maintained by a retired math and science teacher, called Don’s Maps [donsmaps.com], provided some details that I wasn’t able to procure from the museum websites. Some of the best photos and images of the original (and some facsimiles) of the figurine are on this website, so I do recommend that you visit it, even though his site is a secondary source.

The Don’s Maps site states, “This marionette was found in the grave of what has been interpreted as a shaman… He possessed a fascinating cap sewn with some 600 shells…, a marionette, many discs made of various materials and several animal skulls. When he died, the survivors broke his drumstick, and one of its parts was placed in his grave together with the other things that he was using. It is possible that they placed the other part on the top of the grave together with the drum. This custom still exists in some Arctic communities”(3).

The reason the puppet is thought of as a marionette rather than a doll is not because the person with whom it was buried was both male and an adult, but rather, it’s because the object has holes for joining its arms to the body and another hole through its head. At least, that seems to be the case. “The body is too damaged to judge its degree of naturalism but it seems more schematic than the head. Both head and body are pierced lengthwise” (Don’s Maps).

I haven’t seen this object in real life, but I understand it is housed in the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Brno. And since I’ve never seen it, personally, I’m not sure how it was strung. Perhaps there isn’t enough left of the object to conclusively decide how it was strung.

But from what I’ve read, it does seem to have been pierced through the top of the head, and that does make it seem like the object was very likely used as a puppet, if not for shamanic purposes. You can imagine that the little figurine was perhaps affixed to a stick, held above its head.

But what if the holes were used for something else? What if they were used to attach a hat to it, maybe even one like the shaman’s 600-shell cap? Or even a single seashell that formed a cap?

Before I started this research, I wrote an article on how you can use pins to make a bandana lay more naturally on your doll’s head. Click back to this article to see more on that. Pins can be used to hold lots of things to a doll’s head.

It does seem likely that this was used as a puppet though, if I understand what is meant by “pierced lengthwise,” especially if that means that there’s a hole going from the top of the head, out the bottom of the head, and into the very top of the torso.

Don’s Maps tells us it’s only 20 cm long; that’s about 8 inches. I assume that’s just a measurement of the pieces we have today, but I would guess it once had legs. So maybe it was between 14 and 16 inches long when new…?

What are your thoughts? Is it a puppet? Is it a doll? Do you think it was used for strictly ceremonial purposes? Or could this man’s child have included the object among the burial goods as a way to say goodbye to his/her beloved father maybe?

Please leave your thoughts and reflections in the comments!

Works Cited:

1. Wikipedia contributors. “Dolní Věstonice (archaeological site).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 21 Feb. 2024. Web. 26 Jun. 2024.
2. Izen, Judith. “Doll.” World Book Student, 2024,
https://www-worldbookonline-com.lili.idm.oclc.org/student/article?id=ar163080. Accessed 26 June 2024
3. Hitchcock, Don. “Brno Burial of a Shaman.” Don’s Maps. 29 May 2021, Web. Accessed 26 June 2024.

Please note: throughout the month of July, 2024, I will be taking a break from my blog. I will still approve comments though, so feel free to comment on this and other blog posts.

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