Figurine Diva Rumina of Ulcinj

Description

The upper part of a flat female figurine of fired clay, the oldest object in this collection. The surviving part is **14.7 cm high, 11.6 cm wide and 2.8 cm thick**; the lower part and the sides are broken off. [1] On the front are **two breasts in relief**, a larger depression below them, and on the rounded upper projection (the “head”) **three shallow depressions in a row and one above them**. On the lower fracture line half of a small, carefully drilled round hole can be seen, interpreted as a female sexual symbol. [2] The other side is flat. [4] In the specialist literature it is called an **anthropomorphic slab figurine** (in Montenegrin, antropomorfna pločasta figurina), or an idol. [2] [3]

The figurine is made of clay fired at a high temperature with crushed limestone, and the front was coated with a greyish-white paint. When it was entered in the inventory it was described as a “fragment of a vessel (?)”; only when it was taken out for a display case was it noticed that it represents a woman. [1]

## Where it was found

It was found in 1969 on the citadel of the Old Town, in a trench next to the Illyrian-Greek wall (structure 221), 2.05 m below the threshold of the Museum; it was entered in the Museum inventory on 19 November 1969 under number 1449. [1] Maja Parović-Pešikan associates it with the deepest, undisturbed prehistoric layer, directly above the bedrock. [2] Pavle Mijović warns that after 1718 earth with rubble from the nearby gardens was dumped into this area, so the layer is not reliable, and Čedomir Marković thinks the figurine probably arrived with rubble from a nearby prehistoric site. [1] [3] The Lexicon of Archaeology of Montenegro notes that such finds led researchers to think that the rock itself may have been settled in prehistory. [4] The question remains open.

## Date

There are no direct analogies. Parović-Pešikan connects it with monuments of the **Late Eneolithic and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age**, from the end of the 4th millennium BC: with the violin-shaped idols of the Cycladic Grotta-Pelos culture, of Anatolia and of the sites of Shtoj near Shkodër and Maliq in Albania, and with disc-shaped idols with a central hole. She concludes that the Ulcinj idol preserves an eastern Mediterranean tradition, known from pottery from Troy and the silver idol from Amnisos on Crete, rather than being related to idols from the Carpathian-Danube basin. [2] The Lexicon of Archaeology dates it broadly to the Eneolithic or Early Bronze Age and stresses that it differs from the violin-shaped idols of the Lake Skadar basin. [4] For Montenegro, the Lexicon of Archaeology places the end of the Copper Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age at the end of the 4th millennium BC, which makes the figurine roughly 5,000 years old. [5]

## What it was for

Mijović sees in it a goddess of breastfeeding and calls it the **“Diva Rumina of Ulcinj”**, after the Italic goddess of nursing; he reads the depressions as eyes, nose and mouth pressed in with a finger. He himself concludes that the figure is “morphologically original” and leaves the problem open. [1] Marković reports this as one opinion and adds that there is nothing to help define the cult more precisely. [3] Here it carries the name Mijović gave it, while the question of the cult remains open.

## The 3D model

The figurine was not recorded for this project. The model was made **from a single published photograph** (© CANU, Lexicon of Archaeology of Montenegro), but unlike most photo-based models it is **to scale**: width, height and thickness follow the published dimensions. [1] The outline, the colour of the front and the layout of the depressions come from the photograph; the height of the breasts and the depth of the depressions are estimates. The sides and the back were not photographed: the back is flat, as described, and the colour of the fracture was taken from the edge of the photograph.