An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe [1° ed.] 0415881307, 9780415881302

Citation preview

An Archaeology of Materials

Routledge Studies in Archaeology

1. An Archaeology of Materials Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe Chantal Conneller

An Archaeology of Materials Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe

Chantal Conneller

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Chantal Conneller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Conneller, Chantal. An archaeology of materials : substantial transformations in early prehistoric Europe / by Chantal Conneller. p. cm. – (Routledge studies in archaeology; 1) “Simultaneously published in the UK”–T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Antiquities, Prehistoric–Europe. 2. Materials–Europe–History. 3. Materials–Analysis. 4. Antiquities–Analysis. 5. Material culture–Europe– History. 6. Social change–Europe–History. 7. Social archaeology–Europe. 8. Europe–Antiquities. I. Title. GN803.C663 2011 930.1–dc22 2010028120

ISBN 0-203-83372-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88130-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-83372-8 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction: Making Materials Matter

vi vii 1

1

Forming Materials

24

2

Animal Materials

49

3

The Mutability of Stone

76

4

Material Worlds

102

Conclusion: Substantial Transformations

124

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

130 132 133 153

List of Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 Magdalenian contour découpé of horse’s head from Isturitz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France 1.2 A horse’s hyoid bone 1.3 Magdalenian rondelle with engraving of bovid from Mas d’Azil, Ariège, France 1.4 Aurignacian basket-shaped beads made from ivory and stone 1.5 Fragment of mammoth tusk showing desiccation fractures 1.6 The châine opératoire of basket-shaped beads 2.1 Barbed points from Star Carr, North Yorkshire 2.2 Early Mesolithic sites around Lake Flixton, North Yorkshire 2.3 Antler Frontlets from Star Carr 2.4 Aurignacian mammoth figurine from Vogelherd 2.5 Shell skeuomorphs made from ivory, from La Souquette, Dordogne 3.1 Flint with engraved cortex from Tågerup, Scania 3.2 Core with engraved cortex from Tågerup, Scania. The engraved lines echo the positions of blade removals on a worked core 3.3 Refitted engraved flint nodule from Holmegård V, Zealand 3.4 Stylised male figure on Holmegård V, Zealand 3.5 Trilobite from Grotte de Trilobite, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne 3.6 Carving of a beetle from Grotte de Trilobite, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne 3.7 Echinoid fossil originally concealed within flint nodule from the Mesolithic site of Seamer C, North Yorkshire 4.1 Aurignacian mammoth figurine from Vogelherd 4.2 Aurignacian horse figurine from Vogelherd 4.3 Human-lion figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel

35 36 38 41 44 44 55 57 63 68 73 84 85 88 89 92 93 99 104 106 107

Tables 3.1 Different fossil types on Upper Palaeolithic sites

96

Acknowledgements

The genesis for this book came from Sîan Jones, in a question during my interview for a job in Archaeology at Manchester University in 2005: Why was my work on lithics so different from my work on animals? Being explicitly forced to confront my own practice as a lithic specialist, and to think about the different treatment of stone and animal materials, helped me to coalesce some rather disparate interests into a book about materials. The gestation of this book therefore neatly corresponds with my time at Manchester. I owe a huge debt to my colleagues who contribute to such an exciting and vibrant department and whose interest and support has sustained my work on the book. I am also grateful to the University of Manchester for providing a semester of university leave in autumn 2008 during which a major part of the book was written. Other ideas in this book have a longer genealogy. My initial interest in lithic technology and materials was sparked as a second year undergraduate by Mark Edmonds. Marks’s lectures introduced me to social approaches to technology and his work on the Langdale axe factories made me realise how detailed empirical study of material culture through the medium of social approaches to technology revealed what was interesting and different about past societies. Mark left to take up his post at Sheffield soon after, although I have continued to benefit from his encouragement. However I was lucky in that Cambridge in the early 1990s was an excellent place for an aspiring technologist. I benefited from the inspiring teaching of four then PhD students with interests in technology and material culture: Brian Boyd, Nathan Schlanger, Victor Buchli and Bill Sillar, and the production of the legendary ARC 9.1, which did more than anything to bring the French school of technological thought to the attention of an Anglophone audience. As undergraduates, then PhD students and finally research fellows together, discussions with Terry Hopkinson helped in refining my thinking on technology. My work for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, and with Mark Knight in particular, taught me to have ‘confidence in my contexts’. Throughout this period Lesley McFadyen has been instrumental in encouraging me in my work and in helping me think through archaeological practice. Highest praise of all though must go to Thomas Yarrow. This

viii

Acknowledgements

book benefits from more than ten years of shared ideas, discussion and debates. It would undoubtedly have taken a very different form without him. I would particularly like to thank him for very nobly reading through the whole book (possibly more than once) and for his encouragement and support. A number of people have read through individual chapters of this book and I would like to thank the following for their helpful comments on the text: Ben Elliott, Elizabeth Healey, Lesley McFadyen, Beccy Scott, Julian Thomas, Graeme Warren and Becky Wragg Sykes. Various friends and colleagues who have known of my project have also directed me towards useful reading or have helped me with problems I have encountered. I have also presented versions of various chapters and conferences and benefited from questions and discussions from the audience. In these last two (overlapping) categories I would particularly like to thank Brian Boyd, Victor Buchli, Eleanor Casella, Hannah Cobb, Anwen Cooper, Lindy Crewe, William Davies, Karen Exell, Chris Fowler, Duncan Garrow, Mel Giles, Dan Hicks, Sheila Kohring, Jim Leary, Robert Loseley, Anja Mansrud, Nicky Milner, Andy Needham, John O’Hara, Nick Overton, Paul Pettitt, John Piprani, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Penny Spikins and Randall White. Chapter 2 in particular has benefited from discussion of an early version at the Ubiquitous Animals seminar, Olso, held in May 2008. I would very much like to thank the organisers, Kristin Armstrong Oma, Lotte Hedeager and Anja Mansrud, for inviting me to speak at such a productive and enjoyable meeting and for making me so welcome. My interest in obsidian was sparked during a fascinating discussion with Osamu Maeda and Doug Baird during Osamu’s viva, which I hope he was able to appreciate at the time. I would also like to thanks students in my third year Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic course and Mesolithic MA course over the past few years for their patient response to a lot of information about mammoth ivory, stones and fossils. The production of this book has necessitated a lot of practical support. Lesley McFadyen and Mark Knight have provided accommodation and evening entertainment during visits to various Cambridge libraries. My parents have done the same for my visits to the British Library. Ina Berg helped me with German translations for permission requests. Anders Fischer, David Gelsthorpe and Randall White very generously furnished me with images from their own archives. Dominique Baffier, Francine David, Anne-Catherine Biedermann, Bo Knarrstöm, Caroline de Lambertye, Jessica Rippengal, Barry Taylor, Jo Tozer, Kurt Wehrberger and Sibylle Wolf all kindly helped me with images and image permissions. The horse’s hyoid bone was generously provided by the Grahame Clark Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Finally I would like to thank Laura Stearns and Stacy Noto at Routledge for their support for this book. The day I discovered Routledge were willing to publish this book was also the day that my friend Roger Jacobi died. As a result its destiny feels

Acknowledgements

ix

bound up with him. Roger has done the most in encouraging me in my work on the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic over the years. His support was very important both starting out as a PhD student when he seemed to have some faith in my analyses and in working through problems in more recent years. His rigour, intelligence, knowledge and intellectual generosity serve as an example to us all of how to conduct our archaeology. I hope this book lives up to his standards.

Introduction Making Materials Matter

An archaeology of materials poses a number of fundamental questions. For a start, what is a material? Does it have a discrete essence, or is it something more fluid and variable? Similarly do materials have a set of objectively measurable or experienced properties, or are their qualities relational, emerging in the process of very specific interactions? Is matter inert or animate? Moreover, what is the relationship between materials and the forms of things that are made from them? In this book I will outline some of the ways that philosophers, scientists and social theorists have addressed these questions. Some of this thinking on materials, I will argue, works to restrict our interpretations of how materials worked in the past; others offer more radical possibilities for thinking through prehistoric materials. Traditional understandings of materials in archaeology (and in western thought more widely) have failed to acknowledge both the complexity and, moreover, the benefits of an analysis of materials. Broadly, these traditional views of materials can be said to have taken two forms. In the first, the standard view (Ingold 2000, 341), materials are seen as a formless substrate onto which human mental representations (variously conceived in archaeology as typology or symbolism) are imposed. In this view materials can inform us about little, if anything; human thought and action is viewed as primary. The second view, coming from a technological or material science approach, sees materials as composed of a series of natural, essential properties which constrain or enable human action. In this view materials are only able to inform us about some of the properties of the natural world and the nature of certain technological choices. As a result, materials have been relegated to the technical manuals; they have not generally been discussed in relation to social theory. Archaeological theory and practice has itself worked to reify particular material categories. The Three Age system, first established in the early nineteen century by the Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen, divided the prehistoric past into the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, a division which stands to this day. This division solidifies a very variable range of articulations of matter into just three things. The social evolutionary and deterministic narratives that this categorisation arose from have resulted in

2

Introduction

the implicit assumption that these material categories in some way reflect past people’s experience of the world. This reification has continued through the development of archaeological specialisms. The presence of lithic or pottery specialists, and the separation of specialist reports in publications, has resulted in the assumption that these same categories of materials were replicated in the past. The work of specialists is supported by technical manuals which are concerned to define and measure the properties of a particular material through scientific analysis or to replicate it through experimentation. Through these techniques there is the assumption that the properties of materials can be directly apprehended by the analyst. However this is not necessarily the case. The technical manuals are themselves the product of a very specific kind of technological engagement with materials. This engagement involves machines, chemicals and measurements that act to objectify and essentialise different materials and thus may not be helpful in trying to understand the nature of past materials. Certain properties, for a start, only arise in conjunction with particular technologies. The introduction of metal axes, for example, resulted in a fundamental reconceptualisation of the properties of wood, and in the reorganisation of the modes of engagement with it (Taylor 1998). These issues are more likely to be grasped through experimental replication of past technologies, yet the assumption of uniformitarianism that underlies experimentation also creates problems, as we will see in Chapter 1. We should not assume that particular properties of a material are important, simply because these accord with our own understandings. These twin assumptions – that archaeological specialisms reflect past material categories and that the ‘real’ properties of material can be grasped through scientific analysis – have guided traditional archaeological approaches to materials. A brief incursion into archaeological writing on stone (which will be elaborated in Chapter 3) can elucidate some of these concerns. The category of stone encompasses matter with a very varied array of properties. Stones can be hard or soft, dull or brilliant, large or small and their properties can change if heated, if wet or dry, or seen in light or shade. There has been some excellent archaeological work on stone that has outlined these varied properties. It is worth noting that this encompasses both recent theoretically-nuanced material culture studies (e.g. Tilley 2004; O’Connor et al. 2009) and more traditional technical manuals (e.g. Luedtke 1992). However more generally archaeological accounts have tended to emphasise the hardness and durability of stone and its ability to outlast human generations. This understanding is derived from a study of prehistoric monuments, but has more recently been extended into thinking on artefacts, seemingly on the basis that stone is a single valid category for analysis. However this single property can in no way encompass the variability of stones and the variability of past interactions with stones. To move to a specific example, I have recently studied a set of flint tools, from the site

Introduction

3

Seamer C in North Yorkshire, which date to the Mesolithic period. Here tools were expediently produced and rapidly discarded, rarely leaving the area where they were made. Here transformability and disposability seem key. Similarly a study of a soft stone, such as ochre, reveals a very different set of properties emergent in technical action (Warren 2009). Stones also can reveal what seem to us very unexpected properties: Saunders describes how pre-Columbian Mesoamericans understood that jade was magnetic, could absorb water and impart greenness and fertility (Saunders 2001, 221). In this book I will attempt to outline how materials are at once more complicated and more interesting than previous treatment might suggest. As the examples discussed throughout this book will I hope make clear, human/ material interactions are instances through which ideas about what constitutes the cultural, natural and supernatural are framed, and both the potential and the limits of human power articulated. In particular times and places, what people consider to be the essential properties of material differ. Working materials is both a part of, and itself generates, broader understandings of the world. Thus through close attention to past material– technological interactions, quite profound insights into past worlds can be revealed. This book draws on the rich tradition of material culture studies that has emerged across several disciplines over the past two decades (Miller 1987; Buchli 1999; Tilley 1999, 2004). However it answers more specifically a recent call by both archaeologists (Boivin and Owoc 2004; Jones 2004; Boivin 2008) and anthropologists (Ingold 2007) to take materials more seriously. Jones in particular argues that we need to fuse recent theoretical insights with the rich empirical accounts of materials generated by material scientists. To this I would suggest the need to add understandings derived from similarly detailed technological studies. This approach is vital for a study of materials, as it offers a chance to trace human–material interactions and material transformations. In this book materials are defined more narrowly than in some recent works. Boivin, for example, views materials more broadly, as objects, landscapes, environments and bodies (2008, 25). Here I will be focusing more narrowly on what traditionally might be termed ‘raw materials’, such as stones, fibres, bone, clays, metals, etc., that have been the foci of technological action and transformations. Of course, the very term ‘raw materials’ is, as Ingold (2007, 9) outlines, problematic; it recapitulates a longstanding separation in western thought of culture and nature, mind and matter. A material is ‘raw’ in the sense of existing prior to cultural elaboration. Despite this, I find the term ‘material’ less problematic than a frequently used alternative, ‘substance’ (e.g. Nanoglou 2008), which, as I will outline, has a very specific philosophical inheritance. The term ‘material’ is used in this book instead to mean a specific articulation of matter.

4

Introduction

W H A T I S A M AT ERI AL ? What is a material and what are its properties? Compare these different definitions of gold: Soft metal with characteristic yellow colour. Highest malleability and ductility of any element. Unaffected by air, water, acids (except HNO3HC1) and alkalis. (Emsley 1995, 80) We say that gold is a metallic, yellow, heavy, silent, brilliant body, temperately digested in the womb of the earth, and washed for a very long time by a mineral water, extensible under the hammer, fusible, and able to withstand the tests of cupellation and cementation. From this you should gather that nothing is gold unless it have all the causes and differences listed in the definition of gold. However anything that radically yellows a metal, leads it to equality of qualities, and cleanses it, makes gold from any genus of the metals. Geber, Summa Perfectionis (cited in Newman 2004) The first definition comes from a modern chemistry textbook. Most of the properties outlined are familiar to a general reader; although some seem more obviously the product of a scientific understanding than that of a layperson. The second quote is taken from a thirteenth-century Latin text, by a writer masquerading as the eighth-century Persian philosopher, Jabir (Newman 2004). Many of the properties Geber outlines (metallic, yellow, heavy, etc.) are those we ourselves would generally recognise as qualities of gold. Others, although not familiar to us, would be common to specialists who work and assay this metal. Others perhaps to us seem mistaken, the product of a limited understanding of the natural world, or appear simply irrelevant for a precise definition of the metal. However the last claim is perhaps that which is most startling. How can gold, an element, be produced out of something else? Would something that yellows a metal not simply produce a fake, or imitation gold? Geber’s argument that any material reproducing the properties of gold is in fact gold itself, appear to modern ears the disingenuous pleading of an alchemical charlatan. The premise of this book is that we need to take Geber’s – and others’ – articulations of the properties of materials more seriously. By articulations I mean not simply written descriptions, but varied configurations glimpsed through tracing the connections of people and materials in past technological processes. Only through these efforts can we arrive at a more nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the properties of materials. The ways in which people have conceptualised materials and their effects in technological action, I will argue, is at once a product and produces different understandings of the world. As a result, changes in use, or the mode of use, of

Introduction

5

particular materials that we glimpse in the archaeological record may tell us something important about the emergence of new worlds. Let us return to Geber’s definition of gold to draw out some of these issues. Geber was writing in the context of a broader debate focused on the nature of materials and their alchemical transmutations. Thought on materials (and indeed other entities) at that time was based on the Aristotelian conceptualisation of substances. Crucial to the alchemical debate was the distinction between ‘substantial form’ and ‘accidental form’.1 Substance is the essential nature of a material or being; accidents, by contrast, are contingent and can change without fundamentally altering the nature of the thing (Ross 1964). Iron, for example, will remain iron whether it is polished or dull, cool and solid or molten and heated in a furnace (Newman 2004). In Aristotelian thought, substance is prior to the qualities of that substance. A substance can exist apart from its properties, because substances are both matter and form, they are made up of the qualities and relations which form their essence. Their existence does not therefore depend on something outside of them. Qualities by contrast can only exist as part of their substances (Ross 1964, 165). While Aristotle and Plato differ considerably in their conceptualisation of substances, in general in Greek thought, as Whitehead has argued, the properties, the interface of human engagement with matter, became separated from the substance and subordinate to it (Whitehead 1920, 16). This privileging of something beyond the human experience of matter has had, as we will see, an unfortunate effect on subsequent imaginings of matter. The distinction between substance and accidents was however an important one to alchemists and their detractors. Critics argued that alchemists were simply engaged in the prosaic craft of manufacturing imitations, altering the accidents of a base material to resemble those of the metaphysical substance, gold. Geber, by contrast, believed that alchemical work could result in a more fundamental change, a transmutation of the substance of another species of metal into that of gold. Geber’s definition of gold raises more fundamental questions about the nature of materials which this book aims to address. It seems that in different times and places, what people consider to be the fundamental nature of materials differ. These understandings are both a product of, and participate in, generating broader understandings of the world. And as these substantially affect the way people deal with materials, they are thus vital for understanding technological practice. Different understandings of materials are not simply ‘concepts’ set apart from their ‘real’ properties; they are realised in terms of different practices that themselves have material effects. Let us examine yet another definition of gold: In the pre-Columbian Americas, gold was just one of a series of materials with colourful or gleaming surfaces that were seen as infused with spiritual light (Saunders 1999, 2001, 2004). Amerindians placed significant emphasis on the multi-sensory

6

Introduction

aspects of the experience of materials. The smell and colour of gold, for example, was important in its shamanic associations. Particularly valued was the redness of gold, a property generated through the addition of copper, and which indicated virility, sex and fertility (Lechtman 1993; Saunders 1999). Saunder’s elegant analyses of an aesthetics of brilliance in the Americas reveals the incommensurability of some of these different understandings of materials. When Europeans arrived in the Americas they were astounded both at the mineral wealth of the continent and at the careless attitudes of the natives towards it. The Europeans valued gold in terms of its purity. Purification was an important part of contemporary alchemical practice; Geber’s tests of cupellation and cementation, part of his definition of gold, are assays of purity. Thus alloying gold with copper, a practice that increased its significance to the Amerindians, made it simultaneously less valuable to the Europeans. Columbus complained that groups he encountered could not distinguish between gold and pyrites (Saunders 1999, 243). Here the European framing of the differences between minerals in terms of substance and accidents resulted in incommensurability: Columbus was scornful of the Amerindians’ inability to distinguish between substantial differences and accidental similarities; for the Amerindians it was the similarities between the two minerals that was important, their golden colour and shared gleaming surface that made them the same thing. In a similar vein, the Inka emperor Atahuallpa was astounded that the Spanish would travel so far for such a common material as gold when they had such beautiful things as glass in their native land (ibid., 247). Here gold and glass had shared properties that made them similar; however the novelty of glass in the Americas made it more interesting to Atahuallpa. Understandings of materials also differ between individuals, depending on the nature of their engagement with them (familiarity, specialisms, etc.). Although the greater part of Geber’s list of the properties of gold echoes similar alchemical texts, his understanding that substances could be transmuted was certainly controversial and hotly disputed by contemporaries (Newman 2004). However Geber’s understanding of the nature of gold was partly generated through the process of alchemical experimentation (Newman 2006). These are not the only influences we see. Geber was probably a churchman (Newman 2004) and demonstrates a detailed understanding of the natural philosophy of medieval Scholasticism. Indeed his purpose in writing was a reconciliation of alchemical experiments and Scholastic philosophy. His knowledge of the processes whereby gold could be produced by alchemists was bound up with his understanding of the natural generation of metals and with longstanding debates concerning the nature of both divine and human agency. Alchemists, conquistadors, Amerindians, scientists: their understandings of materials are all bound up with their broader knowledge of the world. This poses obvious problems for archaeologists. Materials in general have

Introduction

7

been considered to have a knowable set of mechanical properties, accessible directly through physical examination, experimentation or scientific analyses. This is evident in the profusion of technical manuals on various materials (e.g. Shepherd 1972; MacGregor 1985; Luedtke 1992; Lord 1993). Although these works do make clear that the properties of materials can change in certain circumstances (for example through heating), these changes are always predictable through a basic knowledge of chemical reactions. They will be the same today as they were for an Iron Age metal worker arranging torques in the Snettisham hoard according to colour and metal content (Stead 1991), or a Tukanoan smith adding copper to gold to combine properties of fertility and virility (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1981, 21).

M A T E R I A L S AN D T E C H N O L O G Y Geber’s work also poses problems for our understanding of the relationship between materials and technology. The method of the production of gold was crucial to Geber. St Thomas Aquinas had argued that only a natural agent could transform substances. Thus gold could not be produced by alchemical fire, because this differed from the heat of the sun, which was considered responsible for the generation of metals. However Thomas’s work did raise the possibility that utilising similar methods to nature might effect a transmutation of substance. This is the path that Geber followed, arguing, by contrast, that alchemists could replicate the processes of nature and, as a result of this, produce real gold. Geber differed from Thomas in seeing the potential equivalence of human technologies and natural processes. Whereas for Thomas the use of artificial heating produced very different effects to the sun, for Geber, the heat of a furnace was analogous to the sun’s heat and could thus be used to produce gold. As Newman (2004, 76) argues, Gerber’s concept collapses the distinction between cultural and natural products. The natural and artificial do not differ in terms of their substance, nor, necessarily, in terms of their process of production, but rather, simply, in the agent behind their production. In this case at least, then, the techniques selected for working a material are inseparable from broader understandings of the workings of natural processes. The same concerns can be seen in the written accounts of the French potter Bernard Palissy (1510–90), describing his own technical relationships with clay materials. Palissy is known, (along with several French and German contemporaries who worked with pottery and metal) for his moulding from life of fish, amphibians and reptiles (Amico 1996). These creatures were caught and kept alive, until finally immersed in urine or vinegar, coated in grease and pressed into plaster (Shell 2004). The resulting mould was used to make a clay impression of the animal, which was then posed along with other creatures in a naturalistic scene, usually in the form of a platter.

8

Introduction

Palissy’s ceramics materialised his understanding of the working of natural processes (Smith 2000; Newman 2004; Shell 2004). In his Discours Admirables Palissy describes the power of ‘generative salt’ and ‘congealative water’ which provided the material substrate of the minerals (Shell 2004, 27). This generative water was seen as having a tendency to congeal within the earth, through the evaporation of ‘accidental water’. If this happened in an enclosed space, it would congeal in the shape of its container. Palissy viewed these methods as the processes by which fossils were generated. As Newman (2004, 157) argues, Palissy considered natural processes and the potter’s process of fabrication as the same. His clay was also composed of congealative and generative material. He also made accidental water evaporate in his kiln, thus replicating the process whereby nature created fossils. Palissy’s belief in the equivalence of his clay animals and fossils is made evident in his catalogue of his ‘teaching exhibit’, which he insisted visitors view after attending his lectures. These consisted of a series of fossils, displayed alongside items of his own work. Both were used to illustrate the operation of natural processes (Shell 2004, 35–36). Both Palissy’s and Geber’s techniques materialised their knowledge of the working of natural processes. As a result, the idea that techniques are uncomplicatedly grasped, related to the efficient exploitation of materials can be questioned, a point also made by various anthropologies of technology over the previous two decades (e.g. Lemonnier 1993). Past technologies have been traditionally considered by archaeologists to form one of the lower rungs of the ‘ladder of inference’ (Hawkes 1954). In Hawkes’ opinion: To infer from the archaeological phenomena to the techniques producing them I take to be relatively easy. The modes of research are themselves no doubt difficult, and in detail often tedious. But the reasoning employed, I maintain, is basically simple. (Hawkes 1954, 161) However both materials and technology, it seems, are more akin to the higher, just-out-of-reach rungs on the ladder, what Hawkes termed ‘social/ political institutions’ (‘considerably harder’, Hawkes 1954, 161) and ‘religious institutions and spiritual life’ (‘the hardest inference of all’, ibid., 162). This problematic provides the challenge of this book, but also its potential. People engage with materials through their properties. However these properties cannot be uncomplicatedly grasped by an analyst, because they arise through the process of people’s very different interactions with matter. Materials have a range of properties, some of which we can see are broadly harnessed. Other properties are not always evident, or only arise in conjunction with particular technologies. Some qualities, which we would see as essential, are actively ignored in people’s engagement with materials. We should not assume that particular properties of a material are important, simply because these accord with our own understandings. This needs to be

Introduction

9

demonstrated, rather than presumed. Above all, materials should not be relegated to the realm of mechanical functionalism, as those substances involved in mundane, habitual activities have tended, in particular, to be. Materials are meaningful and these meanings are reciprocally generated in the varied processes of people’s engagement with them. Tracing these connections reveals past worlds. In this book I hope to do the materials themselves justice. P R O P E R T I E S , Q U AL IT IE S A N D TH E ‘ BI F UR CA TIO N O F N A T U R E’ As a PhD student, learning to think about lithic technology, I eagerly devoured a number of technical manuals on the properties of flint and chert (e.g. Shepherd 1972; Inizan et al. 1992; Luedtke 1992; Lord 1993). My favourite of these was an extremely comprehensive and informative book, An archaeologist’s guide to flint and chert (Luedtke 1992). This book outlines the current state of knowledge on the formation of flints and cherts, and has separate chapters on the chemical, visible and mechanical properties of these materials. This is a nuanced book: it recognises that properties are not fixed, but processual; for example the properties of cherts change if wet or dry, or if heated. I learned a lot from this and similar books. They have certainly contributed to me becoming a competent archaeological lithics analyst. However as a corollary, I have found it much more difficult to think about the properties of flint when writing this book than other materials in which I have had less formal training. Let me explain why. An Archaeologist’s Guide to Flint and Chert and similar manuals describe the properties of a substance as apprehended through a very particular engagement, that of the archaeological specialist with their material. This is a vision of material properties as apprehended through an objective, scientific analysis: Luedtke seeks to describe objectively the visible properties of chert (by using a Munsell colour chart for example); its mechanical properties (hardness, for example, is measured using a Mohs scale) and chemical properties (understood through a variety of techniques such as neutron activation analysis, x-ray fluorescence, etc.). At one level this arsenal of scientific techniques are simply a means of description and identification. However problems do arise in the latent assumption that what is being described are the ‘real’ properties of materials: We often assume that prehistoric people went to the trouble of obtaining a certain chert from a distant source because it was ‘better’ than local cherts. We could be far more convincing if we could demonstrate how it was better – for example, that its strength or elasticity is superior to that of local cherts. It would be equally informative to demonstrate that the imported material was not mechanically superior to local

10

Introduction cherts, thus implying that chert preferences were determined by ideological, social or political factors. (Luedtke 1992, 1–2)

Here, note how only scientific analysis can determine whether distant cherts were objectively superior. Any behaviour that ignores the ‘real’ properties of materials is due to ‘ideological, social or political factors’. In other words, in addition to this objective natural world of materials, there is a layer of subjectivity, the realm of culture, which leads people to ignore ‘reality’. This sense of a ‘real’ set of material properties (which can be empirically grasped) overlain by cultural perception is echoed even in more recent volumes. Hurcombe, for example, compares materials and materiality with respectively biological sex and socially constructed gender, arguing that ‘to deny the physical differences between sets of materials is to go against nature and to create false divisions for objects from the past’ (Hurcombe 2007, 111). It may seem unfair to criticise these manuals which, after all, are attempting to give archaeologists the necessary knowledge to reproduce a particular form: the lithic report (in general a stand-alone section of a site report which demands a particular technical vocabulary). However at another level this work is problematic. Specialists are able to connect very different contexts and periods on the basis of an assumed objectivity of materials; their expertise constitutes the very object it assumes. The properties of materials arise through technical engagement with them, and the modes of engagement of these manuals is through chemicals, machines and measurement. These technical manuals demonstrate what Whitehead (1920) has called ‘the bifurcation of nature’ into primary and secondary qualities. As far back as the fifth century BC Democritus could claim that our perception of the qualities of materials differed from their reality: ‘By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour, but in reality atoms and void’ (Berryman 2008). More generally, though, for ancient thinkers a substance could be understood through a relatively straightforward perception of the attributes of its matter, albeit that the substance of the material was viewed as more significant than its properties (see page 5). However the emergence of scientific understandings in the seventeenth century resulted in a questioning of this direct knowledge of a thing. Whitehead argues that Newton’s theories of light in particular opened up a gap between reality and perception. So instead of our perception of the redness of a rose permitting us an understanding of the substance ‘rose’, what we now see depends on light entering the eye as waves (or in Newton’s view tiny particles) and it is these waves that are seen as colours (Whitehead 1920, 27). Locke attempted to address this problem through a distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. Primary qualities are the real

Introduction

11

properties of matter: form, size, position, solidity, duration and motion (Gibson 1979, 31). Secondary qualities are things (such as colour) that are not true attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they are (Whitehead 1920, 27). As a result, a gap opens up in western philosophy and science between what seems to be (what is experienced by the subject) and what is (what is known as a fact), between the redness and warmth of fire on the one hand, and the conjectured system of agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen on the other. (Fraser 2010, 60, original emphasis) As Whitehead (1920, 27) argues, this has resulted in the view that no account can be given of nature through the sense-perception of its qualities without bringing in the mind. This is the position of the technical manuals: the real properties of materials, as measurable by scientific analysis, exist alongside the properties of materials as apprehended by the mind and influenced by ‘ideological, social or political factors’ (Luedtke 1992, 1–2). A similar distinction between Locke’s primary and secondary qualities can be seen in more recent work on materials. A common division is erected between the properties and the qualities of a material. Pye, for example, has argued that materials have a set of inherent properties that can be expressed or suppressed through human engagement with them. He distinguishes between properties, which he defines as objective and measurable, and qualities, which are ‘in our heads’ (Pye 1968, 47). This distinction produces a ‘real’ natural world, which is the world as measured by scientists, versus a set of beliefs (the worldviews of medieval alchemists, pre-Columbian Americans, etc.), mistakenly apprehended as reality, which is layered on top. The erection of an opposition between primary and secondary qualities, or between properties and qualities creates a fundamental problem for thinking about materials. It creates a dual system whereby properties become the subject of scientific study, whereas qualities are apprehended through cultural or cognitive analysis. As Ingold rightly states (2007, 14), in his critique of Pye’s work, this distinction returns us to the polarisation of mind and matter.

T H E MO V E M E N T O F MA T T E R A welcome new account that takes materials seriously and offers us possibilities for moving beyond this impasse comes from the anthropologist, Tim Ingold (2007). The importance of this work stems from its exploration of the specificity of materials in different interactions. Rather than attributing an undifferentiated agency to things, different material affects are explored. Ingold’s initial premise is that ‘the properties of materials … are not fixed

12

Introduction

attributes of matter but are processual and relational’ (Ingold 2007, 1), emerging in the process of human and non-human engagement with matter. However it is difficult to discern in this short article exactly how radically Ingold intends this point to be framed. The technical manuals, for example, can tend towards a processual view of material properties, acknowledging for instance that different properties emerge if a material is heated. However we have also seen that quite unexpected properties can emerge in the technical process. Ingold’s concern to break down the property/quality dualism might suggest that his scheme could encompass an event whereby virility would emerge as a processual property of gold. However his frequent appeal to experimentation reads (to an archaeologist at least) perhaps as intending something rather less radical. Ingold’s discussion of the animacy of materials does however offer rather more potential for reworking the ‘standard view’. Materials are seen as partaking in a world of flux whereby they embody properties of animacy as a result of their movement towards dissolution and regeneration. Objects in this account, rather than having any generic property of agency, only seem animate as a consequence of the materials of which they are formed: Ingold argues that there is a ‘misrecognition of the active properties of materials as a power of the materiality of objects’ (Ingold 2007, 12). The idea that matter is animate or embodies properties of movement has a long history. Movement, for the Greeks, was a quality of bodies but also of stones and minerals, which embodied properties of motion or rest (Ross 1964). Ingold’s position, that gives primacy to animacy deriving from the properties of matter rather than the agency attributed to finished objects, echoes in particular the Aristotelian idea that natural things differ from the artificial through the principle of movement. In his Physics (II 1 193b, 8–9), Aristotle distinguishes natural products from artificial ones on the basis of the fact that only natural things have an innate principle of movement: ‘Men propagate men, but bedsteads do not propagate bedsteads’ (cited in Newman 2004). More recently other authors have argued for the animacy of matter. Simondon (1964) recasts matter as a vehicle for actualising potential energy in the generation of forms, a position which will be discussed at greater length in the following chapter. In this conception matter contains the ‘ingredients’ of form without preparing or planning for it (Grosz 2004, 189). Simondon, a philosopher of science, was also undoubtedly aware of scientific accounts that had generated a more animate understanding of matter: so systems can be self-organising (Lovelock 1989) and matter can generate its own form. The form of a soap bubble, for example, emerges out of the constituent forms of its molecules, rather than being imposed from outside (de Landa 1999). Of recent philosophical works, Deleuze and Guattari (1999) argue most forcefully for the agency of matter. Their thinking on materials is exemplified through the discussion of metals in the Treatise on Nomadology.

Introduction

13

Metallurgy is the technology par excellence, particularly because its operations exceed each threshold of form. Metals reveal the vitality of matter: In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism, that doubtless exists elsewhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognisable, disassociated by the hylomorphic [material-form] model. (Deleuze and Guattari 1999, 411) In Deleuze’s articulation of the animacy of matter ‘metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1999, 411). Note that the vital principle here is metallurgy, the process – the assemblage of things and energy caught up in production (ore and furnaces; bloom, heat, molds, hammers and smiths) – rather than simply the material, metal, its correlate. The work of Ingold, Simondon and Delueze is important in that it renders matter something other than an inert substrate. The variability of the ways in which these authors conceptualise this movement in matter however differs. These positions echo (and indeed have influenced) some of the debates over the agency of things, in the relative contribution attributed variously to the human and the non-human or to agency as a property of networks encompassing both (cf. Latour 1993; Gell 1998). In Simondon’s view matter is orientated towards future becomings through its ability to actualise energy in the course of interactions. In Ingold’s view matter is animate because it is caught up in the flows of life itself rather than through any human impulse to attribute agency to it. For Deleuze, matter has its own inorganic life: ‘Matter has its own Dasein’2 (Mullarkey 1999, 78). This is revealed through its excess in the process of metallurgy. Though the nature of the animacy or energy accorded to matter in these accounts varies, all stress the vitality of material interactions and processes. The distinction Ingold makes between the vitality of materials and the concept of materiality is ultimateIy unhelpful. Things are the results of complex processes involving relations between people, materials and both ‘natural’ forms and ‘made’ forms that produce a variety of different outcomes. As outlined in the remainder of the book, at times materials do seem more important in the generation of an artefact and the affects it may come to have; at other times material properties are subsumed, transformed or transcended in the making of an object. As a result a meta-theory where things are always animate only by virtue of their materials does not allow us to conceptualise the variability of past interactions. Rather we need to trace the complex processes whereby materials and things come to have affects.

14

Introduction

TH I N GS , CO N CE PT S , PR O PER TI ES The idea that matter can be animate is a corrective to the standard view of inert material onto which cultural representations are imposed. However a major problem remains: in this introduction a very different range of properties have been revealed for what to us appear to be ‘the same’ material. There does not necessarily seem to be room for such configurations even in Ingold’s account where materials are processual and relational. How are we to make sense of alchemists’ and Amerindians’ very different knowledge of gold, then, without an appeal to a social constructivism that once again forces a distinction between mind and world? One way may be through recent anthropological work that questions the distinction between concepts and things (Henare et al. 2007). Here concepts are not in the mind, cultural representations that are layered onto things, but are identical with the things themselves. This approach is exemplified in Holbraad’s discussion of aché (2007), a powder used by Afro-Cuban diviners and which is the source of their power. As Holbraad states, the usual way of proceeding would be to see the powder as a thing to which a concept (power) is attached. The usual task of the ethnographer would then be to explain how a thing can come to be considered powerful, given that in western experience things are not seen to exercise power of themselves; and conversely to explain how a concept might become material, e.g. how power might be considered powdery. Holbraad argues, however, that we need to take on board the statement of his informants that powder is not just powerful, but is power and that this insight has significant interpretive potential. This, for Holbraad, is the starting point for a methodology whereby the ‘things’ themselves may dictate the terms of their own analysis. Holbraad’s case study is worth discussing at length because it encompasses both the physical and the conceptual properties (or the properties and qualities in Pye’s terms) of a single material (powder) within a single scheme. In Cuba, aché can refer to both the concept power, or its material manifestation, the powder used by diviners. The powder is spread across boards used by Ifa initiates during divination. The divination process occurs as the diviner marks the powder on the board. This process invokes Orula (the patron god of Ifa) or various lesser deities who becomes immanent in the marks made by the diviner’s fingers in the powder. This presence of Orula is generated, Holbraad argues, through the nature of powder: a collection of unstructured particles, amenable to be moved by the diviner’s fingers and thus to reveal, through temporary displacement of the powder, the lines that become the deity. It is the very formlessness of powder that permit the tracings of Orula. In his discussion of powerful powder, Holbraad, it seems, provides a way forward for thinking about materials. Rather than composed of what we would view as mechanical properties (permeability, motility), with an ‘extra’ of imposed cultural meaning or mistaken interpretation (power),

Introduction

15

powder is power and these different ‘types’ of properties are mutually implicated. Or, to be more accurate, both powder and power are a third thing entirely, ‘powerful-powder’, a thing which is neither co-terminus with western concepts of powder or of power. The power of powder is part of a process that emerges through its physical properties, as its motility renders deities immanent. Our idea of physical object and mental representation are collapsed in this substance. As a result powder is a different thing in the world of Cuban diviners from something composed of overtly the same physical elements elsewhere. Thus tracing processes whereby the properties of materials emerge may reveal a plurality of ontologies. Is this what we see, then, in Saunders’ study of gold in the Americas (1999), not simply a clash of meaning, but a collision of worlds? On the one hand the rapacious essentialist ontology of the Europeans led them to recognise the reddish gold mineral of the natives as gold. This was precisely because Aristotelian distinctions of substance and accidents had taught them that there was something real (the species pure gold, a metaphysical reality) that could be distinguished throughout nature (albeit that it might have a different appearance through alteration of accidents). Furthermore, there existed a number of alchemical and craft practices (tests of cupellation and cementation) through which these ideas could be instantiated. For the Amerindians, though, the shiny surface of gold was an indicator of inner vitality. Making metal objects was ‘an act of transformative creation, converting … the fertilising energy of light into brilliant solid forms, through technical choices whose efficacy stemmed from a synergy of myth, ritual knowledge and individual technical skill’ (Saunders 1999, 246). In contrast to the Europeans for whom the transformation of gold into finished objects changed only its accidental form rather than any essence of the material, for the Amerindians technological transformations had sufficient effects to produce something new. The very smell and colour of Amerindian gold differed, as well as its potency. Are these then not simply different materials, revealing as they do, themselves as both products and producers of different ontologies? The collapse of the concept/thing dichotomy offers a starting point for an adequate understanding of materials and a way of circumventing the mechanical properties/cultural perception problematic. How can such a project be an archaeological one though? It is no doubt obvious to readers of this book that archaeologists cannot simply summon up informants to tell them that powder is power. This is where archaeology and anthropology, by necessity, diverge. For anthropology this standpoint is a methodology, or, more accurately a point of departure, in that the statement of the informant is the starting point for an investigation of the affects of such surprising things. In archaeology, the movement of interpretation must, by necessity, differ (see Yarrow 2010). Because the division between culture and nature, between concept and thing, has been so problematic for thinking about materials, I would argue that we need to proceed, at least initially, on

16

Introduction

the basis that this dichotomy does not exist. We must start from the assumption of a priori connection, rather than separation. Thus the collapse of concept and thing is a heuristic. However what exactly these past concepts were (and thus what these past materials were) becomes the end point of an investigation pursued through following material transformations and relations between things. However, this difference of focus and process is not to the detriment of archaeology. Rather archaeology’s absences (for example the lack of access to the discourse of informants) are its productive potential (Lucas 2010; Yarrow 2010). Here the very tracing of material processes becomes the means by which we can transform our initial premise altogether. For whether concepts and things are ultimately identical or not in any particular case – or even whether materials can be understood simply through these two (collapsed) categories – must become an outcome of analysis. This focus on process through close empirical analysis – as a means of both transforming things and our ideas – offers archaeology its critical potential. This archaeological project is a more difficult one, but proceeding as it does by necessity through the material (through its transformations and relations), rather than discourse relating to the thing, it is much more akin to the approach where things dictate their own terms of analysis that Henare and colleagues call for. TOW AR DS A RA DI CA L C H Â I N E O P É R A T O I R E How do we then trace the material transformations and connections whereby things reveal what they are? We need here a focus on both process and relations. Thus far we have examined two accounts of materials in detail, those of Ingold (2007) and Holbraad (2007). Both offer considerable potential for thinking through materials; however I would also argue that both are only partial accounts. Ingold properly emphasises the importance of materials; however in critiquing the concept of materiality, Ingold perhaps swings the pendulum too far in privileging materials to the detriment of the effects of things made from them and the relations between things. Holbraad’s (2007) case-study of aché focuses on the properties of a powder as they emerge through its connection with other things (divination boards, fingers, deities), but neglects how they emerge through the assembling of the different ingredients of the powder.3 Thus both these studies are only partial, for knowledge of the entire process of material transformation is vital for revealing how different ontologies are articulated. As a methodology the concept of the châine opératoire (Leroi-Gourhan 1993) can provide us with a way of elucidating process. This concept is not without its problems (in particular its lack of focus on relations) but through extension and reworking permits us to trace a multiplicity of material transformations. The importance of the châine opératoire stems

Introduction

17

from its focus on the process of making, rather than simply on finished objects. Thus it provides an ideal methodology for tracing the varied nature of human–material interactions. The châine opératoire refers to the entire sequence of technological actions: from the gathering and selection of raw material, through manufacturing, use and recycling, to abandonment (although, in general, studies have tended to focus on the process of making). As Sigaut (1999) states, there are, in fact, two distinct uses of the term chaîne opératoire. The first involves the sequence of successive material transformations, whereas the second consists of the physical enactment of an operational sequence. The first is thus a chaîne opératoire of (transformed) materials, the second a chaîne opératoire of (transforming) people. These two definitions encapsulate a very narrow (and traditional) definition of technical acts, whereby these are characterised as involving active human agents and passive matter. This need not be so. Techniques do not, for example, necessarily involve material media. A foundational aspect of French anthropologies of technology is Marcel Mauss’s work on techniques du corps. Mauss (1979) famously described how seemingly universal techniques of the body, such as walking and swimming, are socially specific and vary over time. Warnier outlines how Mauss’ broad definition of techniques, as ‘traditional efficacious acts’ (and thus encompassing ritual and magic) became narrowed during the 1970s as anthropologies of technology took a materialist focus, while more overtly ‘symbolic’ activities became the object of study of structuralist anthropologists (Warnier 2009, 460). In the approach outlined in this book, technology and techniques will be framed broadly. They encompass, but go beyond, the traditional definition of the modification or transformation of materials by human physical engagement to produce made things. However, although daily tasks of manufacture are important (and neglected in studies of materials), a focus simply on the habitual tasks undertaken by people using material media is too narrow (see Sturt 2006 for a discussion of this point in relation to landscape). Mauss’ work makes clear that techniques need not involve materials as their object, or even human physical action, if we can imagine a scenario where magic might involve purely mental or verbal operations. As Coupaye states, we should not ignore rituals or magic as techniques, as they are also ‘traditional efficacious acts’ (Coupaye 2009, 436; see also Barndon 2004; Warnier 2009). As a result it may be appropriate not simply to collapse the concept/thing dichotomy, but also the thought/action dichotomy to include techniques that require mental or verbal operations. As part of technological magic, taboos are frequently employed (Barndon 2004), thus non-action may also be an important part of the technological process. Recent work has continued to broaden the definition of techniques. Coupaye (2009) includes both mental and physical operations under the banner of techniques, as well as broadening the object of technology, in his study of the chaîne opératoire of yam growing amongst the Abelam of Papua New Guinea. Warnier (2009) reframes techniques to include people (as well as

18

Introduction

things) as the object of techniques. However in all these accounts the active subject, the source of force, movement or form, remains the human (see also Gell 1998). As part of this reframing of technology, then, we need to acknowledge that techniques do not necessarily involve human action. The technologies of animals, for example, have long intrigued biologists and social theorists alike: from termite-fishing and nut-cracking chimpanzees (Boesch and Boesch 1990), to birds’ nests and beavers’ lodges (Ingold 1986, 345), to the architecture of bees (Marx 1930, 169). Nor should we ignore the work of supernatural beings in effecting material transformations (Bobik 1998, see also Chapter 3). Finally we need to consider the contribution of matter to its own transformation. Materials are not passive in technical interactions (Simondon 1964; Leroi-Gourhan 1993), although, as will be argued in Chapter 1, their respective contribution will vary in different situations. Ingold (2000), for example, describes the involvement of fibres in generating their own made form (a basket). In this case it may be more appropriate to talk about techniques of materials rather than techniques on materials. Beyond this we need to consider, as discussed earlier, the animacy of materials, but we must realise that animacy can work in a number of different ways: from ancient Greek ideas that natural things move towards their own perfection (Newman 2004), to animist groups where stones have the potential to be alive (Hallowell 1960, 24). Such situations force a reframing of technique through a realisation of material potential.

A Move to Relations A problem with certain châine opératoire studies, particularly those with a techno-psychological focus (Schlanger 1994), has been a focus on single technical sequences, partly as a product of archaeological specialisms in a single material (e.g. stone, metal), but also from a desire to reconstruct an idealised technological ‘grammar’ (schema opératoire). In practice very few technological acts are solitary. However this is not the impression gained from representations of prehistoric technology (see Dobres 2000 for a selection of examples). Dobres has rightly criticised those studies of the châine opératoire which focus on a single operational sequence (2000, 175). The image of the lone technologist or hunter, almost always male, has been soundly critiqued (Dobres 2000, Finlay 2000). Finlay has emphasised that this image of the solitary hunter/maker is impossible to sustain if even a single act of composite arrow manufacture is considered (2000, 74). For this technical act involves a number of different actions, processes, components – manufacture of different lithic components, mastic collection and preparation, working a haft, etc. – not all of which may have been undertaken by the same individual. She suggests that sharing of work would have engendered obligations and that different elements of this same task may have been apportioned on the basis of age, gender or kinship.

Introduction

19

Archaeologists rarely see the remnants of a single technical act. Instead archaeological sites are the remnants of hundreds or thousands of partial connections of people, things and materials. As a number of accounts attest (e.g. Lemonnier 1993, 7; Coupaye 2009, 443), it is difficult to delimit a lone châine opératoire: instead these always escape into other sequences. This has been framed as a problematic, the need to find the right ‘level of description’ (Coupaye 2009, 444) in order to delimit a single technological sequence. This should not be seen as a problem, rather it should be seen as a strength of the approach. Châines opératoires are not single, but multiple; what they connect with may well be more important than the transformations of a single material. Bateson (1972, 465) describes a blind man using a stick, and asks where this system ends: at the skin, the stick handle, the tip of the stick? In Bateson’s terms, these are all pathways along which ‘systems of difference’ are being transmitted. The system is delimited in such a way that nothing is left out that renders the thing to be explained as inexplicable. As a result, explaining a blind man walking will need to include the street, the stick and the man. However, we can go further and see multiple châines opératoires, not as chains or cybernetic systems, but as rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari 1999). Rhizomes always have the potential to go further, to escape the expected terms of a delimited system. Rhizomes are generated through the non-hierarchical relations of heterogeneous elements, including things of putatively different status (so powder with power with fingers with deities, to return to Holbraad’s example). If we follow closely a rhizomatic châine opératoire we find material–technological assemblages composed both of temporal processes of deformation and transformation (events)4 and of variable qualities which are produced as affects.5 Events-affects as a variable coupling differ from the conceptualisation of things as substances with fixed essences whose properties derive from their substance. The rhizome thus works to dethrone the metaphysical concepts of substantial essence and form, concepts that, as we have seen (and will see in Chapter 1), have produced limitations for thinking through materials. Broadly this Deleuzian perspective leads to a focus on matter not in terms of what it is (or the forms it is represented as) but in what it does, and in particular, in what it does in connection with other things. We see a ‘primacy of relations’ (Viveiros de Castro 2010, 224). While offering the possibility of an anti-substantialist view of materials, Deleuze and Guattari at the same time afford materials significant affects: ‘The matter flow can only be followed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1999, 409, original emphasis). So an artisan planing wood follows matter: not just the fibres of the wood, but also in collecting material from the forest with the right kind of fibres. Similarly, as we have seen earlier, metallurgy establishes particular types of relations. The concept of becoming embodies Deleuze’s focus on relations of difference. Materials always exist as a becoming – they are never finished – and

20

Introduction

as such always carry within themselves their relation to something else (Viveiros de Castro 2010). Matter is thus in constant variation with other things, a point also made by Ingold (2007) in his account of materials. Becomings are neither mimicry nor metamorphosis: ‘What is real is the becoming itself … not the supposedly fixed terms through that which becomes passes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1999, 238). Becomings always exist in relation to something else (becoming-animal, becoming-stone). The concept of becoming is a useful one for technological studies. Technological acts involve transformation, but a transformation traditionally seen as poised between mimicry or replication (of the same physical type) and representation (a mental image). Becomings, although framed in this sense less radically and ‘unnaturally’ than Deleuze intended, offer new possibilities for thinking through technological transformations. Why are these concepts useful? If the premise of this book is that following human–material interactions reveal different worlds, how can a very specific (not to say idiosyncratic) way of thinking help us towards this goal? Primarily, a rhizomatic châine opératoire shifts focus from sequences, solid forms and homogeneous matter, towards a focus on connections, assemblages and heterogeneous, processual matter. This apparatus for operating between the major categories in western thought (that have worked to inhibit thinking on materials) is a useful one, in that it allows possibilities for new material articulations. We can move in our analysis between a focus on the intensity of relations (assemblage) to the extension of matter (rhizome). However at the same time we should not forget the more traditional châine opératoire which is conceived as both sequential and segmentary – from raw material through successive stages resulting in a finished object (Conneller 2006). The traditional châine opératoire is a product of what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘arborescent’ thinking, a work of individuating essences and forms. As they themselves point out, it is not simply a question of following rhizomes and banishing arborescence, for every rhizome has the potential for an arborescent root to shoot from it; just as rhizomes can sprout from tap-roots. Materials can be fluid, transformable, in flux, but also arborescence may re-emerge, matter may solidify, forms may become primary. Following the processes of material interactions enables us to trace these processes.

TO W AR DS A N AR CH A EO LO G Y O F MA TER IA LS In this introduction I have attempted to explain why materials matter and to outline the approach I will take in this book. I have argued that attention to different manifestations of materials can provide a broader understanding not only of technology, but also of the ways in which different worlds are articulated. This has involved revealing understandings of materials and properties that vary in different places and at different times. However some

Introduction

21

important themes still need to be addressed. These will be the subject of the remainder of the book. Whereas the relationship between substances and their properties has been a thorny problem for philosophy, another central issue to the understanding of materials is the relationship between materials and forms. This has only been briefly touched on in this introduction as it will form the focus of Chapter 1. Foundational to western understandings of the material/ form relationship is the ‘standard view’ (Ingold 2000), whereby materials are viewed as a formless substrate on which mental or cultural representations are imposed. A second tradition is also present in technological studies, which views materials as constraining or enabling human action. Beyond these, a number of more radical approaches (e.g. Simondon 1964; Deleuze and Guattari 1999; Ingold 2000) have outlined very different conceptualisations of this relationship. These have all been based on an explication of the material–form relationship focused through a single material (variously clay, metal, fibres, etc.), but are often elevated to a universal explanation of the relationship. This is where the specificity of different material affects emerge (a feature perhaps underplayed in this introduction), and in particular the specificity of individual materials in relation to technological acts. These, I will argue, have the effect of generating very specific understandings of the relationship between material and form. By positing their theories as universal explanations of the relationship between materials and form, these authors ignore the complexity and variability of people’s engagement with materials. At different times (and in the use of different materials) we can see concerns with form or surfaces which seem to work against a material’s mechanical properties; at other times, form appears suggested by the nature of the material. Here the value of a material approach will be demonstrated. Taking materials seriously enables us to move beyond previous universal approaches and towards a nuanced consideration of the varied ways in which material, techniques and form are articulated. But what of specific material–technological interactions? Gold has been a particular theme of the introduction; in Chapter 1 we will encounter fibres, clay, bone, ivory and wood. Chapters 2 and 3 will involve case studies that attempt to draw out the changing properties of three materials in much greater depth: the animal materials, red deer antler and mammoth ivory (Chapter 2) and the stone, flint (and other stones capable of conchoidal fracture) (Chapter 3). The reader should note that in no way does this book attempt a comprehensive coverage of a range of different materials. The first of these is for reasons of lack of space. The range of materials employed in technical processes throughout history is extremely diverse. Simply enumerating them could probably fill a single book. Furthermore, if, as argued, the properties of materials vary in different events, a list of materials and their properties becomes infinite. Instead, an approach focused on a small number of different materials permits a detailed discussion of processes by which the

22

Introduction

meanings and properties of these materials emerge, and how these are articulated differently in different circumstances. This focus on a small number of materials also allows me the space to demonstrate one of the main points of the book, that the properties of ‘the same’ materials vary in different situations when different qualities come to the fore. The concentration on a few materials will provide sufficient space to draw out the broader meaning of these materials and how they contribute to the production of past worlds. In the selection of red deer antler and flint in particular I have been eager to focus on what might be seen as more overtly mundane technologies. This goes I hope, some way to redress the balance with much of the previous archaeological work on the significance of materials. These, although excellent studies in themselves, have tended to focus on special or important artefacts (such as polished axes) or on monuments. I hope that the study of materials in mundane, daily usage can throw just as much light on broader understandings of the world than more overtly ‘glamorous’ material culture. How can taking materials seriously advance our understanding of past worlds? In this introduction I have described how materials are caught up in broader networks of meaning and significance. This will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4. A case study will investigate the appearance of new materials such as soft stones, antler and ivory in technical networks during the early part of the Upper Palaeolithic period (c.40,000–30,000BP). At this time we see the gradual adoption of new materials, culminating in the spectacular sites of the Swabian Jura in Germany, where the potential of these new materials was fully realised and many of the key features we associate with the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ (such as human and animal figurines) initially appeared (Conard and Bolus 2006). Here we see for the first time an emphasis on the mutability of materials and their ability to transform into other things: stone and ivory were transformed into beads that mimicked shells, wolf bones or red deer canines. The chapter will explore how what has been termed a ‘creative explosion’ of new raw materials and forms both produced and was a product of radically new understandings of the world. Finally a word on period focus: the detailed case studies derive mainly from the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic.6 These periods will be relatively unfamiliar to those with an interest in archaeological theory. Not since Clark in the 1950s and Binford in the 1960s has work on this material made a significant contribution to archaeological theory-building in the Anglophone world. More recent theoretical approaches have tended to draw upon later prehistory and the Neolithic period in particular (e.g. Tilley 1994, 2004; Thomas 1996). Despite frequent statements to the contrary, the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods have rich material records that deserve broader attention for the contribution they can make to theory-building and an appreciation of the diversity of the human past. They also have a long

Introduction

23

tradition of sophisticated, nuanced technological studies of materials, undertaken mainly by French archaeologists and those influenced by their work, which make them extremely appropriate for a project of this kind. I hope this material can once again make a contribution to the broader understanding of the past.

1

Forming Materials

The notion that things have both a material and a form is a compelling one, a concept neatly captured in the term ‘material culture’. As Simondon (1964, 27) argues ‘the logical force of this model is such that Aristotle could use it to support a universal system of classification’, encompassing both inorganic and organic entities. How is this material–form model conceived though, and, what is more, to what extent is this a faithful rendering of technological relationships? This chapter will outline various conceptualisations of the material/form relationship, and how it affects, and has been affected by, different understandings of technology and the general neglect of materials in archaeological and social science accounts. I will argue that opposing views which universally privilege form or materials are inadequate for understanding the complexities of the technical process. Archaeologists have consistently privileged the study of forms over materials. This is the product of a more general view which depends both on the relative importance accorded to cultural over natural forms and on a particular imagining of the nature of technology. This ‘standard view’ (Ingold 2000, 341) of the relationship between material and form posits form as a product of culture, existing in the human mind, imposed on formless, malleable, natural materials; technology is thus the human domination of nature. The preoccupation with culture has resulted in a neglect of materials and underplays their importance both in the technical process and the generation of forms. Thomas (2007, 15) suggests that this problem is reflected in the very phrase ‘material culture’ (see also Olsen 2003). The term indicates, he argues, that things represent a particular type of culture, with the remainder (the more important portion because it does not need a qualifier) being immaterial, existing in the mind. Culture is thus seen to exist in people’s heads before it is added to materials. Understandings of the relationship between material and form are inseparable from perceptions of the nature of technology (in the sense of manufacture or fabrication). As long as technology is viewed as the instrument of Man’s domination of nature, the imposition of cultural form is privileged and materials, lying on the side of nature, are viewed as the passive partner in the technical act. Such views of technology have slowly begun to change.

Forming Materials

25

A closer attention to technological process in archaeology from the 1960s onwards led to a greater understanding of the role of materials in the technological process; however, mental representations still tended to be privileged (although framed in terms of technical procedural schema rather than mental templates of form). Structuralist influences in French accounts in particular led to the search for a ‘grammar’ of technological action that motivated the gestures employed (e.g. Pelegrin 1990; Karlin and Julien 1994). More recent work has attempted to break down these dualisms. Phenomenological approaches have sought to overcome the mind/matter, material/ form dualisms of both the standard view and structuralist-influenced accounts of artefacts and technology. These draw on the Heideggerian view that technologies reveal the world, rather than result in the projection of mental representations on formless matter (Heidegger 1971, 1977). Ingold has argued, for example, that, rather than being imposed, form arises through the interaction of person and material, being generated through the movement of the technological act itself (Ingold 2000). In this chapter, I will review in greater detail some of the ways in which the relationship between material and form – and thus the technological process – have been imagined, and will offer two case studies of my own. The explicit foregrounding of material, I will argue, allows us to reconceptualise the material/form debate. The traditional, technological and phenomenological theories that have so far dominated our understandings offer opposing views of the relationship between material and form: the two former seeing a mental image or template imposed on material; phenomenologists seeing form revealed through the process of human–material interaction. Both cast their view of this relationship as a universal, a product of the way the world works. However, can this really be the case for technical processes and materials which are so diverse? Events of fabrication involve a wide variety of materials (all with different potential), different individuals and groups with different levels of skill in different time-space settings. I will argue that both technologists and phenomenologists have neglected particular aspects of the material–form relationship. By contrast, a detailed investigation of materials and technologies can reveal the complexity of person-materialtechnological relationships. In the different case studies I discuss in this chapter, different emphases are given to particular aspects of the technical process, however this is always context dependent, rather than revealing more general truths about the nature of the material–form relationship. F O R M , O R ‘ T H E TE M P L A T E’ For the majority of the history of archaeology, form has been privileged at the expense of material. For archaeologists, form is what has been worthy of comment. Before the professionalisation of the discipline there was considerable interest in the technological process of human interaction with raw

26

Forming Materials

materials (e.g. Spurrell 1880); however at the same time in museums, universities and learned societies, artefacts were being transformed into ‘type fossils’, their form indicative of a particular stage of social evolution (Sackett 1981; Chazan 1995; O’Connor 2007). The form of artefacts also provided the substance for subsequent cultural historical seriation and identification of culture groups; here form was culture. For cultural ecologists, by contrast, form was function, with tools designed with a view to their role in expedient or curated technological systems (Binford 1979). Despite these different understandings of the nature of form, implicit in all these approaches is the view that the material, the representative of nature, is a passive medium on which mental representations are imposed. This ‘traditional’ idea of the nature of form persisted in the style debates of the 1970s and 1980s (Sackett 1982,1 Weissner 1983). Early post-processualism in its Symbolic and Structuralist guise (Hodder 1982) followed suit, although retaining a more active definition of material culture and the effects of stylistic attributes. The attempt of certain representatives of the ‘standard view’ to conceptualise the process by which culture is imposed on raw material, has resulted in the concept of the ‘mental template’ (e.g. Deetz 1967, 45). The ‘mental template’ is the idea of the cultural form existing as a representation or image in the head of the technologist, which is then imposed on the formless, malleable raw material. This idea draws considerably from Saussurean linguistics, where discrete concepts relate in a direct way to discrete sounds. In this reconfiguration, the mental template is a discrete concept referring unproblematically to the realised object. As many commentators have noted, the idea of the mental template is also a product of an idealised understanding of technology in modernity (Pelegrin 1993; Ingold 2000; Küchler 2002). It is the product of the removal of the skilled artisan from the production process and their replacement with a machine. The mental template is the equivalent of a contemporary blueprint or an architectural plan, which is then mechanically imposed onto material. This idea of a mental template of form, unproblematically imposed on raw material, is more difficult (although certainly not impossible) to maintain for those taking a more detailed, empirical consideration of the technological process. A greater interest in experimentation and replication from the 1960s with the work of such great technologists as François Bordes and Don Crabtree, and both anthropologists and archaeologists with an interest in technology such as Leroi-Gourhan (1993), Lemonnier (1993) and Lechtman (1977), generated new interest in the dynamics of technology in both France and the United States. Such detailed technological approaches have been vital for developing a more nuanced approach to the problem of material and form. In particular these have incorporated a greater emphasis of the active role of materials in technological action. However the concept of artefact form as a ‘mental template’ is still current in archaeology, in particular in debates around the origins of modern humans (e.g. Mellars 1989a, 1996). This ability to impose symbolic representations

Forming Materials

27

on raw material has been viewed as evidence for the presence of language (conceived in a Saussurean sense) and thus one of the key traits that separates humans from all other animals (see Chapter 4). As is common in this approach, material is seen as formless and malleable – hence descriptions of bone and ivory as ‘plastic’ materials (e.g. Klein 1998, 510), despite the fact that ivory, in particular, is extremely difficult to work. Furthermore the idea of the template persists, even in accounts that stress the dynamism of the fabrication process. Pelegrin (1993, 303) describes how the variability of raw material means that flint-knapping cannot be reduced to ‘a series of stereotyped invariant gestures, such as would be used by an industrial robot’. However he still sees the visualised mental image or ‘conceptual template’ (a term itself reminiscent of the factory or architect’s office) as the final goal of the process. The narrative of human mastery of nature remains.

TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACHES The dynamism of technological approaches with their focus on the processes of making, rather than simply the finished object, has problematised the idea of the mental template. The founder of the French school of social technology, Leroi-Gourhan, was less interested in the specific properties of materials than an evolutionary process permitting the harnessing of raw materials ever more approximate to artefact function. However his emphasis on a social approach to technology, and in particular his work on gestures, was important in moving beyond a simple focus on the finished artefact. Although materials were not his main concern, he argued that an understanding of the properties of matter was important for considering the technical act. Rather than seeing raw material as a formless substrate on which human mental projections were imposed, this approach permitted Leroi-Gourhan to describe the technological process as ‘a dialogue between the maker and the material employed’ (1993, 307) and to view material and intended function as combining to generate particular forms. Although Leroi-Gourhan was not a structuralist per se, preferring instead different theoretical approaches to different problems (Audouze 2002), he was influenced by the contemporary structuralist milieu in French intellectual life. This influence and his rather teleological views of human evolution ultimately resulted in a dichotomisation of culture and nature in his work: ‘Technical rhythm materially transforms untamed nature into instruments of humanization’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 310). The grand narrative of human mastery of nature/material remains, albeit under a more subtle reconfiguration than previous articulations. A continued sense of this grand narrative, of overcoming the nature and constraints of material, remains in some current French work on materials (e.g. Mons 2007). Subsequent generations of French archaeologists of technology have been more interested in the relationship between material and form.

28

Forming Materials

‘Techno-psychological’ explorations of the châine opératoire (i.e. Pelegrin 1990, 1993; Karlin and Julien 1994) in particular have been explicitly focused on this issue. Pelegrin (1990) distinguishes conceptual knowledge (connaissance), which corresponds to mental representations of ideal forms and sequences, from know-how (savoir-faire), which is the product of experience and bodily practice. In later formulations (Pelegrin 1993), this is broken down into: 1. Mental images or conceptual templates which exist for each stage of the production process; 2. A repertoire of modes of action which can be selected in any given situation; 3. Know-how (divided into reflection and execution); 4. Attention. As raw material variability means that the knapper cannot be reduced to an automaton, constant evaluation must take place between the work in hand and the idealised mental representation of the procedure, resulting in adjustment of motor sequences. Although these approaches have moved beyond the idea of a ‘mental template’ of form, they appear to have replaced it with a procedural template of a sequence of idealised technical representations (schema opératoire). The opposition between connaissance and savoir-faire, or between Pelegrin’s four elements of the technical process, also force a division between mind and body, privileging the former and once again returning us to a mind/matter division. Ingold has critiqued the concept of connaissance, seeing the idea of an objectified, discursive body of knowledge, capable of being imposed on material as a product of modern conceptions of technology. Such concepts, he argues, are closely linked to the marginalisation of the skilled operator from the centre of the productive process and replacement with a machine (Ingold 2000). Schlanger (1994, 1996) argues that a serious consideration of materials forces a reconceptualisation of Pelegrin’s schema. Because raw material is variable, operational sequences cannot be reduced to mental operational templates, as these themselves must be variable and flexible. Schlanger argues that a dialogue exists between knapper and material, in which, because of its variability, the material can ‘act back’ on the knapper (see Schlanger 1995 for a Piagetian understanding of this process), necessitating a modification of technical action: ‘The lithic medium is, to all intents and purposes, an interlocutor, whose physical reactions cannot be ignored’ (Schlanger 1994, 148). The modern experimental work that is the basis of many of these studies has played an important part in generating the particular understandings of form and material that these accounts espouse. However, rather than being a direct reflection of past technical acts, as often appears to be implicitly

Forming Materials

29

assumed, experimental work is the product of particular (modern) social practices. In these contexts, flint working is frequently replicative or undertaken to solve a particular problem. Learning is also different, as it is usually based on individual experimentation rather than direct observation and practice from an early age. Thus to modern practitioners, working flint is more likely to appear an explicitly cognitive process and to involve mental procedural templates, as it emanates from an academic endeavour, that of replicating a particular technique or finished form. This experimental work also takes place in a historical context where technology is imagined as the imposition of mind on matter. However, an individual inhabiting a cultural milieu where flintworking techniques were frequently observed and imitated from an early age is likely to have had a much more instinctive manipulation of a corpus of appropriate techniques (e.g. Pigeot 1990).

P H E N OM E N O L O G I C A L A P P R O A C H E S In recent years phenomenological accounts have been particularly influential in challenging dualistic ‘standard view’ and techno-psychological accounts of technical action. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger (1971) describes how the abstraction of form and its conception as a product of the human mind results in the idea that matter itself is formless. By contrast, Heidegger argues that material always has a form and it is this form that is often harnessed by human beings in a particular project. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger’s focus is on the dangers and possibilities of modern technology, where materials come to be conceived as a ‘standing resource’. However, he also works through an ancient Greek view of technology (tekhne), as a potentially productive way for thinking about craft activities. Tekhne, which also encompassed art and poetry as well as craft activity, was conceived as a process of revealing the world. In Aristotle’s conceptualisation material and form were but two of four ‘causes’ encompassing also use and maker. The four causes were given relatively equal weight, although greater emphasis was placed on the craftsperson. Ultimately though, form is seen as external to the thing: the craftsperson gathers the causes together ‘with a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction’ (Heidegger 1977, 13). Heidegger’s writings have been influential both in recent archaeology and anthropology. Thomas follows Heidegger in seeing technology as ‘a form of disclosure’ (Thomas 2007, 20), as a counterpoint to studies of modern material culture which, he argues, tend to view objectification as a process of alienation. Of anthropologists, Ingold has engaged most fully with Heidegger’s views of technology. His essay Society, nature and the concept of technology echoes Heidegger’s distinction between modern and non-modern technologies and views techniques in small scale societies as a process of

30

Forming Materials

revealing the world (Ingold 2000, 320). We also see a broader concern with configuring the relationship between form and material in phenomenological terms, most notably in his paper On weaving a basket (Ingold 2000, 339–48). In this essay, Ingold uses a description of the activity of basket-making as a way of problematising ‘traditional views’ of the relationship between material and form. He argues that the form of a basket is not imposed onto the fibres, rather it is generated through the act itself. In making a coiled basket, the previous spiral of the basket acts as template for the next, thus in many ways the form is contained within the material itself. The basket also exerts independent force, in that the fibres are resistant and must be bent into place – it is this very resistance that generates its rigid form. Thus, although the artisan may start with an idea of what the basket should look like, it is not this idea that produces the basket; rather the basket arises through the movement generated by the interaction of person and material. Ingold suggests his description of basket-making elucidates more general aspects of the relation of form and material. All activity, he suggests, can be described as ‘weaving’ (rather than making) because, rather than being imposed on materials, forms are generated through the movement of human–material interactions (Ingold 2000, 347). Ingold’s account is important in that it provides an alternative way of imagining the relationship of form and function, one in which the nature/culture dualism is broken down and where the specific properties of a material are fully considered. However his use of the process of basket-making both as a way of problematising traditional views of technology and a metaphor for understanding other human/material interactions is less secure. Ingold selects basket-making because it represents a material/technical interaction with very particular features, such as its relationship of interiority/exteriority and mutual interactions of force and resistance. It is these aspects of basket-making that challenge traditional views of the relationship between material and form. However, the very reason (its particular features) that allows Ingold to hold it up as a technical interaction that makes us think very differently about form and process, at once render it inappropriate for thinking more generally about technical relationships involving other materials. E N E RG Y– MA TT ER –F O R M A recasting of the matter–form relationship that has yet to be taken up in any significant fashion in archaeological work comes through Simondon’s (1964) elegant discussion of the process of brick-making. In this technological process, he argues, the relationship is not between a pure form and abstract matter, but prepared matter and materialised form (ibid., 39). Not any material will do: if sand is put in a brick mould, it will collapse. Brick manufacture is instead the result of two half chains which make matter and form converge. Form in this case is the result of the mediation of geometry

Forming Materials

31

into a manufactured mould, prepared in a particular way and in a specific material. The clay is also prepared. It emerges as a heterogeneous material with roots and stones, dug up from the edge of a marsh. It is dried, pounded, sieved and kneaded to produce something more homogeneous which, as a result of its colloidal properties, is orientated towards a potential to retain the shape of the future brick. The two technical half-chains only meet when matter and form have been made commensurable, when the matter dug from the swamp is made sufficiently homogeneous to maintain the shape of the mould without voids or cracking and when the geometric form of the brick is materialised in the mould. ‘The pure form already contains the gestures [of the artisan], the matter already contains the ability to become’ (Simondon 1964, 33). The clay, when pressed into the mould transmits the energy of the artisan, as a result of its structure, so that it fills all parts of the empty space. The walls of the mould exert equivalent forces that limit the actualisation of the energy within the clay. Thus matter is not inert and form imposed, both exert similar pressures on each other through force. What differs is equilibrium: the mould is stable (give or take momentary deformation when the clay is introduced, dependent on its thickness and material), having been individuated through the earlier technical half-chain. The clay however is in a process of becoming and only achieves equilibrium through the force of the mould. Simondon focuses on this particular example of brick-making to illustrate that the dominant ‘hylomorphic’ model is inadequate for explaining particular aspects of the relationship between matter and form. Through this work he recasts matter as a vehicle for actualising potential energy, ‘a formtaking activity, immanent to the event of taking form’ (Massumi 2009, 43). Form is redefined as that which acts to limit the energy potential. Simondon’s work is valuable in that it makes matter specific not abstract and form a process, rather than a pure image pre-existing in the head of the maker. Illuminating as this rearticulation of form and material is, many of its aspects are again specific to a particular material, form and technological operation, as Simondon himself notes. Rather than being used as an alternative meta-theory of the relationship between material and form, the concepts Simondon articulates need to be reworked through specific cases. It is important, for example, as he states, that we do not grant the two terms, material and form, an existence prior to the relation that links them. However what the relation between material and form is, emerges in the specificity of the technical act, in the movement of energy.

T H E S P E C I F IC IT Y O F M A T E R I A L A N D F O R M If we are to take materials seriously, we need to acknowledge that different materials demand different forms of technical interaction, generate different

32

Forming Materials

levels of strength and resistance through the processes of particular sorts of interaction. And this is not all, we need to think about the people involved in the technical act and their engagement with a material’s properties. Human interactions with a particular material are not all the same. First, as Schlanger (1995, 1996) points out a single material can be very heterogeneous, or varied; so flint contains inclusions and imperfections that make every interaction unique in certain aspects. Second we need to think about the people involved in the technical act. The French technological school teaches us that levels of skill are important (Pigeot 1990, Finlay 2008), both for the nature of the interaction and the way that it is imagined. The skilled individuals Ingold tends to discuss are more likely to be caught up in the rhythm of human–material interactions than apprentices who do not understand when it is appropriate to undertake particular gestures (see Pigeot 1990) or people who undertake particular tasks rarely and thus struggle with the material. Finally different understandings of the material are important. This does not mean a return to the imposition of mind on matter, rather that, as outlined in the introduction, the properties of materials will be different in particular time/space settings. This vital point, which has been neglected in the viewpoints discussed earlier, will be further elaborated through the case studies discussed in this chapter. Both Ingold and the French techno-psychologists appear to frame their understandings of the relationship between form and material as universal, irrespective of the nature of the material/technical interaction considered. However I would argue that the failure of both to consider materials and technical acts as specific has led them to confuse particular forms of human– material interactions and particular epistemological perspectives. In Ingold’s case he is confusing a single technical interaction (basket-making) with an epistemological position; in the traditional case, an epistemological position (the standard view) is confused with a particular technical interaction (experimental flintworking). I have argued that we should not impose modern understandings of technology on past technical processes; nor should we, though, do the reverse and use a single technological action as the basis for a more generalised position. If we are to take materials, and their position in the technical process seriously, we need to treat each case as an ethnographic moment. Through this we can understand that relations between very different materials, people, events and forms are configured in very different ways. In the remainder of this chapter I want to investigate two different sets of material interactions to explore the various relationships of material and form produced; these in turn can perhaps throw some light on our own use of these terms. Both examples are taken from the Upper Palaeolithic period. The first investigates the production of contours découpés, horse head pendants made from horse hyoid bones during the later part of the Upper Palaeolithic, mainly in the area of the Pyrenees. The second example focuses on basket-shaped beads made from mammoth ivory in the early part of the

Forming Materials

33

Upper Palaeolithic in southwest France. I will argue that one of these examples shows a concern with materials, to the extent that form appears to be generated by the material. In the second example, form appears more important, but in such a way that very particular effects on materials were produced.

P E R S O N A L O R N A ME N T S A N D C A V E AR T I N T H E P Y R E N E E S : TH E M I D D L E MA G D A L E N I A N The Middle Magdalenian of the Pyrenees spans c.14,800 to 13,000BP (Clottes 1995). A large number of archaeological sites are known from this period, often extremely rich in material culture with a number of distinctive regional and temporal characteristics (Taborin 2007). The people who generated these sites created some of the most spectacular and best known of all Upper Palaeolithic art. Several important cave art sites are known from this region (Niaux, Gargas, Les Trois Frères, Le Tuc d’Audoubert, etc.); however it is the portable art that is probably most famous. This encompasses engraved stones (plaquettes) and animal bones, including tools decorated with highly lifelike animal engravings and carvings. Two forms particularly characteristic of this region and period are rondelles (round pieces of engraved bone, pierced for suspension) and contours découpés (mainly animal head pendants). The last of these, the contours découpés, will form the basis of this case study.

The Middle Magdalenian of the Pyrenees The Middle Magdalenian occupation of the Pyrenees spans a series of cold and warm phases (Clottes 1989, 1995; Gamble et al. 2004, 2005). In general, though, the period was cold and the landscape was covered by open, steppic vegetation. This was interspersed with short-lived warmer pulses and a short warm phase (GS-2b) saw the appearance of some trees, mainly birch and pine, before cold conditions returned (Gamble et al. 2004, 2005). These changes affected the abundance of different animals in the landscape; however, throughout the period, horse, reindeer and bovids were the most common species preyed upon, with smaller numbers of red deer, saiga, chamois and birds. Settlement focused on the valley bottoms near to major water sources. Most of the sites known are cave sites, rather than camps of the open air. Though this could be partly a result of taphonomic factors, recent surveys suggest this may represent a cultural preference (Clottes 1995; Chauchat et al. 1999). Excursions into the high mountains were rare, or at least did not generate substantial material

34

Forming Materials remains; no site surpasses 1000m in altitude. Settlement sites range from transient camps, with specialised faunal assemblage, lacking evidence for art and ornamentation, to sites of longer stays or more repeated occupation with diverse tools and fauna and abundant evidence for beads and portable art (e.g. La Vache, Enlène) (Clottes 1995). Finally there are the ‘super sites’ such as Isturitz and Mas d’Azil, which are extremely large and contain parietal and portable art and human remains. These sites have also yielded significant quantities of exotic materials (lithics, sea shells and other marine resources, fossils) (Bahn 1982; Gambier 1996; Strauss 1996) and as a result have been argued to represent aggregation sites (Bahn 1982). Some of the long-stay sites and the ‘super sites’ have yielded cave art. However cave art sites in the Middle Magdalenian frequently appear to have been set apart from daily life. Several sites (Niaux, Fontanet and Pradiéres) are found higher up in the Pyrenees, around half an hour’s walk from the living sites of the valley floor (Clottes 1989, 1995). There was considerable emphasis during this period in executing designs far from the daylight, often in the depths of the cave. Mile-long caves were regularly explored, with people crawling through narrow passages, across overhangs and down vertical shafts. Some of this art was thus extremely difficult to access, however other panels in larger chambers nearer the cave entrance were more obviously accessible to a wider audience. A variety of animals were depicted in the art: horses and bovids were most frequent, with the addition of a significant number of representations of ibex. Deer, chamois and humans were also present, while other animals were extremely rare: felines, bears, rhino, mammoth, a weasel and birds. Abstract signs, such as claviforms were also present (Clottes 1989). The art encompasses painting, engraving and clay sculpture, however contours of parts or entire animals in black, such as those found in great quantities at Niaux and Portel, are particularly typical of the Magdalenian art of the Pyrenees (Sieveking 1979).

MAGDALENIAN CONTOURS DÉCOUPÉS During the Middle Magdalenian, small pendants in the form of animal heads were made (Clottes 1995, Taborin 2004). These pendants, known as contours découpés (Figure 1.1), were usually carved into the form of the head of a horse, although examples of heads of Pyrenean chamois (izard), ibex, bison (Taborin 2004) and deer (Clottes 1995) are also known. They are mainly found in the region of the Pyrenees (97 per cent of total; Sacchi 2003), but there are outliers as far as the Dordogne (at Laugerie-Basse) and

Forming Materials

35

Figure 1.1 Magdalenian contour découpé of horse’s head from Isturitz, PyrénéesAtlantiques, France (©RNM/Loïc Hamon)

Asturias (at La Viña). They are found as single examples on some sites (Le Tuc d’Audoubert, La Viña), but other sites, for example the ‘super sites’ of Mas d’Azil and Isturitz, have yielded great numbers (Buisson et al. 1996). Amongst this latter group are a cache or votive deposit of 20, recovered from a fissure at the site of Labastide (Taborin 2004, 118). The contours découpés were made on hyoid bones, usually taken from horses, a major focus of predation during the Pyrenean Middle Magdalenian, but occasionally also from bison or reindeer (Delporte and Mons 1977; Clottes 1995; Taborin 2004). The hyoid is a small bone of the throat, which in horses is connected to the temporal bone, larynx and pharynx. This bone is long and thin, rounded at one end, and at the other branching into two forks. All commentators on these pendants emphasise that the form of the hyoid bone suggests the shape of an animal’s head (Figure 1.2). Creating the pendants needed only a small amount of additional work: simple transverse sawing of the length, then rounding of the cut, produced the rough outline of an animal’s muzzle, with one of the forks serving as ears or horns (Delporte and Mons 1977; Taborin 2004). The form of the animal depended on the shape of the bone itself, but the artisan had two choices: either to use the long end as the muzzle, in which case it was elongated and thin, or use one of the forks, in which case the muzzle was thick and short. The piece then underwent further engraving to show the nostrils, mouth and eyes, while hair and musculature were produced in a more schematic

36

Forming Materials

Figure 1.2 A horse’s hyoid bone (Photograph: the author)

fashion (Taborin ibid.). The pendant was finally finished by perforation, usually through or around the ears or neck, although the eye was occasionally used (Buisson et al. 1996). The contours découpés were thus produced by a fairly straightforward set of technical actions: sawing, incising and smoothing, with the final perforation probably the most difficult part of the process. No single contour découpé was identical in appearance. The extensive analysis undertaken by Buisson et al. (1996) failed to distinguish stylistic groupings. It is probable that it was not simply individual species that were suggested by the shape of the hyoid bones, but particular animals. Taborin points out that people would be familiar with hyoid bones through routine butchery practices, yet it was only during this restricted time period that these bones suggested animal heads. Although she sees the form ultimately arising from the material itself, she argues that Magdalenian worldviews cannot be neglected: ‘The idea which seems to animate Palaeolithic behaviour is that nature justifies mythology because it carries within it, for those who know how to see it, the themes which express this mythology’ (Taborin 2004; 116). Although in many ways the form of the contours découpés arises from the material, as Taborin states, this was only the case for those who knew how to see it. Thus even in a case where the idea of form appears to be generated by a particular material, this particular property of the material is only evident through particular types of knowledge of material potential.

Forming Materials

37

CA VE AR T These ideas that materials can suggest forms are echoed in Magdalenian cave art. It has long been recognised that the shape of the cave wall was frequently an integral part of the design. Imperfections in the cave wall were used as animals’ eyes, while projections and irregularities became heads or entire bodies. This occurs from the earliest cave art, dating to between 32,000 to 30,000 years ago: at Chauvet Cave a projection from the cave wall was given features to become a horse’s head. However, like the contours découpés, this is a particularly common feature of Magdalenian art of the Pyrenees (Clottes 1989, 1995). In the cave of Altxerri (Guipúzcoa, Western Pyrenees), for example, a fissure and projection in the rock suggested a bird (Clottes 1997). The shape of the rock provided the beak, head and upper back. People enhanced this resemblance by carving the eye, chest and tail, complete with feathers. Similarly at Montespan, Le Tuc d’Audoubert, Les Trois Frères and Mas d’Azil, rocky projections suggested entire animals (Vialou 1986, Clottes 1989); whereas at Marsoulas, 42 per cent of depictions used the natural contours in the rock as part of an animal’s body (Plénier 1984). In his study of the Middle and Upper Magdalenian art of Niaux Cave (Ariège), Clottes states that ‘the form never imposes itself. … it is the artist. … who sees there this or that animal’ (Clottes 1995, 143). Many of these humanly enhanced stony animals are found in the deepest parts of caves. Clottes has described how the art of the Middle Magdalenian was particularly focused on the production of images in the parts of caves that daylight never reached. As much as 70 per cent of the parietal art of the Middle and Upper Magdalenian can be found in the dark, compared with 57.5 per cent for all Upper Palaeolithic art (a figure obviously affected by the increased weathering of art exposed to the elements) (Clottes 1997). Of Magdalenian painted caves in the Ariége, Massat, Niaux, le Tuc d’Audoubert and Les Trois Frères have all or most of their art in the dark (Vialou 1986). Although some of these figures are only just beyond the reach of the daylight, others are found substantial distances from the entrances. Mile-long caves were routinely explored in the Middle Magdalenian (Clottes 1997). Of Pyrenean caves, Niaux has 2.5km of decorated galleries; Montespan has 2km; Bédeilhac 1km; Réseau Clastres 1.2km (Clottes 1989). Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998) have made the point that in the flickering lamplight in which the deep caves were viewed, the walls would come alive with moving shadows and animals would appear to emerge from the rock (see also Dowson 2009). Clottes and Lewis-Williams interpret caves as entrances to the underworld and suggest that that the flint tools, animal bone and beads often found forced into cracks in the rock were offerings to this spirit world (Bégouën et al. 1996; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998; Clottes 2007). In this context the rocky animals would be understood as spirit animals trying to emerge from the underworld, and the act of painting and completing them would encourage them to emerge.

38

Forming Materials

EM ER GI NG F O RMS That forms appear to arise from particular materials is a common theme in the Middle Magdalenian of the Pyrenees. However I do not want to suggest, as phenomenologists would, that this case study reveals a more fundamental truth, that forms invariably emerge in the process of skilled bodily engagement with raw materials, that technical acts are a process of revealing the world. Rather these material interactions depend on a complex, contingent interplay between the properties of particular materials, particular forms and understandings. Nor do I intend to argue that this very particular way of viewing the relationship between material and form was universal in the Magdalenian. There are many things that were made during the Middle Magdalenian where material does not suggest form, or a more complex relationship is indicated. Rondelles (Figure 1.3) are an excellent example of an occasion during this period where material does not suggest form. Rondelles are small circles of decorated, perforated bone that, like contours découpés, are highly characteristic of the Middle Magdalenian of the Pyrenees (Clottes 1995; Sacchi 2003; Taborin 2004). The rondelles were made on scapulae (shoulder blades): an example from Arudy shows the negative removals of three bone circles. They were produced through making a series of incisions on the back of the scapula. These were deepened and finally the rondelle was freed from the scapula through percussion or leverage (Delporte and Mons 1977).

Figure 1.3 Magdalenian rondelle with engraving of bovid from Mas d’Azil, Ariège, France (©RNM/Loïc Hamon)

Forming Materials

39

The rondelle, when removed, was almost perfectly circular in form, rather than being roughly cut out and then finished. This suggests that a template, perhaps a circular pebble, was traced around to produce the final form (ibid., 74). The rondelles thus harnessed the properties of scapulae, in that the thinness of the bone was important for rendering the final form, but the circular form derived from a physical template, the pebble, rather than being suggested by the material itself. These varied relationships between material and form can be seen in other media: flat, elongated bone supports, such as ribs, often suggested decoration of animals in file. However animals were also deformed and stretched to fit them onto particular supports. A good example is the head of an ibex from Gourdan, sculpted in relief. In order to fit the animal on the cylindrical bone support the head was elongated, the nose enlarged and the ears and horns carved in an incorrect anatomical position (Delporte and Mons 1977). We see here a complex relationship between material and form. The form of many things was suggested by the shape of the material. We are here reminded of Heidegger’s argument that materials, rather than being a formless mass on which mental projections are imposed, do themselves have forms and these, in turn, can suggest the use made of the material (Heidegger 1971). However in the case of the contours découpés this form was only suggested in this period and geographical area (returning us to Taborin’s argument that hyoid bones only looked like horse heads for those who knew how to see them). In the case of cave art, projections in caves suggested animals in different areas and periods, although Clottes and Lewis-Williams would also argue here that profound understandings of the world generated these enhancements of the cave wall. This insight is perhaps neglected in Ingold’s account of basket-making; the form of the basket arises not just because of the properties of the material, but because of the artisan’s knowledge that these are the properties of the materials.

A U R I G N A CI AN BE AD S My second case study represents a contrast with the contours découpés. In the early Aurignacian period in southwest France, from around 33,000 years ago, mammoth tusks were made into tiny round beads known as basketshaped beads. Here the massive curved and pointed original form of the mammoth tusk appears in no way related to the final form of the bead. A standardised form and very rigid schema opératoire appear important (White 1989, 1997, 2007). Here we have what appears to be a very different configuration of materials and form, but must this be conceptualised as an imposition of cultural form on matter? Beads are just one of a series of artefacts that appear in Europe at the start of the early Upper Palaeolithic and are viewed by many archaeologists as marking ‘the human revolution’ and the appearance of ‘behaviourally

40

Forming Materials

modern’ humans in Europe (see Chapter 4). A variety of materials were employed for the manufacture of Aurignacian beads: teeth, bone, antler, shell and stone. Teeth were a common choice, encompassing a range of species: red deer, fallow deer, reindeer, mammoth (tusk), ibex, bovid, horse, elk, pig, beaver, badger, fox, lynx, bear, hyena, lion, wolf, human and shark (White 1997; Taborin 2004; Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). Of these, red deer, fox and, to a lesser extent, bovids were the most common (Taborin 2004), but with important regional differences. Fox canines were dominant in France, Belgium, Germany and Russia with smaller quantities of cervid canines, whereas in Spain and Italy red deer vestigal canines were most common and fox canines absent (White 1993, 280). With the exception of mammoth tusks, which were carved into different forms, teeth tended to be simply perforated, although some were decorated with crosses or incisions (Taborin 2004). Shells were also extensively employed. A recent survey by Vanhaeren and d’Errico (2006) discovered 62 different shell types used in bead manufacture. Of these, 16 species were restricted to the Mediterranean Sea, 5 to the Atlantic and 12 to fossil outcrops, 23 were found in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean and one species was found in both fluvial environments and fossil outcrops. As with animal teeth, there are regional differences, with shells representing the main material employed in Italy, but absent in Germany. Shells were widely exchanged, with distances of over 300km regularly reported: Mediterranean shells are found on sites in Austria and southeastern France, while Atlantic shells are present on French Mediterranean sites (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006, 1118). Finally there is the category of ‘formed beads’; these could be made from ivory, bone, antler or stones (often soft and brilliantly coloured), such as limestone, schist, chlorite, talc, calcite, haematite, amber, jet, pyrite and lignite (White 1995, 2007). A variety of forms are present, often made interchangeably across these different material. Small globular or drop-shaped forms predominate (Taborin 2004), although larger and more complex forms are also present: amongst the most elaborate are stone or ivory rings, ‘diadems’ and carved animals. Forms and manufacturing techniques vary across Europe: bilobate beads are characteristic of Germany, basket-shaped beads of Southern France and Italy (White 1995, 2007; Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). In addition, different manufacturing techniques have been noted for ivory beads in southern France, Belgium and Germany (White 1995).

BA SKE T- S HAPE D B EA DS Randall White’s work in southwest France, initially focused on three sites in the Castlemerle Valley, Dordogne (Abri Castanet, Abri Blanchard and la Souquette) and more recently incorporating Brassempouy (Landes) and Isturitz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), has highlighted the importance of beads in the early

Forming Materials

41

Figure 1.4 Aurignacian basket-shaped beads made from ivory and stone (Photo: Randall White)

Aurignacian (White 1989, 1997, 2003, 2004, 2007). The most common bead type on French early Aurignacian sites is a form known as basket-shaped beads (Figure 1.4). Nine hundred of these are known from the Castlemerle sites alone. These are small, ranging in size from 2 to 12 millimetres with an average size of 6 millimetres (White 2007). The size and uniformity of these beads, too small to be individually visible, suggests they were grouped together in numbers, and probably sewn onto clothing. The context of many beads recovered from Palaeolithic sites suggests they were worn on everyday clothing and lost during routine activities (Scheer 1995; Taborin 2004). All the Castlemerle sites appear to have been important foci for bead production. At all three sites, beads have been recovered in large numbers. These were made of ivory, shell, animal teeth (mostly fox, then deer, but also hyena and bovid), (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006) and soft stones (talc, chlorite, calcite, lignite and haematite), some of which also have exotic origins (White 2003, 2007). In addition to yielding one of the richest early Aurignacian assemblages of worked organic material, the shell bead assemblage is also noteworthy. The shells employed mainly derive from the Atlantic, but Mediterranean species are also present, as well as fossil shells from geological beds along the Atlantic coast and the Loire valley. This range of species has led Taborin to label the Castlemerle Valley ‘an Aurignacian crossroads’ (2004, 81). Evidence of all stages of the production of basket-shaped beads were found during the old excavations at the sites (White 1989), whereas new excavations at Castanet, using techniques designed to recover beads and their manufacturing debris, have yielded as many manufacturing by-products as beads (White 2007). La Souquette has a larger quantity of pieces in the final stage of production, perhaps suggesting caching, or that pieces were preferentially finished here. The emphasis on production at the Castelmerle sites

42

Forming Materials

contrasts with two other recently excavated assemblages recently examined by White (2007), Grotte des Hyènes, Brassempouy (Landes) and Isturitz (Pyrenees). At Brassempouy, production debris is present, but at much lower levels than Castanet, suggesting that repair and maintenance of clothing may have been taking place. At Isturitz, manufacturing debris is virtually absent, with the exception of traces of amber working. These contrasts, White (2007, 296) suggests, may be related to potential seasonal differences in the use of the sites, Brassempouy and Isturitz having evidence of summer visits, while Castanet seems to have been occupied in winter. Almost all the basket-shaped beads at the Castlemerle sites were made either from mammoth ivory or imported talc, which comes from at least 100km away in either the Massif Central or the Pyrenees (White 1989). Mammoth ivory was however the favoured material at the Castlemerle sites; finished pieces in ivory outnumber those in soft stone by a factor of between 6:1 (Blanchard) and 10:1 (Castanet). This contrasts with Brassempouy, situated closer to the Pyrenees, where soft stone beads (chlorite, talc, calcite) are slightly more common than ivory examples. There appears to have been substantial investment, not just in the procurement of material, but also in the manufacture of these beads. Experiments suggest between one and three hours per bead, depending on material, with ivory beads taking around three hours to manufacture (White 1995, 2007).

Mammoth Ivory The ivory used in the Upper Palaeolithic derived from mammoth tusks. These can be extremely large: examples over four metres in length and 91kg in weight have been recorded. More usual is a length of between 2.4m and 2.7m and a weight of c.45kg for males and an average of between 1.5 and 1.8m in length and 9–11kg for females (Lister and Bahn 2007). Tusks are composed mainly of dentine; at the centre of the top part of the tusk is the pulp cavity, with the central nerve canal leading from this to the tip (White 1995). Around the tusk itself is a layer of cementum, nearly a centimetre thick. The cementum does not have the properties of true ivory, rather it appears like a more compact bone (Poplin 1995, 20). Mammoth ivory is off-white, gleams when polished and is surprisingly warm to the touch (White 1995). Fresh mammoth ivory is very difficult to work. As Taborin (2004, 121) states: ‘Each stage [of the manufacturing process] demands connaissance, strength and determination. It is necessary to want [the finished product] very much in order to justify such a long and difficult task’. Experiments suggest that fresh tusks (or at least relatively fresh permafrost material) are extremely difficult to break into and reduce into useable parts (White 1995; Hahn 1995b; Christiansen

Forming Materials

43

1998). Ivory has a complex structure, formed by specialised cells called odontoblasts. New dentine is produced along the lining of the pulp cavity; as dentine is produced the odontoblasts migrate, leaving behind tracks called Schreger lines. These radiate out from the pulp cavity obliquely towards the tip of the tusk (White 1995, 33). This Schreger pattern cross-cuts concentric rings or laminae which represent growth interfaces on superimposed cones of ivory. This structure binds tightly together when fresh (Poplin 1995) and is extremely difficult to work. However sub-fossil ivory, from long-dead mammoths, is much more amenable to technical action. Over hundreds or even thousands of years, dentinal collagen breaks down and the different laminae become areas of structural weakness. This affects primarily the outer laminae, while the inner part of the tusk, closest to the dentine cavity retains its integrity and is almost impossible to work. As the tusk desiccates, fractures appear between the concentric rings. In addition, cracks also appear perpendicular to the concentric rings (Figure 1.5). This can produce curved segments around 5mm thick, which are sometimes found in Aurignacian contexts (Poplin 1995, 19). Though produced as desiccation fractures, the ivory within these fragments is strong. All technologists of ivory agree that sub-fossil ivory is much easier to work and thus likely to be the predominant material used in the Aurignacian (Hahn 1995b, White 1989, 1995). Experiments demonstrate that fresh ivory is extremely difficult to break into and does not split along the concentric laminae (White 1995). Nor can ivory be knapped like stone (Poplin 1995). Striking mammoth ivory with a stone hammer produces a very similar effect to hitting hardwood – indeed the similarities between ivory and wood have been remarked on (Hahn 1995b; Poplin 1995). Heating and boiling can soften fresh tusks, but there is no evidence for this before the Gravettian, where it was used at Sungir to straighten whole tusks (White 1995) and possibly at Brassempouy, to produce desiccation fractures (Thiault 2001). Soaking ivory has only superficial effects, though it is useful for facilitating the finishing of an object (White 1995, 37). One of the fundamental Aurignacian technologies for exploiting ivory appears to have been splitting and wedging (Knecht 1991). This cannot be achieved on fresh ivory. Only highly desiccated tusks show emergent fractures that could be exploited to create long workable splinters (White 1995). These fractures could be pushed apart by leverage and inserting wedges (Poplin 1995).

Basket-shaped beads are highly standardised and were made in the same way, despite differences in the properties of the various materials that were employed (White 2007). Pencil-shaped rods, either of ivory or soft stone, were created; these were then grooved into segments 1–2cm long and then

44

Forming Materials

Figure 1.5 Fragment of mammoth tusk showing desiccation fractures (Photo: David Gelsthrope, reproduced with permission of Manchester Museum)

snapped to create cylindrical blanks (Figure 1.6). These blanks were thinned at one end to form a stem, a perforation was gouged out and the bead was finally polished with haematite to finish it. White (1997, 105) suggests that the production of long ivory rods, which appears to have been undertaken

Figure 1.6 The châine opératoire of basket-shaped beads (Image: Randall White)

Forming Materials

45

through splitting and wedging, is not naturally suggested by structure of ivory itself (a very intractable material, see Box 1.2) and is in fact difficult to achieve. Working ivory in this way could only ever be a struggle against the material. White suggests beads were manufactured in this counter-intuitive way because people wanted to achieve standardisation (White 1989). I would take White’s observations further and suggest that the beads were manufactured in this counter-intuitive way because the structure of the material was considered less important than the form that people wanted to achieve. This form was be realised in several materials, using the same manufacturing technique, even though it is a difficult technique to impose onto ivory. So we seem to have a technology that ignores the mechanical properties of materials and imposes a particular technique in order to realise a particular form. This disdain for the properties of ivory in Early Upper Palaeolithic bead manufacture is perhaps characteristic of technologies involving organic materials more generally at this time. As Gaudzinski and colleagues state in relation to ivory use in the German Aurignacian: ‘Only rarely is it possible to detect a connection between raw material choice and the finished product’ (Gaudzinski et al. 2005: 187). T H E IM P O S I T I O N O F F O R M Here, at face value, we have a material–form relationship in Aurignacian ivory basket-shaped bead manufacture which is diametrically opposed to the Magdalenian contours découpés. Whereas the form of the latter emerged from the material, the shape of the basket-shaped beads was imposed on a recalcitrant material, through an unsuitable technique, in order to realise a standardised, idealised form. However, is this an oversimplification? We saw that the production of the contours découpés was dependent on the recognition of hyoid bones as horses’ heads, rather than being a simple logical product of the material itself. Similarly I would suggest that the process of basket-shaped bead manufacture is rather more complex than the mechanical imposition of a mental image. To begin with, what is the imposed image? For a start this does not appear to be an abstract sign existing in the mind, rather, the basket-shaped beads mimic something else: White has pointed out their marked resemblance to the sea shell Cyclope neritea (White 2004). Taborin has that suggested a narrow range of favoured forms were employed for Upper Palaeolithic beads, including small circular and teardrop shapes. These forms are found in a variety of materials – teeth, stone, shell – some of which were humanly modified to achieve this form, others which retained the original shape of the material. Just as round beads can be shells or manufactured stone or ivory (basket-shaped), drop beads can be teeth (red deer vestigal canines), shells or manufactured beads. Almost all German Gravettian manufactured beads, for example, are drop-shaped and are

46

Forming Materials

frequently, as a result, described as red deer canine skeuomorphs (Scheer 1995, 2001). Perhaps then we can move beyond a model which sees a direct correspondence between mental image and sign to an approach whereby the form refers to something else. Also significant in considering material and form in the manufacture of basket-shaped beads are relations of surface and depth. Unlike the contours découpés where modifications were mainly through surface incisions and much of the form of the material was retained, the production of basket-shaped beads involved a complete reworking and rescaling of the original form of the mammoth tusks. A new surface was established through the shaping of the tusk and fixed through the use of abrasion to polish it. This gave the bead a lustrous surface and, importantly, related it back to a class of favoured materials used for Aurignacian beads. Talc, shell and teeth also have lustrous qualities and these, along with ivory, were used for 95 per cent of all French early Aurignacian personal ornaments. As White (1997) points out, ivory needs to be polished to bring out lustre and so the very act of polishing ivory itself represents a mimicry of surface effects perceived elsewhere in the world. The ability of ivory to produce this shell-like or tooth-like surface effect was perhaps what allowed the emergence of its form. As a result the form of the basket-shaped bead may have been perceived as latent within the ivory, no matter that its realisation was extremely difficult to achieve.

CONCLUSIONS In her discussion of binding technologies in the Pacific, Susanne Küchler (2002) draws a contrast between knotting (exemplified by the knotted designs, carved into wood, of the New Ireland malanggan figures) and looping (drawing on MacKenzie’s (1991) work on Telefol bilum bags). The construction process and form of the bilum, she suggests, are inseparable from the selected looping technique.2 In contrast, for the malanggan figures, technical execution is subordinate to the configuration of the surface design of these artworks: Rather than ‘finding’ the design of the figure in the wood during carving, the geometric contours of the image are drawn in sand or onto the wood that is used for carving, thus allowing improved or innovative techniques of fabrication only minimal scope to influence the resulting product. (Küchler 2002, 77) It is the particular design of a malanggan that can be sold or lent and the idea of its form, given value through dreaming, is extremely important. This contrasts with bilum which are exchanged as complete artefacts and valued because of their skilled execution. However, this does not mean that the

Forming Materials

47

malanggan can be conceived as the imposition of abstract form upon matter, nor can the term ‘template’ be used to describe the production of these figures; rather Küchler uses this term for the bilum bags. This is because the learned looping technique selected generates a particular form in a given set of spatial and temporal circumstances. With the malanggan the situation is more complicated. The designs are described as generated through the inherent patterns of binding, but they also, of necessity, embody fractal qualities, because malanggan designs can be memorised, split and divided between parties in land claims. Their design is thus embedded in contractual relations over land. Ultimately Küchler argues that neither the concept of the template nor the idea that the organisation of the designs is inherent in the structure of the practical operations of knotting is adequate for thinking about the malanggan figures. Rather she borrows from biology an idea used to explain the apparent organisation of non-linear organic systems: Lovelock (1989) argues that what appears self-organising is so because of internal systems that are themselves co-ordinated and purposeful. In this vein, the knot is important because it represents the trace of such a system; the pattern exists because the system has agency. Conceived in this way the loop and the knot become more similar; both are generated through a system of purposeful agency, one through processual agency, the other through patterned agency. Returning to the Upper Palaeolithic case-studies, at one level we could relate the contours découpés to the bilum bags, in that in both cases the form of the artefact is generated through the interrelationship of the properties of the material and the technical act. Similarly the basket-shaped beads and the malanggan are both generated through an emphasis on form or design which overrides concern with technique. Yet at a closer level these acts of fabrication are fundamentally dissimilar: Küchler argues ultimately for similarities between knots and loops because both are generated through systemic agency, the difference being in the relative importance accorded to either technical process or pattern. Neither of the technical acts that generated the contours découpés or the beads can be conceived of in this way, because in neither can systemic agency be glimpsed – neither is generated through repetitive gestures of the technical act nor the generative organisation of pattern. Instead forms in both the Palaeolithic cases emerge through particular surface effects – shapes, visual qualities or textures – that permit them to resemble other things. They differ in the weight accorded to the original material form. The two Palaeolithic case-studies perhaps do not present as many contrasts as first impressions might suggest. Both present greater complexities than is immediately obvious and neither can be used to argue for a straightforward relation between form and material, whereby one, unequivocally, has primacy over the other. These two studies urge a situationally specific reading of each technical act, one which takes heed of the original

48

Forming Materials

form of the material; its immediate and latent properties; the ease of working; technical expertise; ways of knowing and understanding and so on. I would argue that neither the techno-psychological school nor phenomenological accounts have thus far taken all these complexities into consideration. The former have neglected the past perception of raw materials, focusing instead on their present understandings of mechanical properties generated through experimentation. This has led to insufficient emphasis on materials and a focus instead on operational schema and mental operations. Phenomenological approaches have attempted to break down the dualisms of previous approaches, but at the expense of neglecting people’s understandings of the properties of materials and the idea of form. Form remains a useful analytical category. However form in these cases is not an abstract concept in the mind of the maker. It relates to the material under consideration (drawing on the original material form) or the intersection of the material and the rhythm and energy of the technical act, or of the generative form of the pattern itself. It is an outcome of the technical act. But form relates also to other things that exist outside the technical act. So rondelles connect to circular pebbles, horses’ heads to hyoid bones, basket-shaped beads to shells. The forms considered in the case studies are all perhaps then skeuomorphs to a certain extent and the concept of skeuomorphism needs to be reconsidered in this light (see Chapter 4). Forms in this sense are becomings and the artisan and material variously become the catalyst for the transformation from one particular configuration of surface and depths to another.

2

Animal Materials

The introduction and Chapter 1 have focused on broad issues central to a study of materials: a reconceptualisation of materials and their properties, and a study of the relation between material and form. The following two chapters look at a small number of materials themselves in more detail. In this, the first of these two chapters I will investigate two different materials that originally derived from animal bodies: antlers that once belonged to red deer, and tusks that once belonged to mammoths. We have encountered mammoth ivory in the previous chapter, in the material–form interaction of basket-shaped bead manufacture. However, the origin of the ivory, as part of a once living animal, has thus far been neglected. Similarly antlers also derive from an animate being, a creature with its own life history, prior to the incorporation of its body parts into technical interactions. The nature/culture divide has represented a fundamental barrier to understanding the use of animal bodies as materials. Lying on the side of nature, animal bones, antlers, horn and tusks – as we have seen is the case with other materials – have been viewed as the passive recipients of imposed, cultural form. In archaeological accounts the various products of animal bodies are rarely distinguished, despite having very different textures, appearances, mechanical properties and life histories. Beyond this, the animals themselves, whose bodies become the material, are almost entirely ignored. The species employed is occasionally mentioned, but little about its age, sex, life history and how it made the transition from animal to material is recorded. How the transition from animal to material happens and its implications are the subject of this chapter. Since the late 1980s both anthropologists and archaeologists have questioned the nature/culture dualism that sees animals as either natural resources or passive recipients of human cultural projections. These historically particular, western articulations of the relationship between people and animals do not make sense for many non-western groups. Amongst these societies, animals may be seen as persons, relatives or supernatural beings. If we take these different understandings seriously, radically new interpretations of animal objects can be achieved.

50

Animal Materials

A N I M A LS A S M A T E R IA LS Archaeological approaches to the study of animals in past cultures have – as amongst anthropology and the social sciences more generally – taken two opposing forms. The first of these, the school of environmental archaeology (incorporating palaeoeconomists, processualists and Marxist approaches) has viewed animals as natural resources. The particular varieties of plants and animals harvested (seen as a product of availability in the environment) and the mode of exploitation is considered to determine the social forms that developed (e.g. Mellars 1985). In more recent cultural ecology articulations of this approach, society is seen as an ‘add on’ or constraint that makes people deviate from optimal ‘natural’ behaviour (e.g. Mithen 1990). The material focus of the environmental school has tended to be animal bones from archaeological sites. The second school of symbolic or structural archaeology sees symbolic meaning imposed on the natural world, or the natural world as a model for human social institutions (e.g. Laming-Emperaire 1962; Leroi-Gourhan 1982). These approaches have proceeded through analysis of very different sets of materials, mainly art and representations. These positions, privileging alternatively nature or culture, nonetheless work by perpetuating the dualism. This has had disastrous consequences for analyses of worked animal materials, where conceptualisation through this dualism has resulted in incomplete analysis. Things made from animal remains tend to be dealt with in one of three different ways. First they may be grouped with butchered bone and discussed in animal bone reports (Rowley-Conwy in press). Here animal bone specialists tend to view animal artefacts as epiphenomenal (although making explicit the relationship of animal materials to hunting and butchery practices) (Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988). Alternatively they may be analysed as cultural artefacts or art objects only (e.g. Nash 1998). Here material culture specialists have neglected their animality (although see Boyd 1996). Finally their natural parts may be separated from their cultural parts and discussed in separate sections of a site report, necessitating a certain amount of analytical gymnastics: ‘The exploitation of the bones for human purposes is dealt with in another part of the report and will only be referred to [in the report on butchered bone] to the extent that it is connected with the biology of the animals concerned’ (Fraser and King 1954, 70). In Latour’s terms, these analyses might be thought of as acts of ‘purification’, a work of separating of people and things, which is the project of modernity (Latour 1993). Even social approaches to technology, based on studies of the châine opératoire, tend to commence their analysis with a clean, disembodied bone, antler, horn or tusk. Specialists in animal materials are acutely aware both of how artefacts relate to an animal’s body and to butchery practices (David 2003), yet these intimate knowledges are omitted from published accounts.

Animal Materials

51

These approaches are thus guilty of neglecting the first phase of the châine opératoire, the animal’s growth and development – probably because this impulse emanates from the animal itself. Lying on the side of nature, animals cannot be imagined to contribute to a cultural form. This is true even of more recent châine opératoire approaches (although see Coupaye 2009 on yam growing). Dobres, for example, who very explicitly problematises dualisms, completely neglects the animality of the organic artefacts she studies, to the extent of failing to distinguish between bone and antler, or even the animals involved (see Dobres 2000, 188–209). The divorce of the living animal from the artefact produced from its remains is problematic when we come to think about the significance of animal materials. Perhaps we need to learn from Amerindian ontologies where ideas of production ex nihilo are rare; instead things and beings originate as a transformation of ‘something else’ (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 477); what exactly that something else, the animal, is, being the point in question here. What is needed is a ‘symmetrical’ analysis (Latour 1993; Law 1994), a faithful story (Haraway 2003) of the animal material that works through focusing neither on animal behaviour nor on a finished artefact, but on the process of human–animal interaction.

HUMANS, ANIMALS AND THINGS Recent work in the social sciences has attempted to move beyond the dualist problematic towards a ‘monist’ approach (Deleuze and Guatarri 1999). Although theoretical approaches (phenomenology, actor-network-theory, queer theory, Deleuzian rhizomatics, etc.) take different forms, all tend to view the nature/culture dualism as historically specific, politically dubious and a barrier to understanding. An important impulse towards a monist approach has come from ethnographers who work amongst peoples for whom a culture/nature divide has little meaning. These accounts show how natural beings can be animate and enter into relationships with people as friends, relations or spiritual beings (Descola 1994). Beyond the simple observation that non-westerners do not share our particular articulation of nature and culture, the shift in recent anthropology from questions of epistemology to ontology (Viveiros de Castro 2004; Henare et al. 2007) has generated a number of broad accounts, designed to illuminate both western and non-western worlds. These highlight some of the differences between what broadly might be termed animist ontologies and western naturalism (Descola 1999; Ingold 2000). In this way Descola (1992) describes animism as a ‘mode of identification’ that attributes to natural beings (animals and things) human-like dispositions and social relations. Descola categorises animist relationships between human and animals as various reciprocal, predatory or protectionary, with the two former more typical of hunter-gatherer groups. Ingold has described

52

Animal Materials

reciprocal relations based on his knowledge of societies of the circumpolar north, where a complex network of reciprocal interdependence, based on the give and take of substance, care and vital force – the latter often envisaged as one or several kinds of spirit or soul – extends throughout the cosmos, linking human, animal and all other forms of life. (Ingold 2000, 113) Predatory relations are described both by Fausto (2007) and Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004), the latter working through the concept of ‘perspectivism’ where the relative position in predator/prey relations determines how each species views the other (so for prey animals like tapir, whereas other tapir will look like humans, humans will look like jaguar; for predators such as jaguar, humans will appear as tapir or white-lipped peccaries). The fact that indigenous groups fail to erect a similar nature/culture divide to certain westerners does not mean that all animals, all humans and all things are seen as equivalent or that the relationship between people and animals are articulated in the same way. Although broadly animist ontologies may have relevance for understanding prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the relationship needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. The ahistoricity of anthropological accounts should not be confused with a genealogical relationship between past hunter-gatherers and contemporary animist groups, nor should generalisation be confused with a transcendental huntergatherer ontology. Anthropological work has revealed, on a broad scale, contrasts in the various ways nature-cultures can be articulated and also that the local emphases of these are specific. Amerindian cosmologies for example do not attribute personhood equally to animals – the emphasis seems to be on those species that perform key symbolic and practical roles, such as the great predators and the principal prey species (Viveiros de Castro 2004). Both anthropological and more broadly social scientific accounts have tended to work through contrasting ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ or ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ ontologies to better understand both. Although these accounts commence with caveats, they have the effect of reifying these oppositions. A keen analysis of the nature-cultures of past groups is needed, to properly understand how the intricacies of these relationships are configured. We also need to go beyond this: just as the complex ways in which personhood is configured has been recognised in recent years (Strathern 1988; Busby 1997; LiPuma 1998), so the complexity of ‘animalhood’ also needs attention. Animal identities emerge individually and collectively in interactions with conspecifics and other species, their activities are guided by age and gender and change over their lifecycle. A truly symmetrical account of animal materials needs to replicate the care with which both ethologists and

Animal Materials

53

indigenous people distinguish the animals they interact with and (as has Donna Haraway in her recent study of companion animals) to pay attention to the process of human–animal relationships that are mutually constitutive (Haraway 2003). The human–animal relationships of mutual care and attention that Haraway describes are mirrored in Rival’s (1999) study of the Huaorani Amerindians. Amongst the Huaorani, hunting is based on a profound knowledge of animal life. Monkeys are particularly of interest and people have a detailed knowledge of the individuals comprising a monkey troop. People plan which animal to kill in advance of a hunting trip, although if the animal is considered to ‘speak with its eyes’ and plead for its life it will be spared. This attention is mutual, not one-sided; the Huaorani know that the monkeys learn and modify their behaviour in response to them. Rival (ibid., 150) argues the interest in monkeys and the woolly monkey in particular is because their territoriality and social habits are seen as similar to humans. In contrast, people have little interest in the social lives of whitelipped peccaries. These peccaries, which roam in large groups of a hundred or more are imagined as anonymous herds. Unlike other Amerindian groups, the Huaorani only hunt peccaries when they approach settlements. Then they are hunted with spears, like human enemies, whereas woolly monkeys are only ever hunted with blow pipes. As Rival notes, people grow and develop through knowledge of these animals, and vice versa. Material culture is also central to mediating these interactions.

TO W AR DS A S YM ME TR IC AL A P P R O AC H TO A NI MA L M AT E R I A L S Over the past two decades, archaeologists have begun to recognise the very different understandings other peoples have of the human–animal relationship. Archaeologists working in the mediaeval period have begun to argue for the integration of faunal analysis with material culture studies (O’Connor 2002; Pluskowski 2002, 2004, 2007). The material implications of different worldviews have also begun to be explored. Jordan, for example, has undertaken ethnoarchaeological work in order to find material correlates of a northern hunter-gatherer cosmology (Jordan 2003). Amongst the Siberian Khanty – as amongst many hunter-gatherer groups – animal remains have to be treated with respect; as a result bear bones are deposited in deep pools, elk bones are returned to the forest. Jordan suggests archaeologists should seek patterns of structured deposition in similar contexts. But beyond this, the implications of very different understandings of animals for the use of bone, antler, and tusks have been rarely considered. A symmetrical analysis must follow the webs of human–animal interaction more tenaciously: the mutual awareness and encounters of people and

54

Animal Materials

particular animals, the knowledge that allows the collection of antler, the human and animal complicity in predation, the partition of animal bodies and sharing of meat and materials which are then brought into a more intimate relationship with the human body. This is not simply a question of extending a biographical approach (Kopytoff 1986) to an animal artefact back to encompass the life of an animal. Things do not just move through different contexts, as if cultural context were something added on to an essential material presence. Rather I suggest that things drag the effects of past encounters with them and present opportunities for future action. Two case studies will be presented in this chapter. The first of these explores human–animal interactions mediated through barbed points made from red deer antler, dwelling in particular on those discovered at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire. The second focuses on human–mammoth relations during the Early Upper Palaeolithic and the effect these had on the manufacture of things from ivory. The point of these two studies is to highlight the very different ways in which these animal artefacts work; depending on the animals involved, the nature of human–animal interaction, the history of these relationships and the particular nature-culture articulations through which these interactions take place.

A N I M A L M A T E R I A L S IN E A R L Y M E S O L I T H I C B R I T A I N : B A R B E D P O I N T S A N D RE D D E E R M AS K S Barbed points (Figure 2.1) are the most frequently recovered early Mesolithic organic tool type. Unlike both earlier and later examples, early Mesolithic points are always uni-serial and made on slender blanks (Bonsall and Smith 1992). They vary considerably both in length (8–38cm) and in the number of barbs represented (between 2 and 28). This range suggests they were used in a variety of different ways. The small examples could have been hafted on arrow shafts, whereas the larger examples would have been used as spearheads. One example from Star Carr has a hole in the base indicating use as a harpoon, while two examples from the same site were recovered in an arrangement suggesting use as a leister (Clark 1954). They were thus presumably used in pursuit of a range of terrestrial and aquatic prey. With the exception of examples from Wandsworth and Waltham Abbey, neither of which were found in an archaeological context (Bonsall and Smith 1992), and two examples from sites in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire (Moore 1950, Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003), all known British barbed points come from the site of Star Carr, which is also located in the Vale of Pickering. Here 193 points were found, all made from red deer antler (Clark 1954; Mellars and Dark 1998; Dark et al. 2006, Elliott pers.

Animal Materials

55

Figure 2.1 Barbed points from Star Carr, North Yorkshire (reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press)

comm.). In addition to the points, the excellent organic preservation at Star Carr resulted in the recovery of considerable quantities of butchered bone, a range of animal artefacts and over 140 antlers and antler fragments, the by-products of barbed point manufacture. This represents a vast range of materialised human–animal interactions, with the potential for tracing a vast network of technical relationships. Furthermore Clark’s original report and subsequent work on the site (e.g. Clark 1972; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988) have left a strong legacy of interpretation based on consideration of animal behaviour. This creates the potential for a symmetrical archaeology.

56

Animal Materials

Star Carr Star Carr is one of a number of Early Mesolithic sites (dating in the main to the second half of the tenth millennium BP) that are located in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, near to the coastal town of Scarborough. These sites were originally situated on the shore of a palaeolake, Lake Flixton, and on islands in the middle of the lake (Figure 2.2). The lake has long since gone, swamped by peat development; but the area remains waterlogged, resulting in the preservation of organic material, a rare situation for a site of this date. Star Carr was excavated between 1949 and 1951 and yielded a dazzling range of Early Mesolithic material culture: 21 antler frontlets, 191 barbed antler points, elk antler mattocks and various bone tools, 33 beads, a wooden paddle, a wooden platform, beads, animal bones, stone tools and manufacturing debris. Clark interpreted Star Carr as a residential base camp that had been occupied in the winter months by four or five families. Since the excavation publication, the site has been the focus of numerous re-interpretations (e.g. Clark 1972; Caulfield 1978; Jacobi 1978; Pitts 1979; Andresen et al. 1981; Price 1982; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988; Carter 1997, 1998; Mellars and Dark 1998; Pollard 2000; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003; Chatterton 2003). The main thrust of these new contributions has been to revise the season of occupation to late spring/summer (though the most recent contribution to this debate by Carter (1997, 1998) argues once again for winter occupation) and to point out that the representation of faunal parts would be unusual for a residential base camp (Caulfield 1978; Jacobi 1978; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988; Carter 1997). Legge and RowleyConwy (1988), comparing the Star Carr faunal signature with patterns noted by Binford in his Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology (1978), have suggested that the site is more likely to have been a hunting camp. Further small-scale excavations at Star Carr during the mid-late 1980s by the Vale of Pickering Research Trust uncovered a wooden platform on the edge of the lake and suggested the site was more complex than originally recognised. These excavations revealed that Clark had only excavated a small portion of the original area of occupation, while macroscopic charcoal evidence indicated that Star Carr had been repeatedly revisited for over 200 years (Mellars and Dark 1998). This work suggests that imposing a single explanation for the site is likely to be over simplistic. Ongoing excavations at the site (Conneller et al. 2010) indicate the wooden platform stretches at least 20m to the east of where it was originally observed. These excavations are also the first to investigate extensively the dry land occupation zone of the site.

Animal Materials

57

9

10 11

8

12 2 7

1

13 3 4 6 5

0

500

1,000

2,000 Meters

Early Mesolithic sites around Lake Flixton. 1. Star Carr, 2. Flixton 9, 3. VP-D, 4. VP-E, 5. Flixton School, 6. Barry’s Island, 7. Lingholme Farm 8. Cayton Carr, 9. Seamer Carr C, 10. Seamer Carr K, 11. Seamer Carr D, 12. No Name Hill, 13. Flixton Island

Figure 2.2 Early Mesolithic sites around Lake Flixton, North Yorkshire (Image: Barry Taylor)

TECHNOLOGIES OF BARBED POINT MANUFACTURE The majority of barbed points at Star Carr were made from red deer antler. Antlers grow and are shed over a yearly cycle. Both shed and unshed antlers are present at Star Carr, indicating collection of antlers around April and use of antlers from animals killed between October and March (Fraser and King 1954). Several authors (e.g. Caulfield 1978; Jacobi 1978; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988) have suggested that antlers were collected during the year and cached for barbed point production at the site. Barbed points were produced from blanks detached from antlers using the groove and splinter method. Experimental work (Elliott 2008) suggests soaking facilitates antler working, and the proximity of Lake Flixton would have been a convenient water source. The first stage of production appears to have involved the removal of the crown and tines of the antler (Clark 1954, 116). Splinters were removed from the beam; multiple examples (up to six) could be taken from a single antler, although often there is only evidence for a single removal. To remove a splinter, parallel lines were lightly scored along the antler, aligned as far as possible along natural grooves on the surface. The grooves were then deepened, beginning with a short length, then extended laterally. Both actions were probably accomplished using flint burins (Clark 1954; Dumont 1987, 1988; although see Elliott 2008). Clark (1954) states that only on rare occasions was a transverse cut evident on the

58

Animal Materials

antler; however recent reanalysis by Elliott (2008) suggests that transverse cutting is more common than originally noted. Traces on worked antler suggest that the splinters were removed using wedges – possibly consisting of the tines themselves (Elliott 2008), as has been noted amongst Viking-age technologies from Hedeby (MacGregor 1985). The removal of the splinter would leave a blank with a rough ventral surface consisting of internal spongy, cancellous tissue, which was smoothed, as was the dorsal surface, to create a suitable blank form. Barbs were produced by removal of oblique notches from the splinter. Jacobi (1978) suggests that the production of barbs would result in triangular debris. Because this was not recovered by Clark, he suggests that the points were finished elsewhere in the landscape before being returned to Star Carr for deposition. However, experimental work indicates that in most cases the barbs were sufficiently fine and closely spaced that the only debris produced would be shavings and dust (Elliott 2008). Furthermore Clark only retained the larger, well-preserved pieces of bone and antler (Erskine pers. comm.), indicating that even when this debris was produced it was unlikely to have been collected. Around 24 of the points were finished by incising the base, presumably to facilitate hafting. This could take the form of transverse or oblique lines, criss-crossed lines or chevrons (Clark 1954). These are the bald facts of the production of barbed points. They describe one particular kind of encounter between people and animal remains. But they say nothing about people’s relationship with the animal from which they were made. If we accept that things can bring their past with them, we need to explore these past interactions in order to understand the implications of the transformation of deer to barbed point. This may have important bearings on technical choice: on why these points were made from antler, for example, when points of similar date in Scandinavia tend to be made from bone (David 2003); why they were made from deer when other antlered animals were present; and how these material choices, embodying as they did human–deer relationships, affected the subsequent history of the points.

P E O P L E A N D DE E R The evidence from Star Carr indicates that red deer were the animal most frequently encountered in the course of predatory relations in the vicinity of the site. Although both elk and particularly aurochs yielded more meat by total meat weight (Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988), more red deer were killed (26 red deer, in comparison to 12 elk and 16 aurochs). This suggests more of a relation based on predation than consumption in comparison to other animals. Red deer prefer wooded environments (Mitchell et al. 1977) and the open birch/pine woodland, with plenty of under-storey browse that fringed Lake Flixton (Cloutman and Smith 1988; Mellars and Dark 1998; Cummins et al. in press), would have suited these animals. Burning of the

Animal Materials

59

lakeside vegetation at Star Carr by Mesolithic people would have encouraged young shoots and tempted deer to the water’s edge (Mellars and Dark 1998). Unlike red deer adapted to open environments (Darling 1937; CluttonBrock et al. 1982; Clutton-Brock and Albon 1989), forest dwelling red deer tend to live in very small groups. Males are solitary, whereas females live with their offspring (typically one hind with one or two young) (Ahlén 1965). Forest dwelling deer are not migratory (Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988), although stags tend to range more widely than hinds (Jarnemo 2008). With the exception of the rut, males and females live relatively separate lives over parts of the year, although levels of mixing can vary (Mitchell et al. 1977). Forest dwelling deer are also more difficult for people to locate than their open ground conspecifics. During the day they disperse into the woods, only emerging at dawn and dusk to feed at the edge of clearings (Mitchell et al. 1977). Red deer have annual cycles of behaviour and growth. Thus they and other animal species may, like cattle for the Nuer of the Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1940) have marked time for the Mesolithic people that interacted with them. They display particular types of behaviour at relatively predicable times of the year: the rut takes place in the autumn, calves are born in May and June. Red deer antlers in particular materialise the passing of time: these grow and are shed over a predictable annual cycle. Antlers start to grow over the summer and can grow up to 2cm per day. The velvet, a soft, hairy skin initially covering the antlers, is shed in the autumn. Antlers are at their peak during the winter and are finally shed in March or April (Fraser and King 1954; Goss 1983). Although antler growth emphasises a yearly cycle of time, they also represent growth and development throughout the life of a stag. The first pair of antlers is grown by a calf and start to develop shortly after it is born. These consist of a series of simple spikes; over subsequent years the antlers become larger and more complex as the number of tines or branches increase. Maximum antler weight is achieved between 9 and 11 years, around two years after maximum body-weight is achieved (Mitchell et al. 1977). Post-prime the antlers become less complex again (Goss 1983). Despite potential difficulties finding red deer dispersed in woodland, animals seem to have been routinely encountered in the Vale of Pickering. In addition to successful kills, both red deer and elk are known with healed lesions on their shoulder blades (Noe-Nygaard 1975; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988). That three animals have visible evidence of escaping their hunters suggests that these encounters were relatively common. These would be part of a broader set of relations, of tracking animals, of targeting particular animals as prey, of leaving others to grow or breed. Histories of relating with individual animals would have built up. Mesolithic people appear to have been skilled observers of animal identities. The most frequently killed animals were aged between three and five

60

Animal Materials

years (before red deer achieve full size, typically between six and nine years), with males and females targeted in equal numbers (Legge and RowleyConwy 1988). By the age of three, young males have left their mothers permanently (Mitchell et al. 1977). Legge and Rowley-Conwy suggest these animals were targeted because they were inexperienced and thus easy to kill. However the more vulnerable young animals or male yearlings chased away from their mothers by the dominant stag during the rut, are rarely represented amongst the cull. This suggests an understanding that some animals were more appropriate to kill than others. A rather different set of individuals are represented by antler material. Whereas both males and females are represented amongst the butchered bone, antlers are almost exclusively male appendages. Unlike reindeer, only male red deer normally grow antlers, although some males lack antlers and antlered female red deer do occasionally occur (Goss 1983). Furthermore an older set of individuals, animals four years old and over (Fraser and King 1954), are represented by the antlers (prime animals and animals approaching prime), whereas three year olds are most commonly represented amongst the butchered bone (Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988). So whereas relatively young, naïve animals of either sex were targeted for meat, males at their peak were selected for antler. However this did not necessarily result in the death of the stag, for unlike bone, which represents a lifetime of an animal’s growth and development, antlers grow and are cast seasonally. Both shed and unshed antlers are present at Star Carr; 68 antlers were unshed (here the collection of the antlers would have involved the killing of the animal) and 43 antlers were shed (these would have been collected from the woodland floor) (Elliott 2008). These different processes of procurement have implications for the social relations of antler supply and for the means through which it was encountered. Shed antlers could be collected by individuals foraging in the landscape; this is likely to represent specific searches for this material, because the recovery of shed antler in quantities is difficult and would have involved considerable knowledge of local terrain and game movements (MacGregor 1985, 35–36). These shed antlers would have been available in March or April. At other times of the year, most probably between October and March when the antlers were fully grown, the hunting and killing of the animal would be involved. This is likely to have been bound up with routine food procurement activities, although particular animals also seem to have been targeted for the quality of their antlers.

ANIMAL AFFECTS The preceding sections have attempted to outline some aspects of the relationships between people and deer. This appears, for certain people at least, a relationship of close attention, based on the observation, encounter and

Animal Materials

61

targeting for predation of inexperienced young animals. A relationship of mutual care may be envisaged, with people providing browse for the deer through burning the vegetation and deer offering themselves as food in return. In contrast to the animals who provided meat, antler procurement focused on prime-age males. These are the animals with the largest antlers, often measuring over a metre in length, with the greatest number of tines. These antlers would have been more productive than smaller examples, but given that the shortest barbed points were 8cm long, much smaller antlers would have sufficed. These large antlers are excessive, both in energetic and practical terms. They take up huge amounts of energy and are cumbersome for an animal moving through woodland. Caillois (1990) describes insect species that camouflage themselves (and are thus eaten when mistaken for leaves) as expressing a bodily quality beyond what is needed for survival. In Grosz’s reading: ‘There is a structural, anatomical or behavioural superabundance; perhaps it is the very excess or superfluity of life itself’ (Grosz 1995, 280). This is perhaps what was harnessed in the selection of these large antlers for barbed points. These excessive antler appendages are important in male competitive displays and fighting during the rut, which takes place over autumn. Even before the velvet is shed, bucks threaten others with their growing antlers and by rearing up onto their front legs and fighting with their hooves. Males undertake sparring contests in the early rutting season, when stags will lightly test their antlers against one another. These are common in early autumn before rutting peak (Goss 1983). Roaring contests also occur when two individuals are roughly the same size (Clutton-Brock and Albon 1975). During the peak of the rut, rival males will size up each others’ antlers by parading parallel to each other. After protracted rituals, each deer rushes at the other in an attempt to pierce their rival’s belly or chest. However, most frequently their antlers become entangled, resulting in a contest of strength. On occasions though the initial antler charge does cause significant damage. Clutton-Brock et al. (1979) report that on average 6 per cent of red deer stags were seriously injured each year. Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) concept of animal ‘affects’ may be helpful for thinking through these excessive, male-deer, spearing and sparring appendages. The term is derived from his analysis of Amerindian ontologies, but has broader theoretical potential for thinking about animal bodies. Affects are the animal’s perspective, its way of being or habitus that is located in its body. Ingold (2000, 94) illustrates similar ideas with an Ojibwa story (taken from Bourgeois 1994, 69) of a man who sank to the bottom of a lake when his boat capsized: He thought of the beaver, whereupon the beaver came to him and gave him his body. He swam towards the shore, but before he could reach it, he felt himself losing his power to keep the shape of the beaver. So he thought of the otter. Then the otter gave him his body, and in that form

62

Animal Materials he reached land. There Ironmaker found himself naked in his own body. It was freezing weather … He would have died of cold but for the help of four other animals which, one after the other, lent him their bodies to get home: first the bear, in whose form he went a good way, then the lynx, then the raccoon and after that the buffalo.

In this example, the animal’s habitus is also located in a particular bodily feature that appears to mediate its way of acting in the world. This is not to reduce animality to instrumentality; affects are the animal’s perspective, not simply bodily function. To extend this theoretical perspective and to see the Star Carr red deer antlers as affects means to see them as facilitating a certain way of acting in the world. So harnessing deer affects would extend the human body and allow people to act in a ‘deerish’ way. As outlined earlier, antlers are used in aggressive displays by male red deer. Antler is strong and resistant to impact fracture, with an ability to absorb shock, because it is used in these fighting contests. This resistance to impact renders it a more suitable material for projectile points than bone (MacGregor 1985; Chen et al. 2008). To see these as purely mechanical properties, though, is a mistake, because they have emerged developmentally through the historical process of male aggressive interactions. I therefore suggest that the manufacture of barbed points thus harnessed qualities that were at once perspectivally aggressive and materially resistant in order to extend people’s predatory relationships with red deer and other animals.

FRONTLET AFFECTS The suggestion that barbed points allowed people to harness potent animal affects can be extended to the other major antler artefact at the site, the famous antler frontlets (Figure 2.3). Twenty-one of these artefacts were recovered from Star Carr. They consist of the uppermost part of the skull of a red deer, with the antlers still attached. The antlers had been lightened through truncation and hollowing of the beams and tines; the inside of the skull treated to smoothen or remove protuberances and two artificial perforations had been made through the skull. These modifications are presumed to have facilitated their use as headgear. It is likely that the animal’s pelt was attached to the frontlets, creating a more extensive deer costume. I have argued elsewhere (Conneller 2004) that taking on the frontlets transformed the human body by allowing people to adopt red deer perspectives. However, as outlined previously, we need a more subtle approach to animal identities. There was not just a single red deer perspective. If the barbed points harnessed prime-age aggressive stag affects, the frontlets are rather different. Fraser and King (1954, 81) note that the antlers used for frontlets derived from rather smaller, younger animals that those used for barbed point manufacture. Only 2 of the 21 frontlets exceed the

Animal Materials

63

Figure 2.3 Antler Frontlets from Star Carr (reproduced with permission of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 1953.61A)

mean pedicle circumference of the antlers used in barbed point manufacture. The frontlets thus appear to derive almost entirely from younger animals, precisely those that were the main target of predation. Nor are the antlers emphasised; they are, in fact, heavily truncated, a feature which gives them the appearance of even younger deer. Thus ‘stagness’ in the Star Carr frontlets is marked, but not emphasised. This is in contrast to the two frontlets from Bedburg-Konigshöven, Germany (one of only three other sites

64

Animal Materials

where frontlets have been recovered) (Street 1991, 1998): here prime-age 12 and 14 point full antlers were employed. This lack of emphasis on the sex of the deer suggests this was not the main affect taken on; rather particular aspects of age or predation sets were. The small, truncated antlers are even analogous to those produced in rare cases of antlered females (Goss 1983). Furthermore we do not know if equivalent female deer costumes existed, because these presumably would just be made of the animal’s skin. However frontlets are still male deer costumes and taking on this animal perspective would produce this gender in the wearer. The ability of those in hunter-gatherer societies who can transform their bodies into other species also to change gender has been marked (Schmidt 2000), although it should be noted that male-human is not necessarily an equivalent gender to male-deer.

R E L A T I O N S O F DE P O S I TI O N At Star Carr during the early Mesolithic, barbed points were deposited at the edge of the lake with antler frontlets, beads, animal bone and antler, and flint and animal tools. Archaeological survey (now some 30 years’ work) along the shoreline of Lake Flixton on which Star Carr is situated, has revealed that some of these objects are confined to Star Carr alone. At Star Carr, 193 barbed points have been recovered, 21 antler frontlets and 33 beads. With the exception of two barbed points, none of these objects have been recovered from any of the other numerous early Mesolithic sites around Lake Flixton, despite 30 years of archaeological work. Although most of the beads at Star Carr are made from stone (apart from two from red deer teeth and one from bird bone), the other objects which seem to have been specially deposited are made from red deer antler. The antler debris from barbed point manufacture is also present in significant quantities at Star Carr and rare elsewhere around Lake Flixton. Around 140 pieces of antler have been recovered from Star Carr and only 10 pieces elsewhere (Clark 1954; Rowley-Conwy 1998, in press). Most of these show evidence of splinters having been removed for barbed point production. This evidence suggests a special focus on the deposition of animal remains, and red deer antler in particular, at Star Carr. Although they were used in very different ways, the barbed points and the frontlets were reunited through deposition in the same place. They are absent or near absent from the remainder of the Lake Flixton sites, because they were aggregated and specially deposited together in the waterlogged part of the Star Carr site. Despite being very different objects with very different histories, they were treated in the same way in deposition. This re-assembling of these different objects in deposition, long after the death of the animal of which they were once part, supports the idea that the people who occupied Star Carr retained a conception of the ‘animality’ of both

Animal Materials

65

artefacts. Rather than viewing these objects as passive recipients of meaning, however, as retaining some symbolic sense of ‘animal’, this animality should be viewed as active, as deer affects. This animality is essential to this history of the barbed points and frontlets: from the particular animal bodies that became this material culture, their manufacture and use, to finally their appropriate deposition. H U M A N – A N I MA L R E L A T I O N S At Star Carr, it seems that a potent animality survived the transformation of animal remains into tools and other objects. This seems particularly focused on red deer and more particularly red deer antler (although we should note that roe deer antlers are also over-represented in comparison to post-cranial remains at the site). This special potency necessitated the formal deposition of objects made from antler at Star Carr for several hundred years (Conneller et al. 2010). However the animal affects are different in both cases: the barbed points harness a hyper-male red deer aggressiveness; the frontlets allow people to act like the young deer that they preyed upon, the maleness is less emphasised, gender as well as species may be mutable. This specificity to a particular species, body part and animal identity suggests we must be wary of generalising about hunter-gatherers attitudes to animals, particularly about the way that things from their remains were understood. I would like to extend this insight through a second case study. This will investigate the use of ivory to make beads, weapons and statuettes during the early Aurignacian (c. 34,000–32,000BP). Here a very different set of historical circumstances existed for both people and animals. Ivory, of course, derives from a living mammoth, an animal that has been argued to play an important role in the Aurignacian bestiary (Hahn 1986). Mammoths are also very different animals from red deer with different life histories, who inhabited very different landscapes. However, what appears most crucial of all for understanding the use of ivory is the process of the human–animal relationship. The second part of this chapter will investigate how or whether this significance translated into the manufactured form. As argued earlier, this involves tracing the histories of human–mammoth relatings. A N I M A L M A T E R I A L S IN T H E E A R L Y U P P E R PALAEOLITHIC: RELATIONS OF PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE Woolly mammoths (M. primigenius) are the best understood of all fossil fauna. The discovery of numerous animals with their fleshy parts preserved in Siberian permafrost has permitted reconstruction of their habits. They were the largest animals of Late Pleistocene Europe. Males stood between 2.7m and 3.4m in height (with only the largest specimens reaching the size of

66

Animal Materials

an African elephant) and weighed about 6 tonnes. Females were smaller, between 2.6m and 2.9m in height (Lister and Bahn 2007). DNA sequencing reveals that they carried the genes that cause colour variation in living mammals (Poinar et al. 2006; Rompler et al. 2006). Specimens preserved in Siberian permafrost display a variety of hair colour from blond, through brown to black, although it is thought the red hair often found on permafrost examples was mostly likely caused by depigmentation during burial (Lister and Bahn 2007). Mammoths had sebaceous glands which would have given their coat a glossy sheen and a waterproof function. Their hair varied in length across their bodies: relatively short (a few centimetres long) on the face, whereas on the flanks and underbelly hair up to 90cm in length fell nearly to the ground. The short tail was lengthened by coarse hairs up to 60cm in length, allowing an effective fly swat. The preferred habitat of the mammoth was the so called ‘mammoth steppe’ (Guthrie 1990): vast grasslands of steppe-tundra, similar to the steppe grasslands of southern Russia but much more diverse, containing also shrubs, sedges and herbaceous plants. Trees such as conifers and birch grew in more southerly areas and sheltered river valleys. Although typically seen as creatures of the plains, mammoths appear to have preferred lacustrine environments and broad river valleys (some of which would have been wooded), as attested by large accumulations of mammoth bones in central and eastern Europe in these zones (Oliva 2000; Svoboda et al. 2005). Information about mammoths’ diet is derived from pollen analysis, tooth microwear and isotope studies, but more direct methods are also available: frozen mammoth carcasses have been found eroding from the Siberian permafrost for centuries. Some of these have preserved vegetation in the animals’ stomach and intestines – even, in the case of the Bereskova mammoth, in the animal’s mouth (Lister and Bahn 2007). Analysis of these remains suggest the mammoth’s diet was predominantly grasses and sedges, supplemented by steppic plants and shrubs, such as dwarf willow, and shoots of willow, birch, larch and alder. The huge size of the animal, combined with the low quality of their diet means that they would have spent up to 20 hours a day eating. Unlike elephants, mammoths had a ‘finger and thumb’ structure at the tip of their trunk which was used to pluck vegetation and deliver it to their mouths. The longer projection was on the front of the trunk, measuring (in the best preserved Siberian permafrost example) about 10cm long. The back projection was broader and shorter, around 5cm. Analogies with living elephants and certain fossil assemblages suggest that mammoth herds would have been composed of females and juveniles, and consist of around 15 to 25 animals. Males would probably have foraged separately and been more solitary. Behavioural ecology suggests that large animals living in open environments are more likely to form extremely large herds on occasions and it is possible that this was also part of mammoth behaviour, perhaps as part of seasonal migrations (Lister and Bahn 2007) along river valleys (Svoboda et al. 2005).

Animal Materials

67

The extent to which mammoths were systematically exploited for their meat in the Upper Palaeolithic has been the subject of much debate (Soffer 1985, Haynes 1991, Svoboda et al. 2005). Large accumulations of mammoth bones exist in central and eastern Europe, dating to the Gravettian: at Krakow, Spadzitsa Street, Poland, the remains of at least 86 mammoths were recovered (Wojtal and Sobczyk 2005), at Prˇedmostí over 1,000 mammoths were represented (Svoboda et al. 2005). At one end of the spectrum, these mammoth bone accumulations have been interpreted as the result of specialised human hunting (Musil 1994; Péan 2001); at the other, they have been described, based on the rarity of cutmarks on the bones, as natural accumulations that humans occasionally exploited as a source of meat or raw materials (Soffer 1985). However experiments on African elephants show that butchery need not leave cut marks on the bones, perhaps explaining their rarity on mammoth bone assemblages (Wojtal and Sobczyk 2005, 204) and the most recent analyses (Svoboda et al. 2005; Wojtal and Sobczyk 2005) suggest some accumulations (such as Milovice G) were generated through hunting, others (Spadzista Street B) through a combination of natural deaths and human hunting. Less work has been undertaken on mammoth hunting during the Aurignacian period. Mammoth remains are present on southern German sites, although it is probable that they would have been rarer in this region than further east (Münzel 2001). Three infants of around three months old with cut marked bones, which were hunted in spring or early summer, were recovered from the later Aurignacian layer of Geissenklösterle, making mammoth the most important game animal after horse at the site (Hahn 1995b, Münzel 2001, Gaudzinski et al. 2005). Adults are also represented at Geissenklösterle but only in the form of ribs and ivory, materials that were used in the production of tools and art objects. Adult remains are also present at Hohle Fels (Gaudzinski et al. 2005). Mammoths are rare elsewhere, particularly in southwest France and the Pyrenees, where remains are mainly represented in the form of ivory raw material or finished products. The only mammoth remains in the early Aurignacian levels of Abri Patuad, for example, are in the form of prepared ivory material. At the Castlemerle Valley sites (Castanet, Blanchard and La Souquette), which have yielded huge quantities of material culture made from mammoth ivory, only one tusk section was recovered; postcranial material was absent. Mammoth ivory appears to have entered these sites mainly as preformed rods no more than 10cm long and around 1cm in diameter (White 1989). In his study of fauna from reliable Aurignacian sequences in the Aquitaine region, Delpeche (1993) also failed to locate any mammoth remains. White thus argues that mammoths were not locally present in southwest France during the Aurignacian (White 1997), and that mammoth tusks were imported from other regions for their use as a raw material. It is worth noting, though, that there are significant potential problems identifying mammoth predation (Gaudzinski et al. 2005). It has been argued that, because of their weight, bones are unlikely to be

68

Animal Materials

transported back to living sites. However, because mammoths are present at the German Aurignacian cave sites, it does seem likely that their absence in contemporary French cave sites could reflect a real absence.

M A M M O T H S I N T H E E A R L Y U P P ER P A L A E O L I T H I C Hahn (1986) argues that mammoths played an important symbolic role in the Aurignacian of southern Germany. In his analysis of ivory animal figurines found in a number of caves in the Swabian Jura, dating to around 32,000– 33,000 years ago (Conard and Bolus 2003; Verpoorte 2005), he suggests that the animals selected for depiction were always the largest, fastest, most powerful and most dangerous, a hypothesis reinforced by the threatening postures of some animals and the fact that males were predominantly depicted (although see White 2003): ‘According to the choice of animals, force or strength seem to be the components they were trying to express’ (Hahn 1986, 222). A swift examination of the animals depicted in this region reinforces Hahn’s thesis. Eighteen figurines have been recovered from the sites of Vogelherd, Geissenklösterle, Hohlenstein-Stadel and Hohle Fels (Conard 2003). These consist of two lowenmensches (‘man-lions’), four felids, three mammoths (Figure 2.4) and one or two examples of birds, horse, bovids and

Figure 2.4 Aurignacian mammoth figurine from Vogelherd (Photo: Hilde Jensen, University of Tübingen)

Animal Materials

69

bear. Although the recent discoveries at Hohle Fels (Conard ibid.) add a water bird (possibly a cormorant) to the corpus Hahn originally analysed, the pattern of predominantly large, dangerous animals remains. Hahn suggests the art may have been partly influenced by the large number of mammoths in the environment and the intensive hunting of both mammoths and rhinos. However, as is common throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, the art does not appear to simply reflect animals eaten: faunal remains indicate that horse was the most commonly hunted animal at these sites by weight of meat, followed by mammoth. As Hahn states, hunting arguments cannot apply to lions and bears, and these by their presence exclude a direct relationship between the depictions and the animals exploited for food (Hahn 1986, 221). The suggestion that large, dangerous animals were important in the Early Upper Palaeolithic has been strengthened by the discovery of Aurignacian cave art at Grotte Chauvet, in the Ardeche (Clottes 2003), dating between 30,000 and 32,000 years ago. At Grotte Chauvet the same group of animals clearly dominate: of 313 animal images, mammoth (64 images/20 per cent of total), rhino (61/19 per cent), and lion (61/19 per cent) are the most commonly represented (Clottes 2000, 98). This contrasts with an average across Franco-Cantabrian caves (which mainly date to the Magdalenian) for felines, rhinos, mammoth and bears of 4 per cent. A handful of other caves (Blanchard, Castanet, Cellier, La Ferrassie and La Viña) have been suggested on the basis of direct dating of pigments, or stratigraphic grounds to represent Aurignacian age art (Lorblanchet 1995, 284). Clottes (2000, 92) adds additional examples (El Conde, Les Bernous, Belcayre, La Croze à Gontran, Lartet, Le Poisson, La Souquette and Brassempouy) on contextual and stylistic grounds. Sites in the Périgord of likely Aurignacian age have yielded only 23 animal representations; of these, 32 per cent of identifiable animals represent dangerous creatures. Clottes (2000, 99) suggests that Grande Grotte at Arcy-sur-Cure and La Baume Latrone and Grotte Bayol (both in the Gard), where percentages of dangerous animals are high (respectively 75 per cent, 68 per cent and 38 per cent), may also be Aurignacian, although this is rather a circular argument. The portable and parietal representations suggest that in southern Germany and across France, there was a common interest in the Aurignacian in species that were large and potentially dangerous. This includes both carnivores and large herbivores with tusks or horns, such as mammoth and rhino, both which would have been capable of trampling people, as elephants and rhino do today. However the presence of additional animals in small numbers (two horses and a bird in the southern German portable art; horses, cervids and caprids at Chauvet; six ibex in French likely Aurignacian cave art sites in the Périgord) suggest the Aurignacian scheme should not be over-simplified and that a more richly textured understanding of different species existed than a simple fascination with the potency of the most dangerous. Amongst this bestiary, though, mammoths do seem to have been important. They are the most common animal represented at Chauvet; the second most common in

70

Animal Materials

the southern German caves. Do we see, though, this evident importance of mammoths translated into people’s interactions with and understandings of mammoth ivory?

MAMMOTHS AND IVORY Marcel Otte, writing on the Aurignacian of the Belgian lowlands, suggests a connection between people’s understanding of mammoths and weapons made from their tusks. Ivory, he suggests, ‘was invested with symbolic charge – hard, aggressive, animal’ (Otte 1995, 110). People manufactured spearheads from ivory, he suggests, because they wanted to harness the mechanical traits of the tusk for an analogous function (presumably piercing animal flesh). This near-perspectival argument could suggest that ivory spearheads (known as sagaies) retained a similar sense of the animal as the red deer barbed points at Star Carr. However, because mammoth tusks were curved, they could not be used by the mammoth in life for stabbing during male competitive fighting, as occurs in modern elephants. They would have been used primarily for pushing and twisting as a trial of strength (Lister and Bahn 2007). Thus spearheads would not have been used in the same way as tusks. Furthermore weapons made from mammoth ivory are relatively rare, particularly in certain parts of Europe. Split-based points, characteristic of the early Aurignacian, are almost exclusively made from antler (Knecht 1993). The only exception appears to be a single ivory example from Castillo in northern Spain (Liolios 2006, 48). Other point forms were more frequently made from ivory, although these are still found on only a few Aurignacian sites. There appears a contrast in the distribution of ivory points between northern/central Europe and southwest Europe. In Germany and Belgium ivory weapons are more common: they are known from Spy, Goyet, and Marche-les-Dames, Belgium and Geissenklösterle (Otte 1977, Münzel 2001), Vogelherd (Hahn 1995b), Hohle Fels (Conard and Bolus 2006), Wildhaus and Wildscheuer, Germany (Otte 1979). Particularly spectacular, long, polished points have been recovered from both Geissenklösterle (Münzel 2001) and Vogelherd (Hahn 1995b). In contrast, in southern France and the northern Spain ivory points are rare or absent (Liolios 2006). Ivory appears reserved for bead manufacture in the Périgord and French Pyrenean sites (except Isturitz) during the early Aurignacian (ibid.). There thus seems to be a contrast in the use of ivory in different parts of Europe. In south-western Europe ivory was used predominantly in bead manufacture. In north-central Europe it had a wider range of uses: statuettes, beads, tools, weapons and even flutes (Conard 2009) were made from it. This, broadly, seems to conform to a difference between areas where mammoths were locally present and areas where they were probably absent. Undoubtedly there were a variety of local and historically specific

Animal Materials

71

articulations of these relationships; unfortunately the coarse-grained scale of Upper Palaeolithic archaeology does not allow us to glimpse these in detail. The evidence we have suggests that the people who encountered and probably hunted living mammoths were more concerned with ivory as a potent substance that was in some way connected to the living mammoth.

IV O RY IN S O UT H WE S T F RA NC E What then were the understandings of ivory in areas where mammoths appear to have been absent? If, as I have argued, an understanding of human–animal relationships is vital for considering things made from animal remains, what are the implications when a relationship is lacking? I will argue that just because there is not a direct relationship, it does not mean there was no relationship, rather that it was mediated through others (other people, other things). It is still possible to trace the process of relationships between mammoths, people and ivory in these areas. Although mammoths may not have been locally present in southwest France, there are several contemporary or near contemporary representations of mammoths in an adjacent region, from Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche, southeast France. Because these depictions are relatively lifelike, it seems safe to assume the artists were familiar with the animal, either because it formed part of the fauna of that region, or through visits to regions where mammoths were present. At Chauvet mammoths are rarely a central theme of the panels, they appear to accompany and frame other animals. Gély and Azéma (2005, 187) suggest that this is because the mammoth’s great strength and power set it apart from the normal predator–prey relationship. In this region too the relationship between humans and mammoths may have been one of distance, perhaps for the reason that Gély and Azéma suggest, but the rarity of human–mammoth encounters may also have been a factor. A number of lines of evidence suggest social ties between southwest and southeast France: both share the same bead forms and manufacturing techniques (White 2007); furthermore Mediterranean sea shells are present on southwest French sites. It is therefore possible that knowledge of mammoths as animals circulated from this source. As with travellers tales in general, the mammoths in these accounts may have been much bigger, more powerful, more dangerous or even different animals entirely (Pluskowski 2004). If tusks were obtained from this source they may have been particularly potent animal affects. Although some ivory may have come to southwest France from the east, another source appears more likely, that of locally available, ancient subfossil ivory. As outlined in the previous chapter fresh ivory is very difficult to work and as a result White (1989) suggests that most mammoth ivory exploited in the Aurignacian period was subfossil in origin. Certainly we can see that this occurred in the later Palaeolithic: mammoth material at the

72

Animal Materials

German site of Gonnersdorf has been found to be around 2,000 years older than other remains at the site (Street et al. 2006) This may have implications for the way ivory was perceived. Subfossil ivory is likely to have been collected from the surface or fluvial exposures. In Siberia today, fossil and permafrost mammoths can be found eroding from river banks, as animals were washed into rivers at death and incorporated into bars or sandbanks, finally re-emerging in episodes of erosion or periods of fluvial incision (Lister and Bahn 2007). Alternatively tusks may have remained visible on the surface for longer periods due to the lack of soil development during cold conditions. Thus mammoth tusks in southwest France may have been encountered in a similar way to the soft stones and fossil shells that were also collected to make beads. As a result tusks may have been seen more like stone, as relating to the earth, rather than a living animal. The parallels between ivory and stone produced by their procurement can also be seen in the technology of bead production. As outlined in the previous chapter, the same production sequence was employed in the manufacture of basket-shaped beads, whether they were made from ivory or soft stone. This production sequence is difficult to realise in ivory, and in many way goes against the mechanical properties of the material (White 1997). White (2007) argues that the primary quality desired in Aurignacian beads was that of lustre. This is a quality of ivory when it is polished but it is a quality that is shared by a variety of other materials used in Aurignacian bead manufacture: shells, teeth and soft stones. Both White (2004) and Taborin (2004) suggest that shell and teeth were the primary desired lustrous materials that the polishing of ivory sought to imitate. White’s hypothesis that ivory was used to mimic other materials is supported by the presence of ivory skeuomorphs of seashells and red deer teeth. For example, an ivory facsimile of a red deer vestigal canine was recovered at Brassempouy (Landes) (White 2007); there are also six shell facsimiles in ivory (Figure 2.5) from la Souquette (White 1989). At the Castelmerle sites, meandering rows of punctuation used to decorate bone and ivory objects appear to mimic that on Atlantic sea shells from the site (White 1989). Even basket-shaped beads show a marked resemblance to the sea shell Cyclopae neritae (White 2004). These relationships of resemblance and mimicry emphasise the inter-changeability of materials and forms. In many ways then, the procurement and use of sub-fossil ivory suggests ‘mammothness’ was left behind. However people who were both keenly aware of animal anatomy and had at least second-hand knowledge of mammoths, are likely to have recognised sub-fossil skeletons as relating in some way to the living beast. How exactly this relationship was understood is more open to question. We would view finds of mammoth skeletons as representing past animals that roamed the landscape. Certain Siberian peoples, though, recognise mammoths that emerge from the permafrost as contemporary mythical animals (Jordan pers.comm).

Animal Materials

73

Figure 2.5 Shell skeuomorphs made from ivory, from La Souquette, Dordogne (Photo: Randall White)

Overall though, the imposition of difficult technologies, and the relative interchangeabilty of materials suggests less of a concern with the animal origin of ivory. In fact there seems a concern to move ivory away from its original form and volume. What seems most important in French bead manufacture was particular forms – particular shells and teeth – and more particularly, certain surface effects, namely lustre, that permitted certain materials to be interchangeable. I would therefore suggest that understandings of living, fleshy mammoths do not linger in these ivory beads. Ivory, in southwest France, appears to have been important for its ability to mimic and transform. As a result we need to think of ivory, not just as part of an animal, but part of a group of things – like seashells/fossil shells – which could transform and be transformed into other materials and forms. So unlike the Mesolithic example, animal affects do not linger in ivory objects; ivory was important precisely because it could leave its living-animal heritage behind it. C O N C L U S I O N S : A S Y M M E TR IC A L A R C H A E O LO G Y O F A N IMA L M AT ER IAL S In this chapter I have argued that the nature/culture dualism has been particularly problematic for considering things made from animal remains. Instead, we need a symmetrical approach to the study of animal materials, one that works by neither privileging animal behaviour nor cultural representations, but which follows the processes of human-animal relationships.

74

Animal Materials

The case studies explored here suggest that an understanding of human– animal relationships is vital for considering animal materials. Broadly, relationships of proximity and distance seem important. At Star Carr a close relationship of frequent encounters gave red deer materials a significance not shared with other species. The detailed understanding of red deer activities led particular animal identities to be recognised and their affects harnessed in order to extend and transform the human body. The lack of mammoths in southwest France, by contrast, resulted in a different relationship with ivory, one which left the mammoth behind and related ivory instead to other things. Similar relationships of distance can be seen in Pluskowski’s (2004) study of exotic animals in Medieval Europe. Here ivory (variously from elephants or walruses), when transformed into material culture left behind its animal origins and became simply a valuable material. Narwhal tusks, by contrast, retained an animal origin, but passed from hand to hand, from the northern hunters who procured it, to the nobility who consumed it, eventually it became the horns of unicorns. The distant relationship that people in southwest France had with mammoths was mediated by other people to the east (who had encountered them as living animals) and by finds of sub-fossil individuals (whose ivory shared latent qualities of shininess with other things). Understanding the use of ivory in this case is a product of how these two different connections with distant animals were reconciled. The case studies indicate we also need to investigate hunter-gatherer ontologies in a more nuanced manner. On occasions the importance of a particular animal, or even a particular body part, was vital to the way that artefacts made from animal remains are understood. On other occasions animality was less important and other properties of a material came to the fore: in the case of ivory, its lustre and ambiguous transformative aspects. We thus need to consider history and context; there is no single way that hunter-gatherers interacted with and thought about animals. Rather than seeing hunting and gathering as a particular mode of engagement with the ‘natural’ world (Bird-David 1990; Ingold 2000), hunter-gatherers’ interactions with animals should be seen as varied and complex (if not more so) as those characteristic of our contemporary experience. A more subtle approach to animal identities is needed that draws on some of the recent theoretical approaches to human identity and personhood. In the Mesolithic example, there was not one single red deer identity; animals were distinguished by age and sex. Beyond this, there is evidence that particular animals were routinely encountered and distinguished beyond these broad identity sets. Two of the frontlets were made from much older animals than the rest (Fraser and King 1954); here taking on the identities of a particular individual animal may have been important. I have also argued that seeing animal bodies as made up of assemblages of affects or ways of acting in the world is a fruitful approach to understanding things made from their remains. In this approach, taking on animal affects

Animal Materials

75

would also involve taking on an animal’s perspective. As Donna Haraway points out, viewpoints of the world are not simply related to biologically discrete organisms or individuals, but are materially mediated and extended through the use of tools and instruments. In this way, she talks of the need to learn to see faithfully from others’ point of view, even if the other is a machine (Haraway 1988, 583) or an animal (Haraway 2003). This, I would argue, is what Mesolithic people were doing when they used barbed points or wore antler frontlets, but it is an argument that can be made more broadly in relation to our own analyses. We need to take animals seriously because they are animals, sentient beings that respond to our actions; that we shape and are shaped by. Their viewpoint and their contribution to animal objects should not be ignored.

3

The Mutability of Stone

Throughout the twentieth century a variety of different stones were collected and excavated from what is now a dramatic coastal headland in southwest Pembrokeshire (Gordon Williams 1926; Wainwright 1963; David 1990, 2007). These finds from the Nab Head date to the early part of the Mesolithic period, around 9200BP. Amongst the stones recovered are numerous flint, rhyolite and tuff tools and manufacturing debris, at least 690 shale beads, several unmodified stones and the ‘Nab Head Venus’, an enigmatic piece of worked shale. These stones have been analysed and interpreted in very different ways. The stone tools have undergone a technological and typological analysis (David 2007), which has revealed their resemblance to tools from English and Welsh sites of a similar date. Their very quantity has been interpreted as revealing the presence of a repeatedly revisited residential base camp, possibly occupied during the autumn (Jacobi 1980; Bell 2007). These tools have only ever been considered in terms of their typology, production, economic function and source. Much less notice, though, has been taken of the ‘natural’ stones from the site, apart from a note that they were imported by human agency (David 2007, 111). Such stones only become significant in archaeological narratives if wear shows they also had a function (for example as bevel-ended tools). As Cooney (2009, 64) points out, unmodified stones are usually not considered artefactual and often not even retained in excavation archives. The numerous shale beads found at the Nab Head, by contrast, are considered to mark this place as significant, perhaps even indicative that a cemetery once existed on this site where acid soils mean that bone is no longer preserved (David 1990). Their importance is thus mainly seen in their ability to signify something more abstract (such as a cemetery), rather than anything to do with either the nature of their material or their materiality per se. The Nab Head has been viewed as a production site for these small blue/grey beads which were then exchanged across southwest Wales and possibly also further afield: similar examples have been found at Star Carr, North Yorkshire, Staple Crag, County Durham and Manton Warren in Lincolnshire (Barton et al. 1995). Also recovered from this site was the ‘Nab Head Venus’, an enigmatic piece of shale, which can be interpreted as a

The Mutability of Stone

77

Venus figurine or phallic object, depending on the orientation of the viewer. It has either been seen as very significant indeed – ‘a remarkable Palaeolithic trinket’ (Breuil 1953, cited in David 2007, 111) – or treated with suspicion as a possible forgery (David 2007, 109). More recent finds of similar shaped and/or decorated, pebbles at Rhuddlan, North Wales and Llandegai (Lynch and Muson 2001) and a ground pebble at Goldcliffe, Site B (Bell 2007), have reinforced both the form of the Venus as significant as well as its status as a ‘special object’. In this way, the range of stones found at Nab Head have been variously treated as utilitarian or special, significant or insignificant. Attribution of significance comes from the rarity of the stone’s manufactured form or its subsequent treatment. Little has been made of the material of the different stones themselves, whether flint or shale, apart from discussion of their source. The presence of abundant shale on local beaches has precluded the usual archaeological narratives of effort in raw material procurement which might otherwise have further underlined the significance of the beads. The Nab Head is very typical of the traditional treatment of stone from archaeological sites. While there has been increasing attention to the significance of the stones used in monuments and to the sources of prestigious stone artefacts in later periods (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Saunders 2001; Cooney 2002, 2005; Tilley 2004; Pétrequin et al. 2006; O’Connor et al. 2009), both the stone used to make tools utilised in mundane contexts and the unmodified stones frequently found on archaeological sites have been neglected (although see Cooney 2009). Instead, a consideration of the properties of artefactual stone has primarily focused on issues of raw material source and quality (Inizan et al. 1992; Luedtke 1992; Schlanger 1996). The choice of stone selected for the tools used in daily tasks has been presumed to be purely functional, the product of a balance between expedience and the demands of the technical system (e.g. Myers 1989; Fagnart 1997). Here an implicit ritual/functional divide, which permits rare objects only to be made from significant stones, has proved detrimental both to an understanding of routine stone working and to other less overtly special stones. In this chapter I will argue that even the materials used in mundane tasks were bound up with past people’s understandings of the world and thus cannot simply be reduced to the sum of their mechanical properties.

S T O N E S A S P LA C E The majority of work which attempts to understand the significance of stone has focused on sources. The location of raw materials has always been an important part of prehistoric studies, because of the information it has been seen to provide about mobility (for hunter-gatherers) or trade and exchange (for settled peoples). However, raw material is not just important

78

The Mutability of Stone

as an indicator of trade or mobility, it also embodies a place, and many of the places from which material was procured appear to have been especially important to prehistoric people. Paul Taçon’s (1991) study of stone procurement among Aboriginal groups in Western Arnhem Land has been particularly influential in encouraging prehistorians to think of stone sources in terms of the significance accorded to particular locations, rather than the functional demands of embedded procurement. Taçon has discussed how the procurement and use of raw materials is intimately bound up with ideas about the activities of ancestral beings in particular places in the landscape (with quartz pebbles, for example, being seen as fossilised bones of these beings), and how materials are classified according to their aesthetic and spiritual qualities (see also Jones and White 1988). Cooney (2002, 2005) has elucidated similar concerns in the Irish Neolithic. Drawing on a number of different lines of evidence, he suggests that the white inclusions in the porphyry axes from Lambay Island were perceived as representations of ancestral bones. It was the very act of axe manufacture, the polishing of these inclusions, which would bring out the presence of the ancestors. Some of the best evidence for the importance accorded to particular sources of stone in prehistoric Britain also comes from the study of Neolithic polished axes (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Edmonds 1995). Certain stone quarries at this time were established in deliberately dramatic and inaccessible places. At the Langdale Fells in Cumbria, workable stone occurs along an exposure that runs for 19km. Although some easily accessible parts of this were worked, the quarries that were most intensively exploited were those on narrow ledges that were very difficult to reach (Bradley and Edmonds 1993). The quality of stone at these sources was no better than at more accessible locations, and this may indicate that particular isolated or dangerous places were imbued with special significance. The importance attached to the location of the stone sources was echoed by many other aspects of the life histories of axes: they often circulated long distance from their sources and are discovered in unusual depositionary contexts. Edmonds (1995) argues that the exotic origins of the axes was seen as important, and that their circulation through exchange became a means of producing networks of relations through which political authority was established and expressed. So both the isolation and danger associated with the procurement of the raw material, and the distance between the sources and the areas where the axes circulated, were important in the ways these implements were perceived and valued. Similarly concerns have been elucidated in the study of Neolithic jadeite axes, which circulated vast distances across Europe. These have been discovered to derive from high altitude quarries in the Italian Alps, which could only be worked on a seasonal basis (Petréquin et al. 2006). Innovative and illuminating as these two studies are, there are hints here of an underlying foundation in labour theory of value; these materials are special

The Mutability of Stone

79

because of the effort and danger involved in their procurement, and the distance they were moved from their sources. In many ways this echoes more traditional accounts of stone sources, where materials are marked as valuable in relation to distance from their source. Although still focused on the relationship of stones and places, a recent study by Jones (2001) takes a different perspective. Jones has discussed the various types of stone used as temper in Neolithic pots on Orkney, noting that at the site of Barnhouse different households used different sources of stone. Two of these sources are adjacent to the chambered tomb at Unstan, whereas another is located near a contemporary settlement at Bookan. Jones suggests that different family groups were deliberately referencing particular parts of the landscape through their manufacture of pottery. Households emphasised connections with their ancestors by selecting stone adjacent to a chambered tomb or made connections with living individuals, with kin or exchange partners, at the Bookan settlement. This study is important for two reasons: first, it moves away from a focus on overtly special objects to those used in more ‘domestic’ contexts, revealing how, even here, materials are bound up with people’s understandings of the world; second, it provides a more nuanced understanding of how stones embody places, rather than simply encompassing difficulty of access and distance from sources. Although sources are increasingly acknowledged as important for understanding the meaning of stone, studies of the significance of visual or mechanical properties of lithic artefacts have been much rarer. One study that does focus on visual properties comes from the work of Saunders (2001) on the role of obsidian in Central America. He has described how the use of obsidian was bound up with a complex philosophy of the natural and the supernatural. This encompassed not simply obsidian’s place of origin, as we have seen in previous examples, but also its properties of iridescence and sheen, the technologies involved in its working and the socio-political relationships bound up in its procurement and consumption. As outlined in the introduction to this book, gleaming materials were valued in the pre-Columbian Americas as part as an ‘aesthetics of brilliance’. Gold, as we have seen, was one of these materials, another was obsidian. That obsidian’s properties of iridescence and sheen were recognised and harnessed is evident in its use for mirrors. Mirrors had magical properties and were associated with the supreme Aztec deity, the god Tezcatlipoca, known as the ‘lord of the smoking mirror’, who was considered to observe the world as reflected through his obsidian mirror. So close was the relationship of the god and obsidian that the term for obsidian, itztli, was considered to refer to Tezcatlipoca (Saunders 2001, 222). Additionally, obsidian’s quality of sharpness was valued. In a world without hard metals, obsidian more than anything else embodied this property. Its resulting use as a knife in human sacrifice and bloodletting endowed it with potency and once again enmeshed it within broader cosmological considerations, relating it, in particular, to the dead. Part of this may relate

80

The Mutability of Stone

to its embodiment not only of shininess, but also of darkness, which was symbolic of destruction and death (Saunders 1999, 245). Obsidian was a key feature of three levels of the nine-tiered underworld; on one level the dead had to walk across an obsidian mountain, littered with sharp fragments of the materials; another level was seen as a place of ‘obsidian-bladed winds’; yet another the ‘obsidian place of the dead’ (Matos Moctezuma 1988, 129, cited in Saunders 2001). The association of obsidian with different levels of the underworld perhaps echoes the many levelled obsidian mines with their shafts and tunnels, which were dug deep into the earth (Saunders ibid., 224). Obsidian was also used in medicine: ground up obsidian, often with the addition of crushed quartz crystal, was put in the eyes of those suffering from cataracts (Saunders 2001, 225). Here we see properties of sharpness and brilliance combining in their effects. The relationship of obsidian to eyes may be related to the fact that both have reflective and gleaming qualities. This seems to have been recognised more than once: in the Neolithic of the Near East obsidian was used to represent the eyes of statues, and it was also used to make mirrors (Baird pers. comm.). Obsidian in Mesoamerica was also associated with powerful sight through its use in divinatory mirrors. Quartz, the other ingredient in the cataract medicine, like obsidian, is a material that gleams and certainly had divinatory properties amongst Mayan groups (Brady and Prufer 1999). Here we can see the value of a more holistic approach to stone, where the varied properties of a material were bound up with broader understandings of the world. And although obsidian was used in significant acts such as sacrifice, it also had a broader variety of uses in daily life, such as shaving (Saunders 2001).

STONES AS EVERLASTING MONUMENTS A second strand of research that has explored the properties of stone comes through research on monuments. This is a rather more substantial body of literature, which has often shared distinctive approaches and generated a particular set of interpretations. There is not space to do justice to this work here; instead I will outline some of the major points to come from this research and how this has advanced understandings of the materiality of stone in general. Finally I will consider the effects this has had in thinking about artefactual stone. As with work on artefacts, approaches to monumental stones have also investigated how stones embody landscape. However approaches to monumental stones in general, focus more on the landscape effects of the monuments when erected (e.g. Tilley 1994; 2004; Cummings and Whittle 2004). So Tilley’s work on The materiality of stone, although discussing the materials of Breton menhirs or Maltese temples, is more concerned with how these elicit or echo certain landscape features. Although a landscape approach may be more appropriate to the monumental nature of these stones, it does

The Mutability of Stone

81

also have some potential for a consideration of artefactual stone, where assemblage can knit together parts of the landscape (Conneller 2000, 2006) or produce an architectural space (McFadyen 2006b). As a corollary of the focus on the landscape effects of the finished monument, the making of monuments and how this produces understandings of the materiality of stone has been under-theorised. Although there has been some work on quarrying (Richards 2004, 2009), and building dolmen and long barrows (Richards 2004; McFadyen 2006a, 2007), an understanding of making has been neglected in the works that are more explicitly focused on the materiality of stone. In Tilley’s 2004 study of Breton Menhirs, the focus is on the consumption of the completed monument. Although most of these stones were erected unmodified, the axe-shaped stones of Bas Léon underwent significant shaping. This work, and the effort of quarrying and erecting these and other menhirs must have had a significant effect on many people’s experience of these stones. Furthermore, understandings of monumental stone materials must have been related to people’s knowledge of these as encountered in their use of daily objects made from similar stones. Some of the menhirs Tilley discusses were made from quartz, for example, a material that could also be chipped to make stone tools. Warren and Neighbour (2004) have pointed out that different language is employed depending on whether a discussion focuses on the use of quartz for tools, or on its association with monuments: in the former context quartz is viewed as a poor quality raw material suitable only for crude, expedient technologies, in the latter it embodies a range of symbolic properties and is deposited with some formality. They discuss the use of quartz at the kerbed cairn of Olcote, on the Isle of Lewis, where both quartz used to make tools and smashed quartz were used to cap the cairn. They argue that there is little sense of a distinction between artefactual and smashed quartz in the way these stones were assembled within the cairn itself. In general, the lack of a technological approach and the emphasis on finished monuments has led to a focus on the surface properties of stones rather than an understanding of mass or depths. There has been detailed and nuanced work on the surface of stones as apprehended through a visual (and to a lesser extent tactile) appreciation (e.g. Tilley 2004), revealing complexity in the assembling of stones of different colours and texture in monument building. Some of these affects problematise differences between cultural and natural stones, in that sometimes stones were selected with natural pitting or spirals that on other occasions would be carved onto the stones themselves (Bradley 2009). However we need to go beyond the surface affects of stones. This is where a technological approach is valuable. Working stone material is not just about surface, but also about an appreciation of material mass, depths and volume. A technological approach is needed to fully bring out people’s engagements and understandings of the hidden depths of stones, from large monumental boulders to the smallest chipped stone tools.

82

The Mutability of Stone

The focus of monuments has generated very particular understandings of stone, which are so frequently reiterated they appear to verge on universal. Its properties of solidity and hardness, lasting well beyond individual lifetimes, are seen to make it suitable for monuments designed to endure for generations. Stone has usually been perceived as embodying permanence, so for example, in the introduction to a volume that discusses a vast range of different types of stone (ochre, chert, flint, slate, sarsen, limestone, schist, etc.), used both for monuments and artefacts, stone is seen ‘as embodying the enduring’ (O’Connor and Cooney 2009, xxiii). It has also been argued that stone’s ‘physical properties of durability, hardness, solidity and weight’ make a structural relationship between stone and the ancestors more likely (Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998, 310). While not disputing that hardness and durability are among the properties of stone, and that these may often have been to the fore when certain monuments were constructed, this should not be taken a priori as the property selected for, simply because the monument has endured. Even more problematic is the transposition of these monumental properties into work on artefactual stone. Tilley (1996, 323), for example has suggested that because polished axes were made from stone they, like monuments, represented the enduring. Similarly Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998, 318) argue that ‘if stone was the material of the ancestors then our understanding of its modification for rock art, its context in cave and rock shelter burials and its quarrying and shaping for stone axes takes on a new dimension.’ Material properties however emerge in particular types of engagement, and cannot be transposed across a modern category of material, which is itself in constant variation. While stone’s durability is obvious to us as archaeologists, this represents a different perspective from people undertaking tasks that brought to the fore the mutability and expedience of certain stones: the rapid transformation of stone into tools; the use of these fleetingly; their final abandonment.

T O W A R D S A N UN D E R S T A N D I N G O F M U N D A N E , A R T E F A C TU AL S T O N E S As the cases discussed previously begin to illustrate, it is clear that there is no such thing as ‘stone’; there are many different types of stones with different properties and these stones become different through particular modes of engagement. The experience of stone tool production, for example, brings people into contact with a very different array of stony properties than those viewing a standing stone erected many years previously. There are soft stones that impart colour, hard stones that smash things and sharp stones that cut things. At an even greater level of detail, no two stones will be exactly the same, albeit that standardised modes of engagement may attempt to or succeed in making them more or less similar. Even though they may

The Mutability of Stone

83

appear overtly similar, the properties of visually similar stones will vary, dependent on mass, inclusions, etc. (see Schlanger 1996), some of which may make them more like another type of stone. Furthermore, as Tilley (2004) outlines, the properties of a stone will be perceived differently in different conditions (weather, light, etc). It is hoped that the discussions in the following chapter will elucidate the mutability of stone, that different stones have different properties and these change in different spatio-temporal settings. Stones do not always mean permanence, although they sometimes may do. In the remainder of the chapter, I will work towards an understanding of some of the stones used to make the artefacts used in daily life. As with other chapters I will take a technological approach to this issue, tracing the rhizomatic connections that permit a more nuanced understanding of the properties of materials. Although the initial parts of the chapter will discuss the surface properties of some stones, I will later move towards an understanding of material mass and depths.

I N S C R I B E D S U RF A C E S A common property of flint and chert (and indeed of many other stones) is a outer surface, known as cortex. The cortex of flint fresh from the chalk is soft and powdery and can be easily incised with a sharp tool. That this was a broadly recognised property of such stones is demonstrated by the presence of flint with engraved cortex deriving from contexts widely separated in time and space. The practice first appears in Israel at the sites of Qafzeh, dating to around 100,000 years ago (Hovers et al. 1997), and Quneitra (Golan), dating to 60,000 years ago (Marshack 1995). The design at Qafzeh (a series of parallel incisions) comes from the same levels as the famous human burials, which represent the earliest evidence of anatomically modern humans outside Africa. The example from Quneitra consists of concentric lines. These two pieces of engraved flint are the only evidence we have for symbolic expression in the near east (apart from the shell beads also at Qafzeh) in the c.50,000 years between the first appearance of Homo sapiens and the ‘symbolic explosion’ c.40,000–50,000 years ago (d’Errico 2003; Vanhaeren et al. 2006). Just like the more elaborate engravings on ochre from Blombos Cave, South Africa, dated to c.76,000BP (Henshilwood and d’Errico 2005), the earliest evidence for symbolic expression appears to be bound up with the manipulation of soft stones or the soft parts of stones. Pieces of flint with engraved cortex are present throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, becoming increasingly common towards the end of the period. These engravings tend to reflect common themes in Palaeolithic art (animals and abstract symbols) and are similar to those found on other materials. At the Final Magdalenian site of Roc du Sorciers, Vienne, a possible female symbol was scratched onto a piece of cortex (Pinçon 2007), whereas at Pincevent, in the Paris Basin, a horse’s head was engraved (Bodu 1995,

84

The Mutability of Stone

2000). By contrast, the only two British finds, from Hengistbury Head, Dorset and Gough’s Cave, Somerset, both of similar or a slightly later date than the French examples, consist of a series of roughly parallel and criss-crossed lines (Barton 1992, 171–73; Jacobi 2004, 48–49). Finds of engraved cortical pieces become more common as we move into the Mesolithic and appear particularly frequent on Scandinavian Mesolithic sites. A survey by Karsten and Knarrström (2003, 110) revealed 19 findspots in southern Scandinavia. Within this material they note distinct regional patterns. Only six finds come from Denmark, with never more than one from each site (although their category of single finds includes a refitted engraved nodule which was knapped into 70 pieces). In contrast, findspots from Scania frequently yield multiple examples, with 177 pieces recovered from the site of Tågerup alone. There are also chronological patterns: pieces with cortical engraving are more common during the first half of the Mesolithic (Maglemose and Køngemose periods; c.9600–6500BP). The designs on the Scandinavian material are geometric only (Figure 3.1), consisting mainly of cross-hatching, chequers and parallel lines (Karsten and

Figure 3.1 Flint with engraved cortex from Tågerup, Scania (reproduced with permission from Karsten and Knarrström 2003, National Heritage Board Sweden).

The Mutability of Stone

85

Knarrström 2003, 111). They do however, like the Upper Palaeolithic examples, display similar themes to contemporary decorated organic material, where geometric designs are the predominant motif (Nash 1998). Interpretation of the significance of the engraved cortical pieces has varied. Althin, in an early study of Scanian engraved flint, suggests that the decoration was done ‘to bring magical influences to bear on the flint to facilitate knapping’ (Althin 1951, 260). To strengthen this hypothesis he drew attention to a handle core from Ageröd III on which the ornamentation consists of lines drawn on the cortex in exactly the way that microblades would have been expected to have been detached from the core, had it been worked. Cores with similar decoration are also known from Ølby Lyng and Undeløse Bro, Zealand (Fischer 1974, 165) and Tågerup, Scania (Figure 3.2). However the other examples that Althin cites appear less obviously connected with the knapping process. Nor, on closer exanimation, are the lines on the Ageröd III handle core where blades would be expected to be detached, because the platform edge angle is greater than 90 degrees

Figure 3.2 Core with engraved cortex from Tågerup, Scania. The engraved lines echo the positions of blade removals on a worked core. (Reproduced with permission from Karsten and Knarrström 2003, National Heritage Board Sweden).

86

The Mutability of Stone

(this would inhibit flint-knapping). Neither is his interpretation supported by analyses of the material from Holmegård V, Zealand (Fischer 1974) or (with the exception of Figure 3.2) by the recent finds from Tågerup (Karsten and Knarrström 2003, 111). Larsson, on the basis of material from Segebrø and Ageröd I, suggests an alternative interpretation; that the engravings were the by-product of obtaining white colouring from the chalky cortex (Larsson 1978, 1982, 1990). Although this could account for some of the more haphazard scratches, many designs appear rather more purposeful and elaborate than this explanation might suggest (see for example Karsten and Knarrström 2003, 114, figure 74 or Fischer 1974, figure 1). In their recent discussion of decorated pieces from Tågerup, Karsten and Knarrström compare the decorated lithic material with the engraved bone and antler artefacts from the site. While the same set of geometric motifs are found on both, they highlight significant differences in the quality of the respective designs, with those on cortex generally consisting of short, hastily executed lines. This difference in quality, they suggest, may be due to the identity of those undertaking the engravings. Just as the lithic material from the site shows the presence of children learning how to undertake the knapping process, so the engraved flint material may represent children learning the ‘language of religious and artistic form that was so important for the survival and identity of the culture’ (Karsten and Knarrström 2003, 118), which was expressed, amongst adults, through carving on bone and antler (Andersson et al. 2004). At Tågerup, as on other Scandinavian Mesolithic sites, engraving was undertaken when the flint was an intact nodule, before it was reduced to flakes, blades and tools. As Karsten and Knarrström themselves point out, this renders any attempt to classify designs impossible because only fragments of the original pattern are preserved. In order to rectify this, refitting was attempted at Tågerup; however only 2 of the 177 decorated pieces were found to refit. This, as the authors state, is surprising, especially given the large area excavated at Tågerup. The very presence of the engraving should also hugely facilitate refitting, as parts of designs can be matched, in the same way as a conventional jigsaw puzzle is assembled. The situation at Tågerup replicates Larsson’s (1978, 1982) lack of success in refitting decorated cortical material from Scanian sites (and interestingly is also the case for the Upper Palaeolithic site of Hengistbury Head, Dorset). This indicates a substantial portion of the engraved material was removed from these sites – significantly more than would be expected given the normal patterns of lithic preparation and transportation. The extent of the missing material surely gainsays any prosaic explanation for engraved cortical pieces. Why are these pieces missing?

The Holmegård V Engraved Flint Core One site where refitting has been possible is at the Danish Maglemosian site of Holmegård V, Zealand (Fischer 1974). Here a single engraved flint nodule

The Mutability of Stone

87

was recovered during rescue excavations undertaken by Anders Fischer in 1970 and 1971. 67 flakes and 3 cores were fitted together to form a 21cm long elongated flint nodule. On the outer surface of this piece a variety of geometric designs had been scratched (Figure 3.3). The scratches form a series of motifs of the kind known from decorated Mesolithic bone and antler tools and include barbed lines, zigzag lines and hatched triangles along a line. Fischer suggests that the designs can be grouped into three motifs: two cross-hatched bands were engraved next to each other and another smaller cross-hatched band was engraved on the opposite side of the stone. Moving from the smaller motif around the stone, the lines gradually widen – suggesting that the motifs were engraved at the same time and that the engraving instrument gradually grew dull during the process. Fischer suggests that the cross-hatched bands (Figure 3.4) represent male human beings, because they resemble more widely accepted, though also heavily stylised figures, found on bone artefacts. An additional link to maleness, Fischer suggests, can also be found in the phallic shape of the nodule. Another phallic decorated nodule of likely Mesolithic date (though this one intact) has been published by Vang Petersen (1993, 143, cited in Karsten and Knarrström 2003, 129). As with the Tågerup material, the Holmegård nodule was exploited for tool production after it had been decorated. The nodule was segmented into three cores, which were themselves reduced to produce a series of flakes and blades. In contrast to the Scanian material though, most of the flint debitage belonging to the decorated nodule could be refitted. In fact, the majority of the debris was discovered lying neatly in a small compact heap; the remainder lay scattered round it at a distance of up to two metres. This pile of flint, Fischer suggests, seems to represent material that was selectively aggregated: it consists of the larger waste flakes, the three cores and most of the regularly shaped flakes. When the flint nodule was reconstructed some pieces were found to be missing. Most of these were very small fragments that were probably overlooked during excavation. However, four of the most regular and blade-like flakes were also missing and these seem to have been deliberately removed from the site. Fischer (1974, 165) argues that ‘the ornamentation of the flint-core was a symbolic act intimately connected with the use of the flakes deriving from its destruction’. Because Fischer strongly connects the decoration to maleness (both through the gender of the human figures and the shape of the nodule), we can perhaps envisage that the missing blades were used in male rites of passage, perhaps those connected to circumcision, tattooing or scarification. If we can generalise from Fischer’s work, it is perhaps the missing material – and the uses it was put to – that was important. Some of the tools made from decorated nodules appear to have had extended life histories. They were removed from places such as Holmegård and Tågerup and imported into sites where there are single decorated elements. The Kongemose site of Villingbæk Øst in Zealand, for example, yielded a single decorated

Figure 3.3 Refitted engraved flint nodule from Holmegård V, Zealand (Image: Anders Fischer).

Figure 3.4 Stylised male figure on Holmegård V, Zealand (Image: Anders Fischer).

90

The Mutability of Stone

burin. The uses these special objects were put to may have been quite varied: the specificity of the Holmegård nodule, for example, suggests it played a different role to the material from Tågerup or Ageröd III. It seems to have been the intended use, then, that drove the decoration of the nodule. The act of engraving the designs may have produced an apotropaic effect that subsequently guided the production of blanks and tools and the subsequent uses that these were put to. Thus Althin (1951, 260) may have been right after all when he suggested the decoration elicited magical effects to protect the knapping process, however this seems to have encompassed the entire châine opératoire, from the initial knapping to the final use and disposal of the finished object. The subsequent knapping of the nodule rendered the pattern of the design and the meaning it might carry unrecognisable. Crucially the design would not be seen at all on many of the pieces that were used, because these would derive from the inner part of the nodule and for the most part lack cortex entirely. The knowledge, and affects, of the design, though, would linger for those who had been involved in the process. Conversely the destruction of the design meant it could not be read by others, members of the group whose participation in these activities was denied, or outsiders who may have had malevolent intentions. So what does the practice of cortical engraving tell us about flint as a material? First the soft chalky properties of cortex are vital for the act of decoration. The engraving of the cortex, I have argued, had an apotropaic role in protecting the material beneath. This may have enhanced the existing properties of cortex, rather than transformed them. Flint fresh from the chalk is in general of superior quality than flint from secondary contexts, such as river gravels or glacial till, and cortex is, after all, in most cases a trace of this protective chalky envelope. Second, cortex also reveals the source of the flint. Rudebeck (1998) has argued that leaving a small area of cortex on Swedish Neolithic axes revealed that they had been mined from deep underground. Aspects of the form of the nodule were also harnessed. In the case of the Holmegård V nodule, it appears the phallic shape of the nodule played an important part in the reason why it, in particular, was selected. This is not to say that we can see a more general connection between flint and maleness (the piece of engraved cortex from Roc aux Sorciers discussed earlier appears connected with femaleness for example); rather it is the coincidence of the specificity of the form of this nodule and the task ahead that led to its selection. In the case of the Holmegård nodule at least perhaps we can make a broader link between flint and bodies;1 in this case, cortex may have been seen like skin,2 a protective outer surface. In this context, given the suggestion that the missing blades were used in tattooing or scarification, the design engraved on the flint cortex may have mimicked some of the designs produced on the human body. At a broader epistemological level, though, this investigation into decoration incised onto cortex could be argued to return us to a focus on

The Mutability of Stone

91

surface, not depths. However, I would argue that the case study reveals greater complexity (although it is perhaps the focus simply on the decorated surface that has led to their significance being overlooked for so long). It is the ability of flint to fracture predictably through knapping and to be made into tools that is vital for understanding the life history and purpose of the decoration. To treat it just as a static pattern that was designed to be viewed misses its point completely. It was always orientated towards the process of its destruction. It should be noted though, that decorated cortex is relatively uncommon in the archaeological record, so a focus on this material perhaps returns us to ‘special’ objects rather than habitual daily knapping. The tendency for archaeologists to focus on this factor has been argued to inhibit an understanding of the materiality of stone. A further investigation of form, although perhaps encouraging a focus on surface, can perhaps at least provide the beginnings of a way of thinking about stones. The following two case studies, both focusing on form, can perhaps bring us closer to our goal, in that these approaches can lead to a way of thinking about the interiority of stones.

UN E XP EC TED F O R M S

Stony Insects The first case of unexpected form arises from the Magdalenian occupation of the Grotte du Trilobite at Arcy-sur-Cure, in northern Burgundy. This is one of a series of twelve caves which have evidence of repeated visits throughout the Upper Palaeolithic period. Grotte de Trilobite is a rich site with occupation dating from the late Mousterian to the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Even by the standards of the Arcy caves, Grotte de Trilobite has had an unfortunate excavation history. The cave was discovered in 1886 by Dr Adrien Ficateur who emptied the cave of its sediments over a relatively short period (Leroi-Gourhan and Leroi-Gourhan 1964); we thus know nothing of the context of the Magdalenian finds. Despite its problematic history, Grotte du Trilobite has yielded the only two certain pieces of Magdalenian portable art from the Arcy Caves (Baffier and Girard 1998, 26). The first of these is a fossil, the eponymous trilobite (Figure 3.5), a marine arthropod of the Silurian period. Oakley (1965) states that the nearest source of this fossil is several hundred kilometres away; it appears to have been specially transported to the cave. The trilobite had been modified to allow it to be worn, either as an pendant or sewn onto clothing. It was perforated for suspension in rather an idiosyncratic fashion, through the incision of lateral grooves on the back of the fossil, then drilling a hole through each groove using an awl (Oakley 1965; 1975, 48, Baffier and Girard 1998, 26).

92

The Mutability of Stone

Figure 3.5 Trilobite from Grotte de Trilobite, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne (reproduced with permission from Oakley 1965, 121).

This fossil was certainly seen as something remarkable, as indicated by its transportation over long distances and perforation for suspension. How it was interpreted by the people who collected it however is more difficult to understand. Contemporary scientific understandings recognise this as a once-living animal, whose flesh, over a huge period of time, has been replaced by stone; but it is unlikely that these understandings were shared by Palaeolithic people. Fossils have, after all, been imagined in a variety of ways: in European folklore they were seen as thunderbolts, devil’s toenails, snakes’ tongues, to name but a few (Oakley 1975); even the scientists of the early modern period varied in the ways they made sense of the relationships of material and form embodied in fossils (Rudwick 1972). A clue to how the trilobite may have been understood can be seen through the second piece of Magdalenian portable art recovered from the cave – a carving in lignite of a beetle (Figure 3.6). This was also perforated for suspension in the same idiosyncratic fashion as the fossil, by drilling holes through lateral grooves incised onto the reverse of the piece (Baffier and Girard 1998, 26). The representation of insects is very rare in the Upper Palaeolithic. Only a dozen examples are known, mainly from Magdalenian portable art (Bahn and Butlin 1990). This co-occurrence of a fossil trilobite and a rare depiction of a beetle, both perforated in similar fashion, appears too great a co-incidence to suggest anything other than a relationship between the two. The manufactured beetle can be viewed as a commentary on the trilobite; a recognition of the beetle-like nature of the fossil. It is important to note that the lignite beetle is not an exact replica of the trilobite. The manufacture of the lignite beetle represents an acknowledgement

The Mutability of Stone

93

Figure 3.6 Carving of a beetle from Grotte de Trilobite, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne (reproduced with permission from Oakley 1965, 121).

of the trilobite as a beetle, rather than an act of facsimile. People materialised their understanding of the trilobite by manufacturing their own stony beetle. Lignite, a fossilised wood, may have been chosen for this because it is black and shiny and thus mimics the surface affects of a living beetle. This unusual juxtaposition of a beetle’s form in an unexpected material was obviously something remarkable to the people using the cave, leading them to collect and curate the trilobite and carry it over great distances. Modern scientific understandings of fossils would privilege the form over the material and see this as a beetle that has become stone – a beetle in an unfamiliar material. However the technological mimicry of this transformation – the act of making a stone into a beetle – may suggest the Magdalenians had a different view of this transformation and perceived it as a stone with an unfamiliar form. The manufactured lignite beetle suggests people recognised that beetles might emerge from stones. The trilobite appears to have been picked out because of the non-human agent of transformation – perhaps conceived as the work of a supernatural being, or perhaps effected by the stone itself. Both trilobite and beetle, though, emphasise the transformability of stones and their ability to take on other forms. This idea of transformability as a quality of stone is very different to that imagined in archaeological accounts, as discussed earlier, where permanence is in general taken to be their key feature (see also Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998).

94

The Mutability of Stone

Monstrous Stones Halitherium was a genus of dugong or sea cow around two metres in length which lived during the Eocene and Oligocene. Bones of the Halitherium are common in Early Oligocene strata of the Gironde and relatively easy to recover due to the erosion of these sediments (Cousté and Gaillard 1957). Vertebrae and other bones can be found, but ribs are the most common element, which in the Halitherium were broad and elongated, to aid buoyancy. In these sediments the bones of the dugong have lithicified, resulting in a stone with a homogeneous inner core which is pink or reddish brown in colour. The outer surface has a soft cortex, similar to that of flint, which, if exposed, disappears to be replaced with a irregular, striated surface, similar to antler (ibid., 575). In the two contiguous caves, known as the Grottes de Jaurias, Gironde, both of which contain evidence of occupation in the Middle or Late Magdalenian (Cousté 1951), tools and blades made from the stony bones of the Halitherium can be found. In Grotte 1 many fragments of ribs were recovered which had been smashed and abandoned. This has been interpreted as an attempt at knapping, which failed because of the poor quality of the lithic material (Cousté and Gaillard 1957, 575). In the adjacent cave, Grotte 2, more successful assays on the dugong bones were recovered: a core demonstrating blade removal, a series of blades (two of which can be refitted to the core), flakes and bladelets and two tools, a burin and a borer. The Magdalenians were not the only people to show an interest in the fossil dugong. Oakley (1975, 42) notes the presence of a piece made from stony Halitherium bones in the latest Aurignacian levels at Isturitz, BassePyrénées. Because the nearest location of fossil dugong is likely to have been around Bordeaux, this material seems to have been considered important. As Oakley states: ‘Such unusual raw material for the production of tools and weapon-heads may easily have been regarded as having some symbolic virtue on account of its strangeness’ (ibid.). People familiar with the bones of a variety of animals are likely to have recognised the stone had the form of a dead, giant, unknown animal; a monster. Like the trilobite from Arcy, stone presented itself in an unusual form, one more usually assumed by animals. During the Aurignacian the products of this stony monster were valued: curated and transported great distances. In contrast, the Magdalenians of the Grottes de Jaurias obtained the bones of the Halitherium locally. Its presence in the caves has been interpreted as a reflection of the principle of least effort (Cousté and Gaillard 1957, 575) whereby people were willing to use poor quality raw material only in situations where it was easy to obtain. However the strangeness of the stones that could be found in the local Oligocene deposits appears to have been marked more generally by the Magdalenians who used these two caves. Also collected from these deposits and brought to the Grottes de Jaurias were several fossilised sea urchins

The Mutability of Stone

95

(Taborin 1993; Demnard and Néraudeau 2002, 713). The ability for stones to generate unexpected forms appears to have been a more commonly recognised quality.

M Y S T E RI O U S D E P TH S At one level, as Schlanger (1996), points out, every stone is unique and demands a different form of engagement. However, more broadly, we can consider that every stone has the ability to surprise. The trilobite and the Halitherium are perhaps idiosyncratic examples, but knowledge of fossils does appear to have been an important part of Upper Palaeolithic life. Drawing on a number of synthetic articles (e.g. Morel and Gachina 1975; Morel 1977; Taborin 1993; Demnard and Néraudeau 2002; Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006) as well as individual site reports, it is evident that finds of fossils are relatively common on Upper Palaeolithic sites (see Table 3.1). The use of fossil shells as beads is fairly ubiquitous throughout the Upper Palaeolithic. Of 34 French Magdalenian sites listed by Taborin (2004, 69), only seven lack fossil shells. Several major sources were employed: the Miocene deposits of Aquitaine were a common source for fossil shells which are found as far north as Placard, Charente, and as far south-east as La Vache, Ariège. Shells from the Eocene deposits of the Paris Basin tend to have a more restricted distribution, but were the main source of all shell beads used in this area. In the Mediterranean provinces of France, Pliocene fossil shells found near to the sea shore were often preferred to living species (Taborin 2004, 72). Fossil shells vary in their material properties. Those from relatively recent geological deposits tend to be indistinguishable from living shells in terms of hardness, although they differ in that they lack the often vibrant colours of living shells (Taborin 1993). Those from earlier epochs have been lithicised. In addition to shells, other fossils were collected, predominantly to be used as beads, but were also imported to sites as manuports which underwent little or no modification. Of these fossils, echinoids (sea urchins) were by far the most common, followed by ammonites, then belemnites. Rarer examples include corals, crinoids (sea-lilies), nummulites, sharks’ teeth and sponges. Although fossils were collected throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, there is a strong clustering of finds in the Magdalenian. All major types show their highest frequencies during this period. All fossils, with the exception of shells from recent geological periods which have similar properties to living shells, can be considered stones with remarkable forms. It is this unusual form that appears to have marked them as interesting and led to their collection and transportation, often over great distances. The particular types of stone in which fossils are found vary considerably in their properties, from hard (e.g. limestone) to relatively soft (e.g. chalk), from dull (mudstones and shales) to gleaming (pyritised). As

7

Total

Source: Data taken from multiple sources.

0 1 0 2 3 0 1 0 0 0

Chatel-perroninan

Ammonite Belemnite Coral Crinoid Echinoid Fish dental plate Numalite Shark tooth Sponge Trilobite

Fossil

27

5 6 3 1 8 0 0 4 0 0

Aurignacian

36

14 2 0 3 16 0 0 1 0 0

Gravettian

Table 3.1 Different fossil types on Upper Palaeolithic sites (by period)

14

8 3 0 0 2 0 0 1 0 0

Solutrean

194

17 10 2 2 153 1 0 6 2 1

Magdalenian

1

0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

Azilian

15

2 8 0 0 4 0 0 1 0 0

Unspecified Upper Pal. period

294

46 30 5 9 186 1 1 13 2 1

Total

The Mutability of Stone

97

with the bones of the Halitherium, some of these stones had a structure that permitted the production of stone tools. Fossils are present in both flint and chert, the major stones employed in prehistoric tool production in Western Europe, as well as stones that were used less frequently, such as mudstones. The fossils found on Upper Palaeolithic sites derive from rocks of a variety of different ages: mostly Jurassic and Cretaceous, but also later deposits, of Miocene and Eocene date. This range of sources hints at a variety of procurement contexts. The fossils deriving from Eocene and Miocene deposits (shark teeth and some of the echinoids) are likely to have been collected while groups were searching for fossil shells, as these deposits were their main source. Indeed it is notable that all but two Upper Palaeolithic sites with Eocene and Miocene fossils also contain fossil shells. More frequently fossils were derived from Jurassic or Cretaceous sediments. Of the ammonites, 75 per cent were Jurassic, 25 per cent Cretaceous. Half of all the echinoids derived from Cretaceous deposits. Many of these were undoubtedly encountered by chance, during routine activities, but the close association of fossil sources with deposits that yielded the main sources of knappable stone should not be ignored. The Jurassic sediments are likely to be varied but could include chert-yielding limestone. The association of Cretaceous deposits with flint-bearing chalk sources is stronger and many of these are likely to have been collected during flint procurement expeditions. Fossils can be composed of either chalk or of flint itself. The flint examples can consist either of complete nodules, or be found within nodules (see Figure 3.7). There is thus a strong association of fossils both with sources of workable stone and the stones themselves, with many fossils coming to light during procurement and knapping activities. Why do we see this persistent interest in fossils during the Upper Palaeolithic, and into the Mesolithic? Perhaps one explanation could relate to Clottes’ interpretations of cave art, outlined in Chapter 1 (Clottes 1989, 1995, 1997; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998). In Upper Palaeolithic cave art in general, and Magdalenian art in particular, the natural contours of the cave wall were harnessed in animal depictions, with bulges in the cave wall becoming bodies, projections heads and imperfections eyes. Clottes argues that these shapes were perceived as spirit animals attempting to emerge from the underworld behind the cave wall. The idea of spirit animals emerging from behind a stony membrane is perhaps instructive and can provide a way of thinking about fossils, at least those collected in the Magdalenian period. Sea creatures such as shells and sea urchins and land animals such as snakes (a frequent folk interpretation of ammonites, see Oakely 1965, 1975) could be perceived as emerging through the membrane of the stone. This idea may be strengthened by associations of fossils with caves. At the Arcy Caves, ammonites and belemnites are visible embedded in the cave walls (Baffier and Girard 1998, 59); at the Castlemerle caves (see Chapter 1), crinoids in particular erode out of the cave wall and are found in the archaeological strata (O’Hara, pers. comm.).

98

The Mutability of Stone

Clottes’ idea, drawn from direct historical analogy, that the cave was an entrance to the underworld, the world of the dead, can perhaps be paralleled in microcosm by fossils. In Magdalenian contexts, fossils do have an association with burials (which are themselves very rare during this period). At Placard, Charente, a hoard of 53 fossil urchins was found by the head of a probable inhumation (Taborin 1993, 2004, Demnard and Néraudeau 2002). At St Germain-la-Rivière, Gironde, six perforated echinoids were discovered in the same cave as a burial of a woman, although associated with the ‘living area’ rather than directly with the burial (Álvarez Fernández 2001; Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). The association of fossils with burials continues in the Mesolithic. Dating to the early Mesolithic, a cluster of ammonites was associated with the double grave at Aveline’s Hole, Somerset (Davies 1924; Schulting and Wysocki 2005); in the later Mesolithic two echinoids were recovered from a grave at Skateholm II (Larsson 1988). Cave art and fossils within flint nodules differ in the role of people in the animal’s emergence. In cave art, animals were glimpsed in the process of trying to emerge and the act of painting intentionally brought them forth. Fossils, by contrast, lay hidden within the flint or chalk, and it was often the human act of procurement or of flintknapping that would inadvertently reveal them. Thus revealing a fossil through flintknapping would be both a surprise to the knapper and an act that might be seen as unwelcome to the fossil animal and so potentially dangerous. Though rare, fossils are sufficiently common in flint, particularly in certain areas, that the potential for stone to reveal a stony creature would have been part of the way it was commonly understood. A more detailed understanding of the encounter of people with fossils during routine flintknapping can be seen at the Early Mesolithic site of Seamer C, North Yorkshire.

Fossils at Seamer Carr Seamer C is located in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, near to the coastal town of Scarborough. During the time of occupation the site was situated on the northern shore of palaeolake Flixton, home to a number of Mesolithic sites, including Star Carr (Figure 2.2). Seamer C is a large spread of debris, extending for around 50m along the shoreline of the lake. The site encompasses both Upper Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic lithic scatters, with the Mesolithic occupation dating to around 9400BP (Conneller 2007). Within the Mesolithic part of the site, the knapping process was fairly expedient and the flint employed was of relatively poor quality. Two sources were used: the first, a coarse, opaque, white flint was obtained from the Yorkshire Wolds, which forms the southern boundary to the Vale of Pickering; the other source was the glacial till which blankets the east coast of Britain. The till flint at this site was obtained from the beach, after the sea had eroded the till cliffs. Till flint was preferred at Seamer C and at the

The Mutability of Stone

99

other Mesolithic sites in the Vale of Pickering and is in general of better quality than the coarse white Wolds material. It is fine grained and generally speckled grey in colour, although clear honey-coloured and brown nodules and speckled red material is also present. Amongst the debris in the south of the site, a number of fossils have been recovered. All derive from within flint nodules, from both Wolds and till flint, and were thus revealed through the knapping process. The Wolds group consists of a series of fossil shells that were embedded within the material itself. When people knapped the Wolds flint, it would naturally cleave to the point of the fossil shell, because this is a point of resistance within the otherwise homogeneous material. Thus in routine flintknapping, stony shells would be revealed to the knapper. Although sometimes flakes, blades and cores were produced, often the presence of the shell caused the nodule to shatter, rendering it useless. This may have been seen perceived as bad luck caused by the revealing of the stony shell. Fossil shell imprints in till flint are rarer, but this material also yielded other fossil types. An echinoid, measuring nearly 4cm in diameter, was discovered at the site; refitting revealed it had originally been lodged within a larger flint nodule (see Figure 3.7). This nodule was obtained

Figure 3.7 Echinoid fossil originally concealed within flint nodule from the Mesolithic site of Seamer C, North Yorkshire (Photo: Brian Conneller).

100

The Mutability of Stone

from the beach, at least 10–20km away. Part of the echinoid was visible from the surface of the pebble, yet it still was carried from the beach to the site, despite, or perhaps because of, this impediment to regular flintknapping. Traces reveal that a second echinoid, or similar fossil, was also originally present in the nodule; however this was not recovered. This second echinoid and the surrounding lithic debris appears to have been chipped from the nodule elsewhere; either at source or another site. At Seamer C the flintknapper carefully chipped the other echinoid out of the stone revealing it in its entirety. The remainder of the pebble was then worked and a core produced. The echinoid was abandoned at Seamer C; however the core that derives from the nodule has not been found. It appears to have been removed to be used elsewhere. This is relatively unusual for this site, for although Early Mesolithic lithic material was routinely transported by people round the landscape of the Vale of Pickering, this was much less common at Seamer C. Refitting reveals that complete nodules were imported, reduced, and their products used and abandoned at the site. One of the relatively rare exceptions to this is the core that derived from the echinoid pebble. Although the echinoid itself was abandoned at Seamer C (perhaps because it was potentially dangerous, or more pragmatically because it was too small to be used itself as a source of flint) the core that derived from its pebble was curated. Its derivation from the echinoid pebble may have marked it out as special, giving products derived from it a potency that would make them appropriate for certain tasks.

A V IT AL SPAR K? As a final point it is worth pointing out a potential association of fire and flint. A notable property of flint is its ability to create sparks when brought in conjunction with other hard stones or metal materials, a process that also generates a very characteristic smell of gunpowder. That this potential was often recognised and harnessed is demonstrated through the use of flint as strike-a-lights. Several of these objects are known from Mesolithic sites in the Vale of Pickering, for example. As well as the ability to generate sparks, contexts of production and use also brought flint in close association with fire. All the major knapping episodes at Seamer C, for example, took place around a hearth, and tasks such as the fixing of flint tools into hafts involved the heating of mastic. This is certainly an association that is worth further investigation. The existence of a fiery spark within flint may have enhanced properties of animacy suggested by the emergence of fossils. We can perhaps see these relationships in a later context. Van Gijn (2009) has elucidated associations of flint with fire in the Dutch Middle Neolithic. At the site of Schipluiden, a man was buried with three flint strike-a-lights and a nodule of pyrites

The Mutability of Stone

101

clasped in his hand. His hand was positioned close to his mouth, giving the impression of blowing a spark. If this is the enactment of a metaphor for life, it may have been particularly important that it was undertaken by someone who was dead. This association of flint and fire in this period is strengthened by the treatment of exotic flint tools used for harvesting cereals. Immediately before deposition, they were burned, then the edge that had been used was chipped away to destroy it. Other tools made from the same exotic flint source were not treated in the same way, but this source was, unlike local flint, used for making strike-a-lights.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter I have been concerned to draw out the varied properties of artefactual stone through a series of case studies tracing the material interactions and connections in which various sorts of stones were caught up. An emphasis on the technical process permits us to move beyond a consideration of the surfaces of finished objects. So rather than focusing on the designs engraved on the surface of southern Scandinavian flint nodules, for example, we can see the importance of process. These geometrical engravings were not intended to be admired; instead they were destroyed and rendered unreadable through the knapping process. This was, in fact, their very point: intended to produce an apotropaic effect on the pieces that derived from the nodule, the engravings could only be successful through their destruction. An exploration of the perception of depth and mass of stones also takes us beyond a focus on surfaces. This is evident in the study of the relationship between knappable stone and fossils. Fossils within flint are sufficiently common to have informed people’s perception of this material. There was always the potential in routine knapping to encounter the unexpected, whether this was an internal flaw or a stony animal that lay within. This chapter has also aimed to elucidate the varied properties of stone. We have, for example, encountered different understandings of cortex in the case studies. In the Scandinavian Mesolithic its protective qualities, enhanced by the engravings, were emphasised. In the French Magdalenian there is perhaps the sense that cortex (or the nodule surface more generally) acted as a membrane between different states, or even different worlds, from which stony animals might unexpectedly emerge. Similarly the original shape of the stone has been seen to play a part in the ways it was understood. The phallic form of the nodule from Holmegård V resulted in its engraving and the use of the tools produced from it in very particular tasks. The stony bones of the Halitherium were selected, despite the fact they were difficult to work successfully, because they were in the form of a stony animal. What appears ostensibly the same material, stone with conchoidal fracture, can thus be understood in very different ways.

4

Material Worlds

In the introduction it was argued that tracing people’s engagement with materials and their properties reveals broader ontological concerns. Geber’s writings on the properties of gold and Palissy’s on techniques of pottery production reveal how these concerns shaped, and were shaped by, the form of their interactions with different materials. In the previous chapters we have had glimpses of how different material articulations were bound up in these broader understandings. However, by virtue of the focus on specific substances these have only been partial glimpses. In this chapter I would like to paint a fuller picture of how materials are implicated in the creations of new worlds, through a case study focused on the earliest Upper Palaeolithic groups in Europe. This will involve tying together a number of themes (and materials) that have been introduced earlier in this book. Thus far we have looked at the production of Aurignacian basket-shaped beads (Chapter 1), and at how knowledge of mammoths at this time affected the production of things made from their tusks (Chapter 2). However the adoption of mammoth ivory and the widespread production of beads were just two of the changes that took place at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic. At the same time we see the appearance of a new range of tools and, most importantly, the first undisputed representational ‘art’: depictions of humans, animals and composite beings. These changes in the archaeological record have been termed a ‘symbolic explosion’. Some authors see this as a rapid change, representing a significant shift in human cognitive and/or linguistic abilities around this time (Klein 2008); others as the culmination of a series of longer-term, more piecemeal evolutionary trends towards ‘behavioural modernity’ (McBrearty and Brooks 2000). By contrast I will argue that the emergence of new materials in technical practice was vital to the ‘symbolic explosion’. This process, I will argue, both generated and was generated by the emergence of new understandings of the world. In this chapter, I will trace the relationship between these emergent new materials and changing worlds. This will involve taking a long-term approach to the study of materials, to appreciate the extended and complex histories of certain substances in technical practice, but will also

Material Worlds

103

elucidate episodes of radical change and the unimagined possibilities for life that the use of new materials established.

N E W WO R L D S : T H E UP PE R P A L AE O L I T H I C ‘R EVO L UT IO N ’ Between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, there was a significant change in the composition of the European archaeological record. Prior to 40,000BP, archaeological sites consisted of scatters of stone tools and manufacturing debris, animal bones processed for meat and marrow and, occasionally, burials of the dead (Mellars 1996). Wooden tools, such as spears, were used, but are almost never preserved. Pigments were employed (d’Errico 2003), fossils collected, and, very occasionally, shells used as beads (Zilhão et al. 2010). The rarity of tools made from other organic materials has been frequently remarked upon (e.g. Mellars 1989a, 1989b; Mithen 1996), especially given their ubiquity in the subsequent Upper Palaeolithic period. Bone tools in pre-Aurignacian contexts are very rare: three handaxes of Lower Palaeolithic date made from elephant bone have been recovered from sites in the Latium region of Italy, as has another example from the Hungarian site of Vérteszölös (Gaudzinski et al. 2005, 183). These were made using techniques identical to those employed in the production of stone handaxes (Villa and d’Errico 2001) in areas where large stones suitable for making handaxes were rare (Gaudzinski et al. 2005, 184). They thus seem to have functioned as a substitute for stone when it was not available. Because bone does not suit flaking technologies as well as stone, it was rarely employed as a material. Moving forward in time, Neanderthals also occasionally substituted bone for stone in handaxe production, as demonstrated by an example recovered from Rhede in Germany (Gaudzinski et al. 2005, 184). However the biggest collection of Neanderthal bone tools, over 20 examples from the German site of Salzgitter Lebenstedt, reveals a rather different technological approach to mammoth bone. Here ribs and fibulae were worked into points, through whittling of the tip. In this case the techniques used are transposed from woodworking to produce pieces that are similar to wooden spear points (Gaudzinski 1999, 140; Gaudzinski et al. 2005, 186). It is worth noting that all these bone tools are made from mammoth remains. This is likely to be because of the structure of bone as a material. Bone has both hard and internal cancellous (spongy) elements (MacGregor 1985). The latter is softer and less durable, so unsuitable for tools. Mammoth bones, by virtue of their large size were the only animal bones that could furnish sufficient length and depth to permit them to be treated in a similar way to stone or wood. Neanderthal and pre-Neanderthal technologies reveal the intimate linkage of material and technology. The properties of a material only emerge in the

104

Material Worlds

context of particular technological interactions. Before the conceptualisation that bone could be carved, or perhaps more accurately before carved bone was needed, it was not viewed as a useful material in its own right and acted instead as a substitute for other materials. Wood, which provides fewer morphological constraints and is easier to work than animal materials probably fulfilled many of the functions that were later taken up by bone, antler and ivory and meant that carved bone was not needed. After 40,000 years ago, the traditional material repertoire was augmented by new substances and by new technologies with which to work them: extensively carved antler, bone and mammoth ivory, numerous pierced shells, and a new range of often colourful stones such as amber and soapstone. The appearance of these new material/ technological combinations, has, in general, been of less interest to prehistorians than the forms that were produced from these. For the new substances were associated with new categories of material culture: the first human and animal figurines (Figure 4.1), the widespread manufacture of beads and pendants and a new range of organic tools. These are taken to be the hallmarks of ‘the human revolution’ of the Upper Palaeolithic (Mellars and Stringer 1989), and evidence for what in the archaeological literature has been termed ‘behavioural modernity’, a rather uncritical shorthand for a series of traits that are

Figure 4.1 Aurignacian mammoth figurine from Vogelherd (Photo: Hilde Jensen, University of Tübingen)

Material Worlds

105

considered to be uniquely shared by all extant humans. This ‘symbolic explosion’ (Mellars 1989b, 361) has been associated with the migration of the first Homo sapiens groups into Europe and the extinction of the indigenous Neanderthals. In general, these differences in material culture between the earliest H. sapiens and Neanderthals have been related to innate cognitive (Binford 1973; Mithen 1996) and linguistic (Mellars 1989b, 1996) differences between the two species (although see d’Errico et al. 1998; d’Errico 2003 for a different perspective, which properly acknowledges the creative potential of Neanderthal groups). In this conceptualisation of a difference in kind between the two species the idea of form has played an important part. This narrative of Neanderthal inferiority appears to be partly a product of the ‘standard view’ (Ingold 2000), whereby form is seen as a mental image imposed on a formless material substrate. Thus the absence of discrete forms in material culture has been related to the lack of a cognitive ability for symbolic thought. Considerable effort has been expanded on investigations into whether Neanderthal tools were the product of ‘imposed form’ (Mellars 1989b, 358; Bisson 2001) or were simply generated through raw material constraints and resharpening practices (Binford 1973; Dibble 1987), precisely because forms are seen to bear a direct relationship to abstract thought. Through this conceptualisation of forms as discrete mental images, discussions of linguistic differences between the two species have been generated, Mellars (1989b, 359) arguing for instance that ‘few people would question the inference that these highly developed symbolising systems [of early H. sapiens] must reflect the existence of relatively complicated and highly structured forms of language’. Conversely, the lack of symbols in Neanderthal culture is seen to reflect the absence of sophisticated linguistic abilities. Such arguments follow Saussurean linguistics in seeing words (like forms) as discrete symbols with an arbitrary relationship to the signified. What would the effect be, though, if we reversed the material:form equation in this case, and privileged the uses of new materials at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic over the appearance of new forms? In the spirit of this book, this would not simply involve looking at the origins and appearance of these materials in the archaeological record, but how their properties emerged through specific technological engagements, the social and technological relationships of procurement and production that they generated and how these were caught up in past ontologies. Rather than reifying cultural differences at the species level we need to look at the specific circumstances in which particular material engagements emerged and the possibilities for action that these generated. This approach permits us to look at different human groups (whether Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis) on their own terms. This chapter then will draw together the many different strands of the book, through a detailed examination of the role of materials in revealing past ontologies.

106

Material Worlds

‘B E H A V I O U R A L M OD E R N I T Y’ IN T H E S W A BI A N J U R A In southern Germany, from around 35,000 years ago, people visited a small number of cave sites in the valleys of the Ach and Lone, tributaries of the Danube. The finds from these caves, of which the best known are HohlensteinStadel, Vogelherd, Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle, have been described as the ‘earliest evidence of artistic expression’ (Müller-Beck and Albrecht 1987, cited in Dowson and Porr 2001). They represent some of the most spectacular manifestations of the early Upper Palaeolithic; new things made from new materials. Beads were made from animal teeth, ivory and antler; spear points from antler and ivory; bone was engraved with notches and animal figures (Conard and Bolus 2006). The earliest known musical instruments also come from these caves: flutes made from bird bone and mammoth ivory (Conard et al. 2009). Arguably, most important of all are the oldest undisputed figurines carved in the round: animal statuettes all made from ivory, representing mammoths (Figure 4.1), horses (Figure 4.2), bears, lions, bovids and waterbirds (Hahn 1986; Conard 2003). Two ivory human/lion composites have also been recovered, one from Hohlenstein-Stadel (Figure 4.3), one from Hohle Fels. These have been augmented by a more recent discovery, the ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’, a female figurine, lacking animal characteristics, also made from ivory (Conard 2009).

Figure 4.2 Aurignacian horse figurine from Vogelherd (Photo: Hilde Jensen, University of Tübingen)

Material Worlds

107

Figure 4.3 Human-lion figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel (Photo: Thomas Stephan ©Ulmer Museum)

Conard and Bolus (2003) have argued that many of the innovations habitually associated with the ‘symbolic explosion’ of the Upper Palaeolithic actually arose in the Swabian Jura (the Kulturpumpe hypothesis) and spread across Europe, rather than being carried by the earliest H. sapiens immigrants. This has been disputed on the basis of ambiguities in the dating evidence (Zilhão and d’Errico 2003); the theory also seems to be the product

108

Material Worlds

of a desire to view the Aurignacian as a pan-European ‘package’ of innovations, which were the product of ‘behavioural modernity’. The figurines have been taken as generic illustrations of the abilities of early H. sapiens, and (along with other key pieces of Upper Palaeolithic art) ‘lift[ed] effortlessly out of their local setting into a pan-European tradition of symbolic expression’ (Tomásková 1997, 281). In reality however they represent very specific articulations of people, forms and materials, particular to this area and lasting for a relatively short time (Conard and Bolus 2003; Zilhão and d’Errico 2003; Verpoorte 2005). The two human-lion composites made from ivory, for example, are unique across Europe, found only in the adjacent valleys of the Lone and the Ach. A more productive approach may be to examine what actually is different about the Swabian material; what are innovations particular to that area, in terms of the materials employed, the forms produced and the relationships between them. In order to see what is unique about the Swabian Aurignacian we need to take a step back in time to chart the movement of H. sapiens into Europe, and to investigate the relationship of this movement to the appearance of the new materials: shell, bone, antler, ivory and soft stone.

T H E EM E R G E N C E O F P E O P L E S AN D M A T E R I A L S Fossil and genetic evidence indicates that H. sapiens evolved in Africa from earlier archaic human species around 180,000–200,000 years ago. Thus for the majority of its history H. sapiens has been an African species. At least one episode of population movement by our species preceded the colonisation of Europe at around 40,000 years ago. This is manifested in the presence of burials at the sites of Skhul and Qafzeh, in Israel, and in relatively early dates for the colonisation of Australia, indicating an early expansion of populations probably working their way along the coast of south Asia, before ‘island-hopping’ to Australia by about 50,000 years ago (Foley and Lahr 1997). Some, at least, of these early human groups had knowledge of carved bone technologies and of the use of shells for beads. Bone tools (variously barbed and unbarbed points and awls) are known from a number of African sites, most prominently Katanda Cave in the Democratic Republic of Congo, dating to around 80,000 years ago and Blombos Cave in South Africa dating to around 75,000 years ago (Henshilwood et al. 2001). Analysis of the technologies involved in the production of the bone tools from Blombos indicates that long blanks, which were probably the by-products of smashing long bones and mandibles for marrow extraction, were selected for production of the points. These were then shaped through flaking, scraping and abrasion (ibid.). The three projectile points from the site underwent additional polishing of their surfaces. There appears no

Material Worlds

109

functional reason for this, rather d’Errico and Henshilwood (2007, 143) argue this was undertaken to give the points a distinctive shiny appearance. An aesthetic of lustre can perhaps also be glimpsed in the use of shells for beads, which by virtue of their mother-of-pearl material, also have lustrous properties. Shell beads have been recovered from a number of African sites dating to between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago (d’Errico et al. 2009): Oued Djebbana in Algeria (Vanhaeren et al. 2006), Taforalt, Rhafas, Ifri n’Ammar and Contrebandiers in Morocco (d’Errico et al. 2009) and Blombos Cave in South Africa (d’Errico et al. 2005). Shell beads have also been found at the western Asian sites of Skhul and Qafzeh (Vanhaeren et al. 2006). These seem to have greater antiquity than the African examples, dating to around 100,000 years ago. As d’Errico et al. (2009) suggest, bead making seems to have arisen at certain discrete times and in response to certain situations. The fact that only marine shells were used to make the earliest beads also restricted their distribution to coastal or near-coastal groups (although shells seem to have been transported or exchanged over 100km to some of the Moroccan sites). Bead manufacture was thus not a universal indicator of ‘behavioural modernity’ or part of a broader cultural repertoire, shared by all early H. sapiens. Rather it was something that made sense at certain times and probably for different reasons. A later period when bead manufacture came once again to the fore occurred immediately prior to the expansion of early H. sapiens into Europe, when human groups returned to western Asia. Shell beads have been found on two sites, dating to at least 40,000 years ago, Ksar ‘Akil in Lebanon and Üçag˘ ızlı Cave in Turkey (Kuhn et al. 2001, Kuhn and Stiner 2008). The vast majority of these beads consist of marine gastropods, although a marine bivalve was also used. Beyond these shells, the phalanx of a large bird (an eagle or vulture) was also incised for suspension, the first non-shell bead on record in this area (Kuhn et al. 2001, 7642). At roughly the same time beads made from ostrich egg-shell started to be manufactured in Africa. Bone tools are also present at the same sites, Ksar ‘Akil and Üçag˘ ızlı, in the form of awls, points (probably used for craft activities rather than as projectile points) and small wedges, but, as at other eastern Mediterranean sites, these are rare (Kuhn et al. 2009, 99). The Üçag˘ ızlı pointed forms were shaped through scraping or carving, with minimal grinding. None was extensively shaped beyond the making of the point tip itself. Although cervid remains were common at the site, antler was only used for the small wedges, even though both its mechanical structure and form make it more suitable for points than bone (see Chapter 2). These properties of antler however only emerge through the use of appropriate technologies, such as splitting and wedging or the groove and splinter technique, so do not seem to have been relevant at this time. Overall the picture is of early Upper Palaeolithic groups in western Asia who made beads almost exclusively of marine gastropods and occasionally

110

Material Worlds

produced bone tools, mainly simple point forms, through relatively unspecialised technologies. If we are justified in seeing a genealogical relationship between groups in this area and the first H. sapiens moving into Europe, this would be the extent of the ‘new’ materials and technologies carried by the colonisers.

N E W MA TE RI A L S I N T H E EU RO P E AN L A N D S C A P E The timing and route of the movement of the earliest H. sapiens groups into Europe is controversial. An early radiation seems to have occurred as groups moved from western Asia into eastern and central Europe (Kozlowski 2007; Svoboda 2007). These people made stone tool assemblages known as the Bachokirian and the Bohunician. The Bachokirian contains bone and antler tools, while two beads made from teeth, a bear canine and a fox canine, were recovered from Bachokirian levels at Bacho Kiro itself, in a layer possibly dating as early as 43,000BP (Kuhn et al. 2001; White 2003). In this case, as groups moved away from coastal areas, new materials appear to have been substituted for shells in the production of beads. These new materials selected shared some of the qualities of shell: teeth, like shells, have lustrous qualities and may for this reason have been viewed as adequate substitutes. The gradual adoption of a broader range of lustrous materials for the manufacture of beads can be seen more clearly in sites belonging to a second early radiation (people with an archaic or ‘proto-Aurignacian’ tool assemblage), which seems to have gradually moved along the coast of southern Europe, from east to west, between around 40,000 and 35,0000 years ago. These groups carried with them new hunting technologies, based on the insertion of series of small microliths (Dufour bladelets) into composite weapons (Bon 2006; Maíllo Fernández 2006). This represents the solution to a series of problems, Bon argues (2006, 142), which involved both the socio-economic and the symbolic transformation of hunting activities. Bone and antler tools are rare on archaic Aurignacian sites and types are less diversified than amongst subsequent assemblages (Liolios 2006; Teyssandier 2007). Beads are found on some archaic Aurignacian sites (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). Riparo al Fumane, in Italy, for example, a site dated to at least 36,000 years ago (Mussi et al. 2006), mostly yielded a traditional repertoire of shell beads (95 examples), but also 10 deer teeth. Moving further west, French archaic Aurignacian sites have produced a greater range of materials employed as beads: at Rothschild stone beads and a perforated ammonite were found in addition to shells and deer teeth; at Trou de la Mere Clochette, bear teeth and ivory beads were recovered; at Grotte de Renne bear teeth, shells, stone and ivory beads were found, although at both Caminade Est and Laouza the assemblage entirely consisted of shell beads (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). Recent excavations have also yielded beads in the archaic Aurignacian levels of Isturitz: these consist of shell beads and

Material Worlds

111

a calcite pendant in the earliest levels, with evidence for the production of amber beads in the overlying layer (White 2007). It appears that as people moved west, a greater range of materials became appropriate for use as beads. Finally from around 35,000BP remains known as early Aurignacian are found in the archaeological record across Europe. These sites have yielded a much greater range of new materials and technologies. Fully shaped points, known as split-based points and made almost exclusively from antler (Knecht 1991), are found across Europe. The types of materials used for beads radically increased and a variety of carved beads, made mainly from mammoth ivory, another lustrous material, were used for the first time. Although similar themes in bead manufacture are found across Europe, there were also important regional differences (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). Engravings on a variety of organic materials and carvings in the round, mainly in ivory, are found for the first time. The first cave art dates from around 32,000 years ago at Chauvet cave in southeast France. We also seem to see a change in the scale at which some of these materials are represented. What is striking about early Aurignacian sites is the sheer quantity of beads recovered: hundreds of beads have been found at the three Castlemerle valley sites of Abri Blanchard, Abri Castanet and La Souquette (White 1989, 2007). To sum up this historical review then, the equation of cultural traits with cognitive abilities at a species level has led the changes in material culture in the early Upper Palaeolithic often to be treated as a ‘package’ (e.g. Klein 2008, although see McBrearty and Brooks 2000). However, recent work reveals that this was not the case. Some of the new materials and technologies, such as perforated shell beads and simple bone tools, had previously been made by at least some early H. sapiens groups living in Africa and the Near East and thus conceivably could have been part of the material repertoire of some of the first H. sapiens groups moving into Europe. The earliest Upper Palaeolithic groups in Europe continued to use these traditional forms, but also began to incorporate new materials in the manufacture of beads. It is worth noting that certain Neanderthal groups by this time also shared this material repertoire, manufacturing beads and bone tools (d’Errico 2003), a feature attributed by some (e.g. Mellars 1996) to their imitation of the technology of H. sapiens groups. With the appearance of the early Aurignacian, a much broader range of materials were incorporated into the repertoire of Upper Palaeolithic groups and the scale of the use of some of these increased dramatically. Some material–technological interactions were found broadly across Europe, others have a more regional focus. Although undoubtedly building on longstanding concerns, and spanning several thousand years, this archaic and early Aurignacian material represents, at least in certain areas, an extraordinary fluorescence in the range and scale of material–technological interactions, as well as the appearance of radically different material

112

Material Worlds

culture: ivory animals, lion-men, cave art, musical instruments. Rather than thinking of the Aurignacian, though, as the logical product of cognitive or behavioural modernity, there is something in this extraordinary material amplification that demands explanation.

T H E M A TE RI A L R E V O L U T I O N What, then, was the impetus, for this ‘material revolution’? Some of the answers to this problem can be found, I suggest, in the ways that human groups, moving into new landscapes, rearticulated their traditional material repertoire in these different places. Shells appear to have been the original desired material, a substance of ancient significance, seemingly hugely important to human groups in the lengths they went to procure these and replicate their qualities. Shells seem to have been valued for their lustrous qualities, their colour and probably also, given the restricted range of species selected, their forms (Taborin 2004). Marine shells however have a restricted distribution. Coastal and peri-coastal groups had easy access to these, but to groups moving inland, these would not be readily available. This problem was solved by inland groups in a variety of different ways. The first solution was the establishment of exchange relationships with groups with access to coastal shells. These new relationships were an important aspect of the Upper Palaeolithic, with materials regularly transferred distances of over 300km: Mediterranean shells are found on sites in Austria and south-western France, while Atlantic shells are present on French Mediterranean sites (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006, 1118). The conceptualisation of shells as desirable beads therefore established relationships between widely dispersed groups through exchange. This extension of the scale of human relationships, beyond personal relationships with kin and neighbouring groups, to broader networks between people who would never meet face-to-face, has been suggested to be one of hallmarks of the early Upper Palaeolithic (Gamble 1999). Gamble has argued that these extended networks were possible because they were mediated by material culture; for the first time material culture ‘carried’ meanings that were interpretable beyond their immediate context of production and consumption. These networks appear to have been established initially through mutually intelligible understandings of the gleaming properties of shells. A second way in which inland groups obtained shells was through the exploitation of exposures of fossil shells. These were used in several different regions during the Aurignacian, although in western Europe at least they seem to have had a much more local distribution than marine shells (Taborin 1993). This may be because, though their form echoes marine shells, fossil shells can lack two of the properties that seem to have been desired in marine shells: colour and lustre. Fossil shells used as beads seem mainly to derive from more recent Pliocene and Micocene deposits, where

Material Worlds

113

the mechanical properties would have been most similar to fresh marine shells. However people may also have encountered older fossil shells that were completely lithicised and thus had very different material properties. As a result this interest in fossil shells may have generated broader questions for people about the relationships and resemblances between things that appeared similar in form, but in fact varied in their surface qualities and in their mechanical properties. The relations of similarities that such engagements generated can also be seen in the third solution to the problem of bead supply: imitation. The third solution aimed to replicate some of the forms and qualities of shells through the harnessing of similar affects in other materials. This involved the incorporation into the material repertoire of substances that naturally shared some of the qualities of beads. Here, though moving inland took people away from shells, it opened up new material possibilities: in central and eastern Europe at least, mammoths with their gleaming white tusks offered potential for different types of technical action; elsewhere sources of soft and brilliant stones were found. Other substitutes, such as teeth, were found more broadly in the mouths of the animals that were hunted (and in the mouths of humans). Teeth replicated the sheen and lustre of shell and also some of the desired forms (Taborin 2004, see also Chapter 1). These relationships of similarity could also be reversed, for shells (Dentalia sp.) that replicated the form of teeth were made into beads on many Aurignacian sites (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006). Some of these materials that could generate similar affects to shell required more human effort than simple acts of perforation. The stones selected to make beads were often soft and brilliantly coloured and included limestone, schist, chlorite, talc, calcite, steatite, haematite, amber, jet, pyrite and lignite (White 1992, 1995, 2007). These mimicked the lustre or colour of some shells, but also offered new possibilities in the range of colours and surface affects represented. These stones needed shaping through carving and abrasion to produce desired forms and a gleaming surface. The same is true of ivory. As White points out, basket-shaped beads, the most common formed bead on French Aurignacian sites (and which were mainly made from ivory) mimic the form of the Mediterranean sea-shell, Cyclope neritea (White 2004). Ivory however had to be transformed, through a complex and difficult technology, into a desired shape and finally needed polishing through abrasion to bring out its lustrous qualities (White 1997). As a result the material potential of ivory had the effect of eliciting new technical skills in Palaeolithic people. The close relationship between these different materials used to make beads is also made evident in the appearance of skeuomorphs (Figure 2.4). Shells were made out of ivory at la Souquette, France (White 1989) and at Spy, Belgium (Otte 1995, 106); red deer canines were made from antler, ivory, bone and stone at a number of sites across Europe, ranging from Hungary to France (Otte 1979, 594; Maudet 2003; Taborin 2004, 44;

114

Material Worlds

Mussi et al. 2006, 195; Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006, 1113; White 2007); a fox canine made from ivory was found at Spy, Belgium (Moreau 2003); and a horse incisor made from bone comes from Goyet, also in Belgium (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006, 1113). Resemblances between the forms and qualities of the materials chosen for the manufacture of Aurignacian beads have previously been noted (e.g. White 2004; Taborin 2003). However I would suggest that the significance of this has been underplayed (although see White 1992); for the incorporation of other materials through their similarity to shell affects was part of a process that had far reaching consequences. Although initially chosen for their similarities with shells, these materials quickly generated their own momentum. Rather than simply being representations of shells these new materials and skeuomorphs create their own affects and, in turn, reproduce them in shells. These processes also established new networks of procurement and exchange, which transported not simply shells themselves, but also other new materials, such as soft stones and perhaps even mammoth ivory (White 1997). New technologies developed hand-in-hand with the use of these materials, for just as certain materials do not make sense in the absence of certain technologies, certain technologies do not make sense in the absence of certain materials. Furthermore these new technologies established new frameworks for action and interaction. As Akrich (1992) states, certain technologies act like a script, structuring future action. Finally, the realisation of the similarities between materials and the inter-changeability between various things set up previously unimaginable possibilities for future thought and action.

MAKING THE WORLD ANEW IN THE SWABIAN JURA Let us return to the Swabian Jura to explore the specificities of these transformations. Here we appear to have a scenario where beads and ivory points occur from the earliest Aurignacian, while other organic artefacts appear slightly later in the archaeological record. In Germany people did not have access to shells; instead animal teeth and ivory were used for beads. During the early occupation of Geissenklösterle (layer III), beads consisted of fox canines, both elongated and drop-shaped ivory pendants and a doubleperforated ivory bead. Ivory working debris is more common in this layer than in overlying layers, confirming the importance of ivory in the manufacture of many of these new objects. The earliest layer at Hohle Fels yielded double-perforated ivory beads, while ivory points have also been recovered from the early layers at both sites (Conard and Bolus 2006). Although some bone and antler working is also present in these early layers, production of both beads and projectile points focused on ivory. This in itself is noteworthy. As has been described in Chapter 1, ivory is an

Material Worlds

115

extremely difficult material to work. This is particularly evident in the manufacture of the ivory points from these sites, which are long and fine and extremely difficult to realise successfully (Knecht 1991). These were carefully shaped using a technology that is not yet fully understood and finally finished through the laborious task of surface polishing. This by far exceeds the level of production needed for mere technical efficiency (Münzel 2001). Mammoth ribs, which were used during subsequent Gravettian occupations of the area for the manufacture of spearheads, were ignored, even though these can be made into points through relatively straightforward technologies of splitting. These ivory points represent a successful innovation in this region because they conformed to certain pre-existing criteria involving things made from ivory – they were both formed and polished. The points are very similar to the ivory rods created as part of the ivory bead manufacturing process; as a result their genesis may have been closely related to bead production. The polishing of the points also created the special lustre that was so desired on beads. This lustre, as argued, in Chapter 2, may have had apotropaic affects. This may have been important when, for the first time, things (points) made to kill animals, were made out of other animals, a situation that Chatterton (2003) argues in a later context may have been seen as potentially transgressive. Both the genesis of the points, then, and their particular finishing may be a product of the realization of the problematic consequences of the relatedness of things. In addition to connections with bead production, parallels seem to have existed between ivory point and antler point technologies. Split based points are one of the diagnostic artefacts of the early Aurignacian and the vast majority of these were made from antler: only one example from bone was noted in Knecht’s extensive study of early Upper Palaeolithic projectile technology (Knecht 1991, 252). Split based points were made from semicylindrical blanks, formed through splitting an antler beam first longitudinally and then along the perpendicular into three or four ‘baguettes’ (Liolios 2006, 39). These were then pre-formed by longitudinal scraping with flint blades. The split was then manufactured through simply splitting the base, rather than through the removal of additional material. The point was finally finished through additional longitudinal scraping (Knecht 1991; Liolios 2006). There seems to have been cross-fertilization between antler and ivory technologies. Techniques of splitting and wedging and grooving and snapping were used extensively on both materials (Knecht 1993). The initial stages of working of both ivory and antler depended mainly on these techniques (Knecht 1991; Poplin 1995; White 1995). Both were then shaped through shaving, generally using flint blades rather than burins (Knecht 1991, Christensen 1998). Knecht argues that early antler technologies were not embryonic, but fully suited to antler (Knecht 1991, 522). However the same is not necessarily true for ivory (White 1997). It was only during

116

Material Worlds

the subsequent Gravettian period that heating and extensive soaking seem to have been used, making ivory easier to work (ibid.). Whether techniques of splitting and wedging were developed to work ivory and were subsequently transferred to a more suitable material, or whether they were developed on antler and then transferred to a less appropriate material, is difficult to say, given current dating issues. It is also unfortunate that, due to preservation issues, we do not know how these technological–material interactions related to pre-existing techniques for working wood. The potential similarities between hardwood and ivory (Poplin 1995, 24, White 1995, 36) and the technologies to work them (Hahn 1995b, 116) have previously been noted. Splitting and wedging, for example, has also been recorded in early prehistoric woodworking technologies (Taylor 1998).

I V O R Y RE P R E S E N T A T I O N S From at least 32,500 years ago, animal, human and therianthropic ivory figurines were made in the Swabian Jura (Verpoorte 2005; Teyssandier 2007; Conard 2009). As with other Aurignacian objects, these emerged through the medium of existing technological relationships and forms but, beyond this, they also offered radical new possibilities for imagining the world. The figurines were partly enabled by the adoption of ivory as a material, because this is much more suitable than bone or antler for carving in the round. The shape and structure of both bone and antler generates certain parameters which limit the production of carved artefacts. Bone either has a hollow interior (once marrow was removed), and thus cannot be sculpted, or, like antler, has a spongy interior less favourable for sculpture (Delporte 1995b, 8). The morphology of bone and antler also often means that sculptures in the round cannot attain their natural thickness, as a result, depictions on bone and antler tended to take the form of incised decoration (ibid.). Ivory is much more difficult to work than these other materials and both the curve of the tusk and the presence of an internal pulp cavity present constraints (Hahn 1995b; White 1995). However it offers much more potential for the production of both longer and thicker objects. As a result the technologies and the concepts involved in the earliest ivory working, the production of beads, established possibilities for the manufacture of new and different things. At one level the animal figurines made on ivory are very similar to what went before, for their small size (all but the Hohlenstein-Stadel human-lion are around 5cm in length), the presence of perforations on some and signs of wear indicate that many were worn as pendants. As formed ivory pendants they thus fell comfortably into the existing corpus of material culture. As things that look like something else they also conformed to broader criteria for Aurignacian bead forms. They utilised existing technologies of splitting and wedging of mammoth tusks, followed by scraping, gouging, incising,

Material Worlds

117

grinding and polishing (White 1997), all of which were techniques used in the manufacture of beads in this region (White 1995). These techniques were adjusted to the demands of the figurines and the different relationship with the mammoth tusks that their volume entailed. For example, the HohlensteinStadel lion-man (the largest of the figurines at almost 30cm) was made from the proximal part of the right tusk of a young mammoth, where the dental cavity facilitated the representation of separate legs (Hahn 1995b, 130). The statuettes may also have used a different form of ivory from the beads. While beads seem to have been produced from subfossil ivory (see Chapter 2), the figurines seem to have been carved from fresh, or semi-fresh ivory at Geissenklösterle (Christensen 1998, 197) and perhaps also at HohlensteinStadel (Hahn 1995b, 119). The production process involved in the manufacture of the animals also took significantly longer than bead making. Experimental work took 40 hours to reproduce the Vogelherd horse (Hahn 1993, 232), while each basket-shaped ivory bead took around three hours to make (White 1995, 2007). On another level the figurines are something completely different. Although Aurignacian beads frequently looked like something else, this ‘something else’ was always a material also used for beads in its unmodified form, such as shell or teeth. The Swabian animal pendants represent felids, mammoths, birds, horse, bovids and bears, not things that, because of the miniaturisation involved, could be mistaken for ‘real’ animals. This is in contrast to basket-shaped beads and skeuomorphs, which, from a distance, could be seen as real teeth and shells. However, on closer inspection, there may be some relationship between form and materials, although one that is not as direct as those previously materialised. Mammoths, the second most common animal to be represented in the figurines, were of course, the original source of the ivory used to manufacture them. The bodies of the other animals represented, by contrast, were used much more rarely as the raw material for bead manufacture. Tooth beads from the Swabian sites include bear and bovids, which are depicted in the figurines, but also deer and fox which are not. In addition two tubular bone beads which were recovered from Geissenklösterle and Vogelherd (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006) are likely to be of bird bone. Could the synecdochial relationship between ivory and mammoths perhaps then be the impetus for the new pendant forms? Ivory could be made to represent mammoths because ivory derived from mammoths. Ivory, initially co-opted to make beads because it shared the gleaming properties of shell and teeth, offered new possibilities, due to its additional properties of ‘mammothness’. As argued in Chapter 2, ivory seems to have retained much more of a link to living mammoths in the Swabian Jura, where they were regularly encountered, than in southwest France where they seem to have been locally extinct. Ivory certainly seems, par excellence, the material in Aurignacian Germany used to transform forms (Hahn 1995b). Once mammoths could be represented, other animals (and humans and therianthrops)

118

Material Worlds

could perhaps too, because of their relationship to mammoths. These ivory animals, Hahn (1986) argues, comprised an Aurignacian ‘bestiary’ that focused on the largest, fastest, most powerful and most dangerous animals. That these animals were important is reinforced by the species representation in French Aurignacian cave art (Clottes 2000), which shows a similar level of concern with large, dangerous creatures. Bone, antler and ivory have often been described as ‘plastic raw materials’ (Klein 1998, 510). This metaphor is not entirely appropriate as the form, texture and hardness of these materials meant that not everything was possible. However it is also important to point out that ivory in particular did permit considerable freedom to the imagination. As Gaudzinski and colleagues state in relation to ivory use: ‘Only rarely is it possible to detect a connection between raw material choice and the finished product’ (Gaudzinski et al. 2005, 187). The potential of this material allowed existing concerns to be refigured in new ways, but the ‘enchantment’ (Gell 1998) of this material led to a proliferation of new forms and a level of experimentation and innovation previously unseen. The rapidity of change in Aurignacian material culture, in comparison to the preceding Mousterian, has often been noted (e.g. Mellars 1989a). The levels of experimentation, deriving from the possibilities offered by the new materials, are evident in the appearance of the first uncontroversial musical instruments. Four of the eight flutes found on the Swabian sites were made from mammoth ivory and manufactured according to a highly elaborate technology (Conard et al. 2009). This involved roughly shaping the curved tusk, then splitting it in half, either along a natural cleavage line or the internal dental cavity. The two halves were then carefully hollowed out and finger holes incised. Finally, the separate halves were joined together very tightly with fine air seals in the form of dozens of finely carved notches along the edge (ibid., 738). Here again, we see an existing preoccupation (mammoth ivory) offering new possibilities and leading to the appearance of radically new and different things. The other four flutes at the sites were made from bird bone: one on a swan radius from Geissenklösterle, one on a griffon vulture radius from Hohle Fels and two (one from Vogelherd, one from Geissenklösterle) on unidentifiable birds. Bird bone is a more suitable material for the manufacture of flutes because it has a hollow interior. However, there are also connections with the ivory animals: waterbirds were both depicted and used for flutes, while the griffon vulture falls into the Aurignacian bestiary of large and dangerous animals. Connections may also have been made between the cry of these birds (or even the trumpet of mammoths) and the sounds of the flutes. As a final point we should note that the concern with mammoth ivory and other animal materials established new relationships between people. Flint and wood, the earlier favoured material resources, were stationary and could be gathered by anyone. Animal materials, with the exception of sub-fossil mammoth ivory and shed antler, were mobile, and had to be gained through

Material Worlds

119

the pursuit and killing of an animal, tasks more likely to favour co-operation and the work of multiple individuals in the course of the châine opératoire. The collection of mammoth ivory, whether fresh or sub-fossil, would also probably have required communal effort, by virtue of its weight. Values of up to 91kg have been reported for a single tusk, though 45kg is a more usual average (Lister and Bahn 2007). It would have thus been difficult for a single individual to carry a pair of tusks any considerable distance. By contrast the intractability of ivory in technological engagements is likely to have made ivory working a pursuit of only certain individuals. Thus ivory at once brought people together in its procurement, but differentiated them in its manufacture.

M A T E R I A L S AN D O N T O L O G I E S The changes that we see in the world during the Aurignacian are predicated on the emergence of new relationships between materials and things. This proliferation of connections between these different materials in relationships of similarity, substitution and transformation is key to understanding the broader ontological shifts that occurred at this time. This relationality has previously been noted and related to the appearance of metaphorical thought in the early Upper Palaeolithic (White 1992). White sees a fundamental difference between Neanderthals and Aurignacian people in their treatment of materials. Neanderthals were interested in unusual forms and qualities such as fossils and pyrites and collected these, but did not transfer these to new contexts. In the Aurignacian by contrast we see, White argues, the materialisation of metonymical qualities in transformed objects. There are other possibilities, though, beyond language. This world, where relationships between things were made evident through material transformations, also seems echo accounts of animist ontologies. Here things are never made anew, but always transformations of something else (Viveiros de Castro 2004). In Pedersen’s words: ‘A logic of endless substitutions seems intrinsic to animist thought … There are no radical discontinuities here, only continuous substitutions of Same becoming Other, and vice versa. The fundamental animist principle … is one of analogous identification’ (Pedersen 2001, 417). Animism, as Levi-Strauss (1969, 339) states, is analogic in character, but structuralist accounts of animism stress hierarchical analogies (so animal species are taken as models for human moieties). Rather the analogical relationships we see in the Aurignacian are horizontal in nature – a question of series, rather than structure – so shells are like teeth, which are like ivory. These relationships are predicated on these materials sharing the same properties, which allowed ivory to become shells, or teeth, or even mammoths or lions. There is evidence that this relationship also worked more broadly; for as the therianthropic figurines from Hohlenstein-Stadel and Hohle Fels demonstrate, people could also become lions. It does not make sense to ask the order of these relationships. Just as an animist ontology did not

120

Material Worlds

emerge as a direct consequence of the forging of new material–technological relationships, neither are these technologies a direct reflection of new understandings of the world. Ricoeur (1978) states that metaphors are fundamental in creating new insights and forging new links between things. However this relationship works both ways, in creating new possibilities both for concepts and for material action. There are other clues that we are seeing the emergence in the Aurignacian of an ontology that can be broadly described as animist. Ingold (2000, citing Fitzhugh 1988) describes the importance of the elaboration of hunting equipment in this regard across north America and the Eurasian north. ‘Hunting art, the ornamentation of weapons, and the use of ritual hunting clothing were the hunter’s way of asking for the gift of an animal, rather than overpowering it physically or spiritually’ (Fitzhugh 1988, 310–11). In the Swabian Jura the over-elaborate polishing of ivory points, the first hunting weapons in the region made from animal materials, suggests related concerns, perhaps borne of the contradiction involved in the use of part of one animal to hunt another. There is also the presence of the animal figurines themselves. A concern with animals not only as prey, but also as animate beings, many of which also, like humans, have a soul, is a central feature of animist groups (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Ingold 2000). The selection of animals for depiction, along with both humans and composites do suggest that similarities between humans and at least certain animal species were noted. The presence of the human-lion composite also suggests a rather different understanding of the relationship between people and animals; that certain individuals (whether human or animal) could become animal and as a result take on aspects of the other’s appearance, perhaps in order to partake of social relations in the other’s society (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Ingold 2000). The presence of that great figurehead of animism, namely the shaman, has previously been suggested to represent the impetus for the Swabian figurines. Although they reduce the significance of the figurines to an act of representation, Dowson and Porr (2001) have explicitly linked the Swabian statuettes with the hallucinatory experience of shamanic individuals. They view the Hohlenstein-Stadel therianthrope as representing the experience of an individual, in trance, of turning into an animal. The bodies of many of the figurines are covered with abstract signs. These are interpreted as ‘entoptic phenomena’ which, during the deepest stages of trance, are experienced as intimately connected to iconic imagery (ibid., 172). Finally the carving of the feet of some of the statues gives the impression that the animal bodies were floating, yet again another consequence of hallucinatory experience.

P E R S P E C T I V I S M , S I M IL A R I T Y A N D TR AN S F O R M A T I O N The concept of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998), argued by Pedersen (2001) to be a specific feature of certain animist groups, offers a more precise

Material Worlds

121

understanding of the way these material transformations were effected. Viveiros de Castro argues that groups in Amazonia, and perhaps much more broadly (see also Descola 2005; Fausto 2007), view humans, animals and certain things as sharing an identical internal component (a soul), but as being externally differentiated through their bodies, which are the source of their perspective. Whereas souls are identical and immutable, bodies can be transformed. So taking on a bear’s body, for example, would entail taking on a bear’s perspective, and thus enable a person to function as a bear. We can perhaps see these understandings materialised in the HohlensteinStadel and Hohle Fels therianthropes, in that bodily transformation permitted people to undertake feline activities, or permitted felines to mingle within human society. However the concept of perspectivism can also throw light on the process of bead manufacture itself. The quality of a variety of materials to shine and gleam can perhaps be understood as their inner, identical essence, their shared, immutable quality or soul. By contrast, the external part of these materials, their form appears highly mutable. The reasons that these materials could take on the outer form of another material was by virtue of the fact they shared this common inner essence. This may also be why these materials could take on the form of animals and humans too. Gleaming materials, like humans and animals, shared a common inner essence, but were distinguished by their outer form. These beads may thus work in similar ways to the masks described by Ingold in his description of animist ontologies. Masks, representing animals, are not worn to disguise the human wearer (Ingold 2000, 123; see also Conneller 2004), but, rather, to reveal the animal itself. Ingold argues that the reason why these animal masks frequently do not look much like the animal they are said to depict, is that each reveals the animal’s true face, its inner essence or soul. Similarly the production of beads may not be so much about imitation, as revelation, exposing the inner essence of the material, its eternal, gleaming quality. This act of revelation, embodying as it did both the knowledge and ability to recognise the inner essence of a material, may thus have shared some of the same power and danger as shamanic acts of transformation. This insight throws new light on the production of skeuomorphs during the Aurignacian. In studies of skeuomorphs, the presumption always seems to be that the aim is to produce a desired form in a less valuable material, as a way of satisfying consumer demand amongst lower status individuals (e.g. Knappett 2002, 110). Thus Knappett relies on the categories of deception and honesty in his discussion of two types of Minoan skeuomorphs, one a (deceptive) pottery imitation of a silver cup, the other an (honest) imitation of a basket. A perspectival approach to the study of Aurignacian skeuomorphs would suggest something rather different; in this case categories of deception and honesty are simply not relevant. The Aurignacian examples do not seem to work through mimicking the form of a superior material, and thus deceiving the viewer, rather they reveal a shared internal material

122

Material Worlds

essence (lustre) which marked certain materials out as able to partake in the ebb and flow of forms characteristic of animism. Perhaps here then we can see these Aurignacian materials as having essential properties, in the significance accorded to their lustrous and gleaming qualities. However the nature of these properties, and what they might effect, is rather unexpected. We, in western societies, are used to the essential properties of materials functioning to differentiate substances from each other. However in the Aurignacian case different materials share a single essence. Properties do not differentiate matter, as in western culture, but in fact make them the same. This can perhaps be seen through a rephrasing of Viveiros de Castro’s contrast between western and Amerindian ontologies: ‘Our traditional problem in the West is how to connect and universalize: individual substances are given, while relations have to be made. The Amerindian problem is how to separate and particularize: relations are given, while substances must be defined’ (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 476). In the Aurignacian case, as amongst the Amerindians, there seems also to be a emphasis on relations; substances are not defined through what we consider as the framework provided by discrete materials, separated by differences in sources (animal or mineral, species or body part) and mechanical properties; rather the definition proceeded through the shared possession of a particular quality, lustre.

DISCUSSION The changes in material culture that we see in the Aurignacian have generated deus ex machina explanations for the ‘Upper Palaeolithic revolution’ (see particularly Klein 2008). This is not necessary. We have seen that these developments were the culmination of long-standing understandings of materials and the relationships between things. Although radically different forms appeared, they always emerged though existing material frameworks. People in the Swabian Jura had different ontological concerns from Neanderthals – or at least different material expressions of these – but these concerns also differed from those of their Aurignacian contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. All human groups, whatever the species, in the period between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago seem to have had interests in the similarities between certain things and relationships between different materials. This is manifested amongst French Neanderthal groups through their interests in fossils, which might be considered ‘natural skeuomorphs’. These striking objects, with similarities to other things in the natural world, were transported some distances to living sites (Lhomme and Freneix 1993; Taborin 1993; Baffier and Girard 1998; Demard and Néraudeau 2002; Odin et al. 2006). For Aurignacian groups in the Swabian Jura, the importance of mammoth ivory and its gleaming qualities, which bore similarities to other

Material Worlds

123

materials, permitted the interchangeability between materials and technologies. In southwest France similarities in material properties were more likely to be acknowledged through the replication of forms (in the production of skeuomorphs, basket-shaped beads and in the collection of fossils). These acknowledgements of relationships, albeit taking different material expressions, were indicative of emerging relational understandings of the world in the period 50,000 to 30,000BP. These perhaps may have been engendered through a realisation of the greatest relation of them all, that of the similarities between different human groups – a realisation generated through the encounter of Neanderthal and H. sapiens groups in the European landscape.

Conclusion Substantial Transformations

This book has grown out of the rich tradition of material culture studies that has emerged in archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines over the past two decades (e.g. Miller 1987; Buchli 1999; Tilley 1999, 2004). However, rather than engage directly with the broader issues of materiality that this varied literature raises, I have explored a specific aspect of material culture, the ‘raw materials’ of which things are made. This aspect has sometimes – though by no means always (contra Ingold 2007) – been neglected in material culture studies. This narrowing of focus, rather than being restricting, in fact generates considerable analytical possibilities, because it necessitates a detailed tracing of the technologies whereby matter can both transform (processes of becoming) and solidify (into particular categories of material). Following these human–material, animal–material, supernatural–material or material– material interactions, I have argued is essential. Through this I have attempted to elucidate how materials are processual; their properties emerging in specific ways during the course of particular kinds of interactions. These understandings of emergent properties encompass the processual properties of materials as currently described in archaeological technical manuals (these might include the different properties of stone when heated, for example). However it also encompasses emergent properties that we (as westerners) might find more surprising (the fertility and virility of Amerindian gold for example). Following the collapse of the concept/thing distinction (Henare et al. 2007), this emphasis on process means that different materials are produced in different space-time situations. Thus Pre-Columbian gold is a different material from alchemist’s gold for example, emerging as they do through different technologies and with different properties. This understanding of materials appears counter-intuitive because it works against the broadly essentialising nature of Euro-American conceptualisations of materials. These tend to eschew heterogeneity and process in favour of the search for ‘prime matter’. In this book I have focused on process through a detailed empirical analysis. While the utility of this approach has been explored through work on Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic evidence, it has broader interpretative

Conclusion

125

potential. A detailed focus on process, change and material connections through following interactions, as well as elucidating past materials, also provides us with the productive tension through which we can transform our own initial assumptions. Amongst the assumptions we might transform through such work is the idea that materials are mundane, able to tell us little interesting about the world. Rather than being insignificant, a formless substrate or simply a constraint to human action, I have argued that materials are more fundamental: Tracing the processes by which the properties of past materials emerge reveals configurations of past worlds; particular articulations of the cultural, the natural and the supernatural. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw how different technical processes produced certain materials as similar through an emphasis on a single key property. These relations of similarity and substitution were argued both to produce and reveal the emergence of an animist ontology in Europe in the period 30,000–40,000 years ago. This processual understanding of materials also has implications for archaeology’s own practice. Archaeological analysis and specialist expertise is based on the idea that certain materials share a common essence which permits them to be apprehended through common forms of practice. Through the idea that there is a single thing called ‘gold’ or ‘stone’ that exists everywhere, materials in very different time-space settings are made equivalent. Here the treatment of particular sets of heterogeneous matter in the same way, through the scientific apparatus of materials analysis, both produces and reinforces them as objective, homogeneous categories. Particular material categories are also reinforced through the use of the Three Age System, linked to teleological narratives that have been hard to shake off. Stone, Bronze and Iron are all seen as single material categories, despite encompassing considerable heterogeneity. Recent work has further reinforced the idea of stone as a single material category, encompassing both monumental and artefactual stone (Tilley 1996, 323; Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998, 318). The appearance of bronze and iron are still locked into evolutionary narratives of progress, whereby the appearance of bronze leads to the emergence of wealthy individuals and iron leads to warfare. These totalising narratives are only recently being broken down through detailed studies of what these materials do in particular contexts (e.g. Brück 2004; Giles 2007). However the idea that these materials are a single category has continued to make older narratives pervasive. What emerges from this book instead is the variability and the specificity of human–material interactions and the rather more active role that matter plays in these than traditionally conceived. Matter is very heterogeneous, even within a single one of our own western material categories, meaning that a uniform engagement cannot be presumed. The properties of materials emerge in the process of interactions; thus, for example, certain material properties only appear in the context of their articulations as part of new technologies. The properties of clay as persistently hard and durable, for

126

Conclusion

example, only emerged in conjunction with high-temperature firing technologies. Certain material–technological articulations establish parameters for action, where sequences of successive forms and operations are necessary; others are more fluid, and have the potential to exceed these sequences, or to force their repetition. As Simondon has outlined (1964), the hylomorphic or Aristotelian material– form model has blinded us to the ways in which technologies really work. However that does not mean that a detailed study of a single material– technical interaction can provide us with an alternative meta-theory, as Ingold’s discussion of making a basket, and Deleuze’s work on metallurgy might suggest. These simply reveal that different human–material interactions work in different ways. This is perhaps more generally the case: metatheories, although providing different insights into materials, cannot adequately encapsulate all past worlds. Most of these theories are generated in an attempt to grasp modern ontology (or conversely in reaction to modernity). For many of these meta-theories, the distant past exists as an imaginary resource for the critique of modernity. This is evident in a recent debate on materials, where Miller critiques the romanticism of Ingold’s account of materials as evidencing a desire ‘to re-imagine us back into some kind of stone age, when people interacted with the world largely in terms of its given material processes and qualities’ (Miller 2007, 25–26). I hope this book has demonstrated that neither Ingold’s universal phenomenological animism nor Miller’s caricature of it are adequate for an understanding of ‘stone age’ materials.

MA TE RI ALS PAST What are the consequences, then, of the engagement of this book with the materials of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, periods that within archaeology have very specific histories and sets of evidence? In the introduction I outlined how these periods had been neglected in recent AngloAmerican theory-building. Perhaps this neglect can be understood through what Marilyn Strathern (1990) terms ‘negative strategies’. In Anthropology, regions have become theoretically important as a result of the extent to which they have forced anthropologists to extend or question their own concepts. These two archaeological periods have yet to do this. Engagement with the evidence of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, then, necessitates a consideration of the potential that these periods have for challenging dominant understandings. To do this they need to convert their specific perspective into a common point of interest for archaeology in general, and beyond this, for other disciplines. If archaeology’s distinctiveness lies in its productive absences (Lucas 2010; Yarrow 2010), then the absences of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic are perhaps some of the most substantial. Can they be, though, also the

Conclusion

127

most productive? Lucas (2010, 37) suggests three points of fracture with anthropology that make archaeological practice distinctive: missing persons (absent subject), static record (absent event) and residuality (absent present). These absences should not be read as asymmetries, rather, Lucas argues, we need to engage with what they mean for the mode of operation of archaeology. In terms of the archaeology of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic perhaps the absent present is most acute because the temporal processes of decay and destruction are correspondingly more immense. These absences however have been erased in practice through scalar movements, through increasingly detailed techniques (traceology, refitting, raw material sourcing, etc.) which focus on items of material culture. Due to the different material remains specific to each period and because of their specific disciplinary histories these processes have however worked in different ways in the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic respectively. In the Upper Palaeolithic in particular many significant organic artefacts were excavated in haste without detailed records and collected as art objects during the nineteenth century. Although this focus on objects as forms (often still as ‘art’) has continued more recently, there has been an increasing focus on processes of production. The development of the chaîne opératoire and palethnographic approaches by Leroi-Gourhan, combined with a structuralist and culture-historical interest in form has permitted a focus on objects in this period as variously intensity, process, connection and extension. Here objects (worked stones and rarer organic artefacts) are forced to do a lot of the work that architecture would do in later periods. The archaeology of this period is an almost purely object-centred endeavour, with a lack of training in artefact analysis still construed as a lack of expertise. Mesolithic archaeology has a rather different history: the predominant economic and ecological focus has led to a neglect of material culture (in some quarters). The increased density of finds has made a focus on single objects or groups of artefacts more difficult, in that these are often too numerous to attempt some of the techniques used to understand Upper Palaeolithic material. An emphasis on typology and technology in many parts of Europe is balanced by an economic and ecological focus in Scandinavia, Britain and America. The strong focus on ecology and animal behaviour in the past few decades, although tending to be framed in terms of a naturalistic monism, does however have considerable potential for reframing and reworking through a focus on the activities of the non-human and on ecological relationships. This twin focus of the two periods on technical processes and human relationships with animals has provided the inspiration for many of the approaches outlined in this book. These have been refracted through engagement with other theoretical perspectives, but their foundation lies in the strong empirical analyses of these periods. It is hoped that as well as drawing inspiration from the archaeology of the Upper Palaeolithic and

128

Conclusion

Mesolithic this book will also contribute to their development. Beyond this internal reflexivity, both periods offer considerable potential for contributing their own particular perspectives to current theoretical concerns. The concerns of these two periods thus also offer a perspective beyond them. The creativity of both the methodologies and interpretations of Upper Palaeolithic archaeologists offers considerable potential for material culture studies: like certain museum objects from early collections, often this material can only be analysed through the evidence of production and use immanent in the object itself. Here the absence of almost anything beyond the object offers a novel perspective developed through an entirely object-centred analysis. More broadly the approaches to technology developed partly through Palaeolithic archaeology do represent a common point of interest with other disciplines. Indeed these have already been taken up and are continuously being reworked through anthropologies of technologies and studies of the chaîne opératoire (see Coupaye 2009; Warnier 2009 for some recent articulations of these approaches). The prospects for the Mesolithic are more immanent than realised; however current interest in animist ontologies refracts concerns in Mesolithic (and also Palaeolithic) archaeology with northern hunter-gatherer cosmologies, animism and shamanism (Zvelebil 2003, 2008; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998). This interest, combined with strong traditions of ecological analyses, offers considerable potential for rearticulating human–animal relationships in animism, particularly through animal-centred perspectives. Thus the weight placed in Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic studies on respectively things and animals permits a more symmetrical analysis of process and relations, that takes into account the perspectives of things, animals and humans. Here we can move towards an understanding of the processes through which past worlds were configured, and arrive at perspectives that can reconfigure current theoretical concerns.

MA TE RI ALS FUT UR E While this book has focused on materials in the early Prehistoric period, I have also been concerned with the relationship of these past articulations to conventional western understandings of materials, and how these might reconfigure contemporary approaches. How might we, though, imagine a future for the way in which we understand the nature of materials and their properties? If, as I have argued, materials emerge through interactions, how might current understandings of materials be refracted in future years through work undertaken by those engaged with materials through technical practice? The current dominant Euro-American thinking on materials appears to retain a long standing essentialist inheritance while at the same time acknowledging the ‘bifurcation of nature’, that true knowledge of materials derives from scientific analysis rather than sense-experience. In many ways

Conclusion

129

these more conventional understandings lag behind some of the scientific and manufacturing work on matter which offers new possibilities for imagining material futures. For example, technologies geared to the production of composite materials (i.e. materials made from two or more heterogeneous components) are based on the harnessing of the desired properties of particular materials rather than their micro-structure. This work in materials science thus returns us to a definition of materials based on sense-experience and use, rather than an underlying physical reality (Bensaude-Vincent 2001). The generation by physicists of elements that do not naturally occur on earth offers new configurations for the old alchemical debates on the relationship between the cultural and the natural and the limits and potential of human power versus natural/divine agency. The same is true for new work on biotechnologies. At the same time the appearance of new technologies of Rapid Manufacturing is reconfiguring relationships of material and form (Buchli 2010). While a detailed review of these new material/technological articulations is beyond the scope of this book, these practices suggest a number of divergent ways in which material futures might be recast. These varied perspectives, produced, as they are, through the practices of different disciplinary contexts, echo the concern of this book with the emergence of human– material configurations through process. These new articulations of process offer considerable potential for imagining future materials and configuring new worlds with a very different set of possibilities to our own.

Glossary

Aurignacian First widespread ‘culture’ of the Upper Palaeolithic, spanning c.40,000 to 28,000BP. It is probably associated with the movement of Homo sapiens into Europe. It is defined on the basis of certain stone and organic tool types such as split-based antler points. Divided into archaic (or proto), early and developed phases. Blade Stone artefact detached from a core using a stone hammer or punch and which is at least twice as long as it is wide. Can represent debitage, be used unmodified as a knife, or undergo further modification to be made into a tool. BP Before the present (era). Used to refer to uncalibrated radiocarbon dates. Because atmospheric carbon has fluctuated, radiocarbon dates need to be calibrated in order to convert them into calendar years (indicated as calBC). Because no calibration curve has been agreed for the earlier part of the period under discussion, all archaeological dates in the book will be expressed in BP (i.e. uncalibrated). Burin Flint engraving tool with sturdy point. Châine opératoire A term used to describe an entire technical operational sequence, from the procurement of raw material to the discard of finished tools. The term also incorporates the sense of techniques as a socially transmitted body of knowledge; as a socialised suite of gestures on matter. Core A block of raw material from which blades and flakes have been detached. Cortex An altered crust on the outside of a block of raw material. Debitage The waste products of core trimming and stone tool production. Ertebølle The final part of the southern Scandinavian Mesolithic, spanning 6500 to 5200BP (5500 to 4000calBC). Flake Stone artefact detached from a core using a stone hammer or punch and which is less than twice as long as it is wide. Can represent debitage, be used unmodified as a knife, or undergo further modification to be made into a tool. Gravettian Second widespread ‘culture’ of the Upper Palaeolithic, spanning c.29,000 to 21,000BP. It is defined on the basis of certain stone tool types. Increasingly it is more commonly known by its regional and

Glossary

131

chronological variants: Perigordian, Pavlovian, Willendorf-Kostienkian, though the more encompassing term is retained here. Knapping The process of producing stone tools and debitage by percussion. Køngemose The middle part of the southern Scandinavian Mesolithic, spanning c.7500 to 6500BP (6400 to 5500calBC). Lower Palaeolithic The earliest European archaeological period spanning the appearance of the first humans in Europe to, broadly, the appearance of prepared core (Levallois) technology around 250,000 years ago. Typified by basic core-flake technology and hand axes. Magdalenian Last widespread ‘culture’ of the Upper Palaeolithic, dating between c.17,000 and 12,000BP. It is divided into early, middle and late phases. The early and middle phases correspond to the last glacial maximum and the circumscription of western European populations in ‘refugia’ spanning southern France and northern Spain. The later part of the Magdalenian witnessed the expansion (often in advance of warmer temperatures) of populations back into north-western and central Europe. Maglemose The earliest part of the Mesolithic period in southern Scandinavia, spanning roughly 10,000 to 7500BP (9500 to 6400calBC). Mesolithic Period commencing at the start of the current Holocene warm period at around 10,000BP (9500calBC). The end of the period is timetransgressive since it is defined by the appearance of agriculture. In southern Scandinavia and Britain this is around 5200BP (4000calBC). Middle Palaeolithic Division of the Palaeolithic period synonymous with Neanderthals. Spans around 250,000 to 30,000BP. Neolithic Period following the Mesolithic generally characterised as representing the emergence of agricultural communities and new material culture such as polished stone axe and pottery. Refitting An archaeological technique for understanding the châine opératoire. This involves fitting flakes, blades and debitage back onto the parent core to reconstruct the original stone nodule. Upper Palaeolithic Final division of the Palaeolithic period. Generally – though not completely – associated with the first Homo sapiens in Europe. Spans around 40,000 to 10,000BP.

Notes

Introduction 1 Form in Aristotelian thought is defined more broadly than currently: it encompasses the general appearance of a substance, what we might think of both as form (shape) and properties such as colour. 2 This is a stark contrast to Heidegger’s own view of matter: ‘The stone is worldless’ (see Agamben 2004). 3 This is unfortunate but unavoidable because the aché recipe is secret. 4 Events here are not just things that happen, but rather a philosophical term that relates to modes of individuation that are not those of beings, essences or representations, but becomings and doings (Fraser 2010, 57). 5 Affects are not sentiments, but a Spinozan term, meaning the ability to affect and be affected which enhances or diminishes the body’s ability to act (Massumi 1999, xvi). It is not just humans who have the ability to affect, but non-humans, things and matter. 6 A glossary is provided for those unfamiliar with the associated technical vocabulary. Chapter 1 1 Although Sackett’s isochrestic style is also indebted to French technological approaches. 2 It thus comes as no surprise that Ingold has discussed bilum bag technologies in phenomenological terms (Ingold 2000, 349–61). Chapter 3 1 This point has been made more broadly by Tilley (2007, 339). 2 I am indebted to Colin Richards for this idea.

Bibliography

Agamben, G., 2004. The open: man and animal. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Ahlén, I., 1965. Studies on the Red Deer, Cervus elaphus L., in Scandinavia. Stockholm: Swedish Sportsmen’s Association. Akrich, M., 1992. The de-scription of technical objects. In W. Bijker and J. Law (eds) Shaping technology/building society: studies in socio-technical change. Cambridge: MIT Press, 205–24. Althin, C.-A., 1951. New finds of Mesolithic art in Scania, Sweden. Acta Archaeologica, 21, 253–60. Álvarez Fernández, E., 2001. L’axe Rhin-Rhône au Paléolithique supérieur récent: l’exemple des molusques utilisés comme objets de parure. L’Anthropologie, 105, 547–64. Amico, L.N., 1996. Bernard Palissy: in search of earthly paradise. Paris and New York: Flammarion. Andersson, M., Karsten, P., Knarrström, B. and Svensson, M., 2004. Stone Age Scania. Malmo: National Heritage Board. Andresen, J.M., Byrd, B.F., Elson, M.D., McGuire, R.H., Mendoza, R.G., Staski, E., White, J.P., 1981. The deer hunters: Star Carr reconsidered. World Archaeology, 13, 31–46. Aristotle, 1950. Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Audouze, F., 2002. Leroi-Gourhan, a philosopher of technique and evolution. Journal of Archaeological Research, 10, 277–306. Baffier, D. and Girard, M., 1998. Les cavernes d’Arcy-sur-Cure. Paris: La Maison des Roches. Bahn, P., 1982. Inter-site and inter-regional links during the Upper Palaeolithic: the Pyrenean evidence. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 1, 247–68. Bahn, P. and Butlin, R., 1990. Les insectes dans l’art paléolithique: quelques observations nouvelles sur la sauterelle d’Enlène (Ariège). In J. Clottes (ed.) L’art des objets au paléolithique 1: l’art mobilier et son contexte. Colloque international Foix-Le Mas-d’Azil, 16–21 Nov. 1987, Actes des colloques de la direction du Patrimoine, 8, 247–53. Barndon, R., 2004. A discussion of magic and medicines in East African iron working: actors and artefacts in technology. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 37, 21–40. Barton, N., 1992. Hengistbury Head, Dorset. Volume 2: The Late Upper Palaeolithic and Early Mesolithic sites. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monograph 34.

134

Bibliography

Barton, R.N.E., Berridge, P.J., Walker, M.J.C. and Bevins, R.E., 1995. Persistent places in the Mesolithic landscape: an example from the Black Mountain uplands of South Wales. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 61, 81–116. Bateson, G., 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. London: Intertext. Bégouën, R., Clottes, J., Giraud, J.-P. and Rouzaud, F., 1996. Os plantés et peintures rupestres dans la caverne d’Enléne. In H. Delporte and J. Clottes (eds) Le territoire des Pyrénées Occidentales. Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, 283–306. Bell, M., 2007. Prehistoric coastal communities: the Mesolithic in Western Britain. York: Council for British Archaeology. Bensaude-Vincent, B., 2001. The new science of materials: a composite field of research. In C. Reinhardt (ed.) Chemical sciences in the 20th century: bridging boundaries. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 258–70. Berryman, S., 2008. Democritus. In E. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/ democritus/ (URL live at the time of printing). Binford, L.R., 1973. Interassemblage variability: the Mousterian and the ‘functional’ argument. In C. Renfrew (ed.) The explanation of culture change. London: Duckworth, 227–54. ——, 1978. Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press. ——, 1979. Organization and formation processes: looking at curated technologies. Journal of Anthropological Research, 35, 255–73. Bird-David, N., 1990. The giving environment: another perspective on the economic system of hunter-gatherers. Current Anthropology, 31, 189–96. Bisson, M., 2001. Interview with a Neanderthal: An experimental approach for reproducing scraper production rules and their implications for imposed form in Middle Palaeolithic tools. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11, 165–84. Bobik, J., 1998. Aquinas on matter and form and the elements: a translation and interpretation of the De Principiis Naturae and the De Mixtione Elementorum of St. Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bodu, P., 1995. Un gisement à Federmesser sur les bords de la Seine: le Closeau à Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine). Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 92, 451–55. ——, 2000. Que sont devenus les Magdaléniens du Bassin parisien? Quelques éléments de réponse sur le gisement aziliens du Closeau (Reuil-Malmaison, France). In B. Valentin, P. Bodu and M. Christensen (eds) L’Europe Centrale et Septentrionale au Tardiglaciaire: confrontation des modéles régionaux de peuplement. Paris: Mémoires du Musée de Préhistoire d’Ile-de France 7. Boesch, C. and Boesch, H., 1990. Tool use and tool making in wild chimpanzees. Folia Primatologica, 54, 86–99. Boivin, N., 2008. Material cultures, material minds: the impact of things on human thought, society and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boivin, N. and Owoc, M.A., 2004. Soils, stones and symbols: cultural perceptions of the mineral world. London: UCL Press. Bon, F., 2006. A brief overview of Aurignacian cultures in the context of the industries of the transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic. In O. Bar-Yosef and J. Zilhão (eds) Towards a definition of the Aurignacian. Lisboa: Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia, 133–46.

Bibliography

135

Bonsall, C. and Smith, C., 1992. New AMS dates for bone and antler artefacts from Great Britain. Mesolithic Miscellany, 13, 28–36. Bourgeois, A., 1994. Ojibwa narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jaques LePique, 1893–1895. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Boyd, B., 1996. Examination of bone artefacts from the Later Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant. Unpublished PhD. Thesis, University of Cambridge. Bradley, R., 2009. Dead stone and living rock. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow, 1–8. Bradley, R. and Edmonds, M., 1993. Interpreting the axe trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brady, J.E. and Prufer, K.M., 1999. Caves and crystalmancy: evidence for the use of crystals in ancient Maya religion. Journal of Anthropological Research, 55, 129–44. Breuil, H., 1953. Statuette bisexuée dans le microlithique de Nab Head, St Brides, Pembrokeshire. Congrès Préhistorique de France: Compte rendue de la XIVe Session. Brück, J., 2004. Material metaphors: the relational construction of identity in Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain. Journal of Social Archaeology, 4, 307–33. Buchli, V., 1999. An archaeology of socialism. Oxford: Berg. ——, 2010. Presencing the im-material. In M. Bille, F. Hastrup and T.F. Sørensen (eds) An anthropology absence: materializations of transcendence and loss. New York: Springer, 185–204. Buisson, D., Fritz, C., Kandel, D., Pinçon, G., Sauvet, G. and Tosello, G., 1996. Analyse formelle des contours découpés de tetes de Chevaux: implications archéologique. In H. Delporte and J. Clottes (eds) Pyrénées préhistorique : arts et sociétés. Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, 327–40. Busby, C., 1997. Permeable and partible persons: A comparative analysis of gender and body in South India and Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3, 261–78. Caillois, R., 1990. The necessity of the mind: an analytic study of the mechanisms of overdetermination in automatic and lyrical thinking and of the development of affective themes in the individual consciousness. Venice, CA: Lapis Press. Carter, R.J., 1997. Age estimation of the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) mandibles from the Mesolithic site of Star Carr, Yorkshire, based on radiographs of mandibular tooth development. Journal of Zoology, 241, 495–502. ——, 1998. Reassessment of seasonality at the early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, Yorkshire based on radiographs of mandibular tooth development in Red Deer (Cervus elaphus). Journal of Archaeological Science, 25, 851–56. Caulfield, S., 1978. Star Carr – an alternative view. Irish Archaeological Research Forum, 5, 15–22. Chatterton, R., 2003. Star Carr reanalysed. In L. Bevan and J. Moore (eds) Peopling the Mesolithic in a northern environment. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International series 1157, 69–80. Chauchat, C., Bonnissent, D., Chauvière, F.-X., Dachary, M., Eastham, A., Fontugne, M., Fosse, P., Fritz, C., Gambier, D., Hatté, C., Le Gall, O., Martin, H. and Roussot, A., 1999. L’ Habitat magdalénien de la grotte de Bourrouilla à Arancou (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Gallia Préhistoire, 41, 1–131.

136

Bibliography

Chazan, M., 1995. Conceptions of time and the development of paleolithic chronology. American Anthropologist, 97, 457–67. Chen, P.Y., Lin, A.Y.M., Lin, Y.S., Seki, Y., Stokes, A.G., Peyras, J., Olevsky, E.A., Meyers, M.A. and McKittrick, J., 2008. Structure and mechanical properties of selected biological materials. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 1, 208–26. Christensen, M., 1998. Processus de formation et caractérisation physico-chimique des polis d’utilisation des outils en silex. Application à technologie préhistorique de l’ivoire. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, 95, 183–201. Clark, J.G.D., 1954. Excavations at Star Carr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 1972. Star Carr: a case study in bioarchaeology. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Modular Publications. Clottes, J., 1989. Le Magdalénien des Pyrénées. In J.-P. Rigaud (ed.) Le Magdalénien en Europe. Liége: Université de Liége, 281–331. ——, 1995. Les cavernes de Niaux: art préhistorique en Ariége. Paris: Seuil. ——, 1997. Art of the light and art of the depths. In M. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann and N. Jablonski (eds) Beyond art: Pleistocene image and symbol. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 203–16. ——, 2000. Art between 30,000 and 20,000BP. In W. Roebroeks, M. Mussi, J. Svoboda and K. Fennema (eds) Hunters of the Golden Age. Leiden: Leiden University, 87–104. ——, 2003. Return to Chauvet Cave: excavating the birthplace of art. London: Thames & Hudson. ——, 2007. Un geste paléolithique dans les grottes ornées: os et silex plantés. In R. Desbrosse and A. Thévenin (eds) Arts et cultures de la Préhistoire: homage à Henri Delporte. Paris: CTHS. Clottes, J. and Lewis-Williams, J.D., 1998. The shamans of prehistory: trance and magic in the painted caves. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Cloutman, E.W. and Smith, A.G., 1988. Palaeoenvironments in the Vale of Pickering – Pt.3: Environmental history at Star Carr. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 54, 37–58. Clutton-Brock, T.H. and Albon, S.D., 1989. Red deer in the Highlands. Oxford: BSP Professional. Clutton-Brock, T.H., Guinness, F.E. and Albon, S.D., 1982. Red deer: behaviour and ecology of two sexes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Conard, N.J., 2003. Palaeolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of figurative art. Nature, 426, 830–32. ——, 2009. A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature, 459, 248–52. Conard, N.J. and Bolus, M., 2003. Radiocarbon dating, the appearance of modern humans and timing of cultural innovations in Europe: new results and new challenges. Journal of Human Evolution, 44, 331–71. ——, 2006. The Swabian Aurignacian and its place in European prehistory. In O. Bar-Yosef and J. Zilhão (eds) Towards a definition of the Aurignacian. Lisboa: Trabalhos de Arqueologia, 45, 211–40. Conard, N.J., Malina, M. and Münzel, S.C., 2009. New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany. Nature, 460, 737–40. Conneller, C., 2000. Fragmented Space? Hunter-gatherer landscapes of the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 17, 139–50.

Bibliography

137

——, 2004. Becoming deer: Corporeal transformations at Star Carr. Archaeological Dialogues, 11, 37–56. ——, 2006. The space and time of the châine opératoire. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 21, 38–49. ——, 2007. Inhabiting new landscapes: Settlement and mobility in Britain after the last glacial maximum. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 26, 215–37. Conneller, C. and Schadla-Hall, R.T., 2003. Beyond Star Carr: the Vale of Pickering in the tenth millennium BP. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 69, 85–105. Conneller, C., Milner, N., Schadla-Hall, T. and Taylor, B., 2010. The temporality of the Mesolithic landscape: New work at Star Carr. In P. Crombé, M. Van Strydonck, J. Sergant, M. Boudin and B. Machteld (eds) Chronology and evolution within the Mesolithic of Northwest Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 77–93. Cooney, G., 2002. So many shades of rock: colour symbolism in Irish stone axe heads. In J. A. and G. McGregor (eds) Colouring the past. Oxford: Berg., 93–107. ——, 2005. Stereo porphyry: quarrying and deposition on Lambay Island, Ireland. In P. Topping and M. Lynott (eds) The cultural landscape of prehistoric mines. Oxford: Oxbow, 14–29. ——, 2009. Mundane stone and its meaning in the Neolithic. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow. Coupaye, L., 2009. Ways of enchanting. Châines opératoires and yam cultivation in Nyamikum village, Maprik, Papua New Guinea. Journal of Material Culture, 14, 433–58. Cousté, R., 1951. Gisement magdalénien des grottes de Jaurias. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, 48, 381–84. Cousté, R. and Gaillard, M., 1957. Utilization des cotes fossils d’Halithérium dans le industries magdaléniennes de la Gironde. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 54, 575–77. Cummings, V.P.D. and Whittle, A.W.R., 2004. Places of special virtue: megaliths in the Neolithic landscapes of Wales. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Cummins, G., Simmonds, I.and Innes, J., in press. The environment of the Vale of Pickering. In T. Schadla-Hall and P. Lane (eds) Archaeological Investigations in the Vale of Pickering 1975–1998. Cambridge: MacDonald Institute. d’Errico, F., 2003. The invisible frontier. A multiple species model for the origin of behavioral modernity. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12, 188–202. d’Errico, F., Henshilwood, C., Vanhaeren, M. and Van Niekerk, K., 2005. Nassarius kraussianus shell beads from Blombos Cave: evidence for symbolic behaviour in the Middle Stone Age. Journal of Human Evolution, 48, 3–24. d’Errico, F. and Henshilwood, C.S., 2007. Additional evidence for bone technology in the southern African Middle Stone Age. Journal of Human Evolution, 52, 142–63. d’Errico, F., Vanhaeren, M., Barton, N., Bouzouggar, A., Mienis, H., Richter, D., Hublin, J.-J., McPherron, S.P. and Lozouet, P., 2009. Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 16051–56. d’Errico, F., Zilhão, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D. and Pelegrin, J., 1998. Neanderthal acculturation in western Europe? A critical review of the evidence and its interpretation. Current Anthropology, 39, S1–S44.

138

Bibliography

Dark, P., Higham, T., Jacobi, R. and Lord, T., 2006. New radiocarbon accelerator dates on artefacts from the early Mesolithic site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire. Archaeometry, 48, 185–200. Darling, F.F., 1937. A herd of red deer: a study in animal behaviour. London: Oxford University Press. David, A., 1990. Some aspects of the human presence in west Wales during the Mesolithic. In C. Bonsall (ed.) The Mesolithic in Europe. Edinburgh: John Donald, 241–53. ——, 2007. Palaeolithic and Mesolithic settlement in Wales with special reference to Dyfed. Oxford: British Archaeological Report (British Series) 448. David, E., 2003. The contribution of the technological study of bone and antler industry for the definition of the Early Maglemose culture. In L. Larsson, K. Kindgren, D. Loeffer and A. Akerlund (eds) Mesolithic on the move. Oxford: Oxbow, 649–57. Davies, J.A., 1924. Fourth report on Aveline’s Hole. Proceedings of the University of Bristol Speleological Society, 2, 104–14. Deetz, J., 1967. Invitation to archaeology. New York: Natural History Press. de Landa, M., 1999. Immanence and transcendence in the generation of form. In I. Buchanan (ed.) A Deleuzian century? Durham and London: Duke, 119–34. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1999. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone. Delluc, B. and Delluc, G., 1992. L’Art Pariétal Archaïque en Aquitaine. Paris: Suppléments à Gallia Préhistoire, 28. Delpeche, F., 1993. The fauna of the early Upper Palaeolithic: biostratigraphy of large mammals and current problems of chronology. In H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay and R. White (ed.) Before Lascaux: the complex record of the Early Upper Palaeolithic. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 71–84. Delporte, H., 1995a. La Dame de Brassempouy: actes du colloque de Brassempouy (juillet 1994) Liége: Université de Liége, Service de préhistoire. ——, 1995b. Statuettes en ivoire du Paléolithique supérieur. In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Wideman (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 7–16. Delporte, H. and Mons, L., 1977. Principes d’une étude sur les supports osseux de l’art paléolithique mobilier. In H. Camps-Fabrer (ed.) Méthodologie appliquée a l’Industrie de l’os Préhistorique. Paris: CNRS, 69–75. Demnard, F. and Néraudeau, D., 2002. L’utilisation des oursins fossiles de la Préhistoire á l’epoque gallo-romaine. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 98, 693–715. Descola, P., 1992. Societies of nature and the nature of societies. In A. Kuper (ed.) Conceptualising society. London: Routledge, 107–26. ——, 1994. In the society of nature: a native ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 1999. Constructing natures: symbolic ecology and social practice. In P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds) Nature and society: anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 82–102. ——, 2005. Par-déla nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Dibble, H., 1987. The interpretation of Middle Paleolithic scraper morphology. American Antiquity, 52, 109–17. Didon, L., 1911. L’abri Blanchard des Roches. Bulletin de la Société Historique et Archeologique du Perigord, 87, 246–61, 321–24.

Bibliography

139

Dobres, M.-A., 2000. Technology and social agency. Oxford: Blackwell. Dowson, T., 2009. Reanimating rock art research. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19, 378–87. Dowson, T. and Porr, M., 2001. Special objects – special creatures: shamanistic imagery and the Aurignacian art of south-west Germany. In N. Price (ed.) The archaeology of shamanism. London: Routledge, 165–77. Dumont, J.V., 1987. A microwear analysis of flints from the Mesolithic sites of Star Carr, Yorkshire and Mount Sandel, Northern Ireland. In P. Rowley-Conwy, M. Zvelebil and H.P. Blankholm (eds) Mesolithic Northwest Europe: recent trends. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield, 82–89. ——, 1988. A microwear analysis of selected artefact types from the Mesolithic sites of Star Carr and Mount Sandel. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 187. Edmonds, M.R., 1995. Stone tools and society: working stone in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. London: Batsford. Elliott, B., 2008. Is there evidence for barbed point manufacturing at Star Carr? Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of York. Emsley, J., 1995. The elements. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1940. The Nuer: a description of the modes of the livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fagnart, J.-P., 1997. La fin des temps glaciaires dans le Nord de la France. Paris: Mémoires de la Société Préhistorique Française 24. Fausto, C., 2007. Feasting on people: eating animals and humans, in Amazonia. Current Anthropology, 48, 497–530. Finlay, N., 2000. Deer prudence. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 17, 67–79. ——, 2008. Blank concerns: issues of skill and consistency in the replication of Scottish Late Mesolithic blades. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 15, 68–90. Fischer, A., 1974. An ornamented flint core from Holmegård V, Zealand, Denmark. Notes on Mesolithic ornamentation and flintknapping. Acta Archaeologica, 45. Fitzhugh, W.W., 1988. Comparative art of the North Pacific Rim. In W.W. Fitzhugh and A. Crowell (eds) Crossroads of continents: cultures of Siberia and Alaska. Washington DC.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 294–312. Foley, R. and Lahr, M., 1997. Mode 3 technologies and the evolution of modern humans. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 7, 3–36. Fraser, F. and King, J., 1954. Faunal remains. In J.G.D. Clark (ed.) Star Carr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70–95. Fraser, M., 2010. Facts, ethics and events. In C.B. Jensen and K. Rødje (eds) Deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. New York: Berghahn, 57–82. Gambier, D., 1996. Les pratiques funéraires au Magdalénien dans le Pyrénées Française. In H. Delporte and J. Clottes (eds) Pyrénées préhistorique: arts et sociétés. Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historique et Scientifiques, 263–77. Gamble, C., 1999. The Palaeolithic societies of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gamble, C., Davies, W., Pettitt, P. and Richards, M., 2004. Climate change and evolving human diversity in Europe during the last glacial. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences, 359, 243–53.

140

Bibliography

Gamble, C.S., Davies, S.W.G., Richards, M., Pettitt, P. and Hazelwood, L., 2005. Archaeological and genetic foundations of the European population during the Lateglacial: implications for ‘agricultural thinking’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 15, 55–85. Gaudzinski, S., 1999. Middle Palaeolithic bone tools from the open-air site SalzgitterLebenstedt (Germany). Journal of Archaeological Science, 26, 125–41. Gaudzinski, S., Turner, E., Anzidei, A.P., Álvarez Fernandez, E., Arroyo-Cabrales, J., Cinq-Mars, J., Dobosi, V.T., Hannus, A., Johnson, E., Münzel, S.C., Scheer, A. and Villa, P., 2005. The use of Proboscidean remains in every-day Palaeolithic life. Quaternary International, 126–28, 179–94. Gell, A., 1998. Art and Agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Gély, B. and Azéma, M., 2005. Approche des représentations de mammouths de la Grotte Chauvet. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 102, 183–88. Gibson, J.J., 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Dallas; London: Houghton Mifflin. Giles, M., 2007. Making metal and forging relations: ironworking in the British Iron Age. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 26, 295–413. Gordon Williams, E., 1926. The Nab Head chipping floor. Archaeologica Cambarensis, 80, 88–110. Goss, R.J., 1983. Deer antlers: regeneration, function, and evolution. New York; London: Academic. Grosz, E., 1995. Space, time and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies. New York: Routledge. ——, 2004. The nick of time: politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Guthrie, R.D., 1990. Frozen fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: the story of Blue Babe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hahn, J., 1986. Kraft und aggression: die botschaft der eiszeitkunst im Aurignacien Süddeutschlands? Tübingen: Archaeologica Venatoria. ——, 1993. Aurignacian art in Central Europe. In H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay and R. White (eds) Before Lascaux: the complex record of the Early Upper Paleolithic. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 229–41. ——, 1995a. Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur: actes de la table ronde : Ravello, 29–31, mai 1992. Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato. ——, 1995b. Les ivoires en Allemange: débitage, façonnage et utilisation au Paléolithique supérieur. In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Widemann (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 115–36. Hallowell, A.I., 1960. Ojibwa ontology, behaviour and worldview. In S. Diamond (ed.) Culture in history: essays in honour of Paul Radin. New York: Columbia University Press, 19–52. Haraway, D., 1988. Situated knowledges – the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–99. ——, 2003. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hawkes, C.F.C., 1954. Archaeological theory and method: some suggestions from the Old World. American Anthropologist, 56, 155–68. Haynes, G., 1991. Mammoths, mastodonts and elephants : biology, behavior, and the fossil record. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

141

Heidegger, M., 1971. On the origin of the work of art. In M. Heidegger Poetry, language, thought. New York: Harper Row. ——, 1977. The question concerning technology. In M. Heidegger The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper and Row. Henare, A., Holbraad, M. and Wastell, S., 2007. Introduction: thinking through things. In A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds) Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge, 1–31. Henshilwood, C.S. and d’Errico, F., 2005. Being modern in the Middle Stone Age: individuals and innovation. In C. Gamble and M. Porr (eds) The Hominid individual in context: archaeological investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic landscapes, locales and artefacts. London: Routledge, 244–64. Henshilwood, C.S., Sealy, J.C., Yates, R., Cruz-Uribe, K., Goldberg, P., Grine, F.E., Klein, R.G., Poggenpoel, C., Van Niekerk, K. and Watts, I., 2001. Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, South Africa: Preliminary report on the 1992–99 excavations of the Middle Stone Age levels. Journal of Archaeological Science, 28, 421–48. Hodder, I., 1982. Symbols in action: ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holbraad, M., 2007. The power of powder: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifa (or mana, again). In A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds) Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge, 189–225. Hovers, E., Vandermeersch, B. and Bar-Yosef, O., 1997. A Middle Palaeolithic engraved artefact from Qafzeh Cave, Israel. Rock Art Research, 14, 79–87. Hurcombe, L., 2007. Archaeological artefacts as material culture. London: Routledge. ——, 2008. Organics from inorganics: using experimental archaeology as a research tool for studying perishable material culture. World Archaeology, 40, 83–115. Ingold, T., 1986. The appropriation of nature: essays on human ecology and social relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——, 2000. The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge. ——, 2007. Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14, 1–16. Inizan, M.-L., Roche, H. and Tixier, J., 1992. Technology of knapped stone/Préhistoire de la Pierre Taillée, Tome 3. Meudon: CREP. Jacobi, R.M., 1978. Northern England in the eighth millennium b.c. In P.A. Mellars (ed.) The early post-glacial settlement of Northern Europe. London: Duckworth, 295–332. ——, 1980. The early Holocene settlements of Wales. In J.A. Taylor (ed.) Culture and environment in Prehistoric Wales. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 76, 131–206. ——, 2004. The Late Upper Palaeolithic lithic collection from Gough’s Cave, Cheddar, Somerset and human use of the cave. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 70, 1–92. Jarnemo, A., 2008. Seasonal migration of male red deer (Cervus elaphus) in southern Sweden and consequences for management. European Journal of Wildlife Research, 54, 327–33. Jones, A., 2001. Archaeological theory and scientific practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 2004. Archaeometry and materiality: Materials-based analysis in theory and practice. Archaeometry, 46, 327–38.

142

Bibliography

Jones, R. and White, N., 1988. Point blank: stone tools manufacture at the Ngilipiyju quarry, Arnhem Land. In R. Jones and B. Meehan (eds) Archaeology with ethnography: an Australian perspective. Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Australian National University, 51–87. Jordan, P., 2003. Investigating post-glacial hunter-gatherer landscape enculturation: ethnographic analogy and interpretative methodologies. In L. Larsson, K. Kindgren, D. Loeffer and A. Akerlund (eds) Mesolithic on the move. Oxford: Oxbow, 128–38. Karlin, C. and Julien, M., 1994. Prehistoric technology: a cognitive science. In C. Renfrew and E. Zubrow (eds) The ancient mind: elements of cognitive archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125–64. Karsten, P. and Knarrström, B., 2003. The Tågerup excavations. Trelleborg: National Heritage Board. Klein, R., 1998. Why anatomically modern people did not disperse from Africa 100,000 years ago. In T. Akazawa, K. Aoki and O. Bar-Yosef (eds) Neanderthals and modern humans in Western Asia. New York: Springer, 509–21. ——, 2008. Out of Africa and the evolution of human behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 7, 267–81. Knappett, C., 2002. Photographs, skeuomorphs and marionettes. Journal of Material Culture, 7, 97–117. Knecht, H., 1991. Technological innovation and design during the Early Upper Palaeolithic: a study of organic projectile technologies. Unpublished PhD.Thesis, New York University. ——, 1993. Splits and wedges: the techniques and technology of early Aurignacian antler working. In H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay and R. White (eds) Before Lascaux: the complex record of the Early Upper Palaeolithic. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 137–62. Kopytoff, I., 1986. The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai (ed.) The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–91. Kozlowski, J., 2007. The significance of blade technologies in the period 50–35kya. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef and C. Stringer (eds) Rethinking the human revolution. Cambridge: McDonald Institute, 317–28. Küchler, S., 2002. Binding in the Pacific: Between knots and loops. In V. Buchli (ed.) The material culture reader. Oxford: Berg, 63–80. Kuhn, S. and Stiner, M.C., 2008. Body ornamentation as information technology: towards an understanding of the significance of early beads. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef and C. Stringer (eds) Rethinking the human revolution. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph, 45–54. Kuhn, S.L., Stiner, M.C., Reese, D.S. and Güleç, E., 2001. Ornaments of the Earliest Upper Paleolithic: new insights from the Levant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98, 7641–46. Kuhn, S.L., Stiner, M.C., Güleç, E., Özer, I., Yilmaz, H., Baykara, I., Açikkol, A., Goldberg, P., Molina, K.M., Ünay, E. and Suata-Alpaslan, F., 2009. The early Upper Paleolithic occupations at Üçagızlı Cave (Hatay, Turkey). Journal of Human Evolution, 56, 87–113. Laming-Emperaire, A., 1962. La signification de l’art Rupestre Paléolithique Paris: Editions Picard. Larsson, L., 1978. Ageröd I:B – Ageröd I:D: a study of Early Atlantic settlement in Scania. Bonn: Rudolf Habelt.

Bibliography

143

——, 1982. Segebro: en tidigatlantisk boplats vid Sege as mynning. Malmo: Malmo museum. ——, 1988. The Skateholm Project. 1, man and environment: Almquist & Wiksell International. ——, 1990. The Mesolithic of Southern Scandinavia. Journal of World Prehistory, 4, 257–309. Latour, B., 1993. We have never been modern. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Law, J., 1994. Organising modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Lechtman, H., 1977. Style in technology: some early thoughts. In H. Lechtman and R.S. Merrill (eds) Material culture: styles, organization, and dynamics of technology. St. Paul: West, 3–20. ——, 1993. Technologies of power: the Andean case. In J.S. Henderson and P.J. Netherly (eds) Configurations of power. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 244–80. Lechtman, H. and Merrill, R.S., 1977. Material culture: styles, organization, and dynamics of technology. St. Paul: West. Legge, A. and Rowley-Conwy, P., 1988. Star Carr revisited. London: Birkbeck College. Lemonnier, P., 1993. Technological choices: transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic. London: Routledge. Leroi-Gourhan, A., 1982. The dawn of European art: an introduction to Palaeolithic cave painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 1993. Gesture and speech. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. and Leroi-Gourhan, A., 1964. Chronologie des grottes d’Arcy-surCure (Yonne). Gallia Prehistoire 7, 1–64. Levi-Strauss, C., 1969. Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lhomme, V. and Freneix, S., 1993. Un coquillage de bivalve du MaastrichtienPaléocene Glypoactis (Baluchicardia) sp. dans le couche inférieure du gisement Moustérien de Chez-Pourré-Chez-Comte (Corréze). Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 90, 303–06. Liolios, D., 2006. Reflections on the role of bone tools in the definition of the early Aurignacian. In O. Bar-Yosef J. Zilhão (eds) Towards a definition of the Aurignacian. Lisboa: Trabalhos de Arqueologia 45, 37–52. LiPuma, E., 1998. Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia. In M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds) Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53–79. Lister, A. and Bahn, P.G., 2007. Mammoths: giants of the Ice Age. London: Frances Lincoln. Lorblanchet, M., 1995. Les grottes ornées de la préhistoire: nouveaux regards. Paris: Editions Errance. Lord, J.W., 1993. The nature and subsequent uses of flint. Bury St Edmonds: JW Lord. Lovelock, J.E., 1989. The ages of Gaia: a biography of our living Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lucas, G., 2010. Triangulating absence: exploring the fault lines between archaeology and anthropology. In D. Garrow and T. Yarrow (eds) Archaeology and anthropology: understanding similarity, exploring difference. Oxford: Oxbow, 28–39. Luedtke, B., 1992. An archaeologist’s guide to flint and chert. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California.

144

Bibliography

Lynch, F. and Musson, C., 2004. A prehistoric and early medieval complex at Llandegai, near Bangor, North Wales. Archaeologia Cambrensis, 150, 17–142. MacGregor, A., 1985. Bone, antler, ivory and horn: the technology of skeletal materials since the Roman period. London: Totowa. MacKenzie, M.A., 1991. Androgynous objects: string bags and gender in central New Guinea. Reading: Harwood Academic. Maíllo Fernández, J.M., 2007. Archaic Aurignacian lithic technology in Cueva Morin (Cantabria, Spain). In O. Bar-Yosef and J. Zilhão (eds) Towards a definition of the Aurignacian. Lisboa: Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia, 111–32. Marshack, A., 1995. A Middle Palaeolithic symbolic composition from the Golan Heights: the earliest known depictive image. Current Anthropology, 37, 356–65. Marx, K., 1930. Capital. Translated from the fourth German edition by E. and C. Paul. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons. Massumi, B., 1999. Notes. In G. Deleuze and F. Guattari A thousand plateaus. London: Althone Press, xvi–xix. ——, 2009. ‘Technical mentality’ revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon. Parrhesia, 7, 36–45. Matos Moctezuma, E., 1988. The great temple of the Aztecs. London: Thames and Hudson. Maudet, M., 2003. L’industrie osseuse pré-et protohistoriques en Europe, approches technologiques et fonctionnelles. Actes du XIVeme congrès de l’Union Internationale des Sciences Préhistoriques et Protohistoriques, Liège, Belgique. Liège: Eraul, 43–51. Mauss, M., 1979. Body techniques. In M. Mauss (ed.) Sociology and psychology: essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 95–123. McBrearty, S. and Brooks, A.S., 2000. The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour. Journal of Human Evolution, 39, 453–563. McFadyen, L., 2006a. Building technologies, quick and slow architectures and early Neolithic long barrow sites in southern Britain. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 21, 117–34. ——, 2006b. Landscape. In C. Conneller and G. Warren (eds) Mesolithic Britain and Ireland: new approaches. Stroud: Tempus, 121–38. ——, 2007. Neolithic architecture and participation – practices of making in early Neolithic Britain. In J. Last (ed.) Beyond the grave: new perspectives on barrows. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 22–29. Mellars, P., 1985. The ecological basis of social complexity in the Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern France. In T.D. Price and J.A. Brown (eds) Prehistoric huntergatherers: the emergence of cultural complexity. Orlando: Academic Press, 271–97. ——, 1989a. The origins and dispersal of modern humans. Current Anthropology, 29, 186–88. ——, 1989b. Technological changes in the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition: economic, social, and cognitive perspectives. In P. Mellars and C. Stringer (eds) The human revolution: behavioural and biological perspectives on the origins of modern humans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 338–65. ——, 1996. The Neanderthal legacy: an archaeological perspective from western Europe. Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press. Mellars, P. and Dark, P., 1998. Star Carr in context. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph.

Bibliography

145

Mellars, P. and Stringer, C. (eds) 1989. The Human Revolution: behavioural and biological perspectives on the origins of modern humans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, D., 1987. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. ——, 2007. Stone age or plastic age? Archaeological Dialogues, 14, 23–27. Mitchell, B., Staines, B.W. and Welch, D.B.A., 1977. Ecology of red deer: a research review relevant to their management in Scotland. Cambridge: The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. Mithen, S.J., 1990. Thoughtful foragers: a study of Prehistoric decision making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 1996. The prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, religion and science. London: Thames & Hudson. Mons, L., 2007. De l’étude des techniques et des contraintes stylistique reconnues dans l’art mobilier de Paléolithique Supérieur. In R. Desbrosse and A. Thévenin (eds) Arts et cultures de la Préhistoire: homage à Henri Delporte. Paris: CNTS, 87–92. Moore, J., 1950. Mesolithic sites in the neighbourhood of Flixton, North-east Yorkshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 16, 101–17. Moran, B.T., 2005. Distilling Knowledge: alchemy, chemistry, and the scientific revolution. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press. Moreau, L., 2003. Les éléments de parure au Paléolithique supérieur en Belgique. l’Anthropologie, 107, 603–14. Morel, J., 1977. Encore les oursins fossiles perforés. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, 71, 213–88. Morel, J. and Gachina, J., 1975. Nouveaux oursins fossiles perforés de France. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, 72, 54–56. Mullarkey, J., 1999. Deleuze and materialism: one or several matters. In I. Buchanan (ed.) A Deleuzian century? Durham and London: Duke, 59–84. Müller-Beck, H. and Albrecht, G. (eds) (1987) Die anfange der kunst vor 30000 jahren. Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag. Münzel, S., 2001. The production of Upper Palaeolithic mammoth bone artifacts from southwestern Germany. In G. Cavarretta, P. Gioia, M. Mussi and M.R. Palombo (eds) The world of elephants. Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 448–54. Musil, R., 1994. Hunting game of the culture layer of Pavlov. In J. Svoboda (ed.) Pavlov I. Excavations 1952–53. Liège: Dolni Vestonicˇ e Studies 2, 138–209. Mussi, M., Gioia, P. and Negrino, F., 2006. Ten small sites: the diversity of the Italian Aurignacian. In O. Bar-Yosef and J. Zilhão (eds) Towards a definition of the Aurignacian. Lisboa: Instituto Portugues de Arqueologia, 189–209. Myers, A., 1989. Reliable and maintainable technological strategies. In R. Torrence (ed.) Time, energy and stone tools. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 78–91. Nanoglou, S., 2008. Qualities of humanness: material aspects of Greek Neolithic anthropomorphic imagery. Journal of Material Culture, 13, 311–34. Nash, G., 1998. Exchange, status and mobility: Mesolithic portable art of Southern Scandinavia. Oxford: Archeopress. Newman, W.R., 2004. Promethean ambitions: alchemy and the quest to perfect nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——, 2006. Atoms and alchemy: chymestry and the experimental origins of the scientific revolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

146

Bibliography

Noe-Nygaard, N., 1975. Two shoulders blades with healed lesions from Star Carr. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 41, 10–16. O’Connor, A., 2007. Finding time for the Old Stone Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, B. and Cooney, G., 2009. Introduction: Materialitas and the significance of stone. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow, xxi–xxv. O’Connor, B., Cooney, G. and Chapman, J. (eds) (2009) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow. O’Connor, T.P., 2002. Medieval zooarchaeology: what are we trying to do? Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 18, 3–21. Oakley, K.P., 1965. The folklore of fossils, part 2. Antiquity, 39, 117–25. ——, 1975. Decorative and symbolic uses of vertebrate fossils. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Odin, G.S., Pelegrin, J. and Néraudeau, D., 2006. Un fossile d’oursin préservé sur un nucléus paléolithique (site de plein air de Tercis, Landes, France). Comptes Rednu Palevol, 5, 743–48. Oliva, M., 2000. Some thoughts on Pavlovian adaptations and their alternatives. In W. Roebroeks, M. Mussi, J. Svoboda and K. Fennema (eds) Hunters of the Golden Age. Leiden: Leiden University, 219–30. Olsen, B., 2003. Material culture after text: re-remembering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36, 87–104. Otte, M., 1977. Les sagaies de l’Aurignaco-Périgordien en Belgique. In H. CampsFabrer (ed) Principes d’une étude sur les supports osseux de l’art paléolithique mobilier. Paris: CNRS, 193–203. ——, 1979. Le paléolithique supérieur ancien en Belgique. Bruxelles: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire. ——, 1995. L’ivoire paléolithique au Nord-Ouest européen. In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Widemann (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 103–14. Parker Pearson, M. and Ramilisonina, 1998. Stonehenge for the ancestors: the stones pass on the message. Antiquity, 72, 308–26. Péan, S., 2001. Mammoth and subsistence practices during the Mid Upper Palaeolithic of Central Europe (Moravia, Czech Republic). In G. Cavarretta, P. Gioia, M. Mussi and M. Palombo (eds) The world of elephants: proceedings of the first international conference. Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 331–36. Pedersen, M.A., 2001. Totemism, animism and north Asian indigenous ontologies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7, 411–27. Pelegrin, J., 1990. Prehistoric lithic technology: some aspects of research. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 9, 116–25. ——, 1993. A framework for analysing prehistoric stone tool manufacture and a tentative application to some early stone industries. In A. Berthelet and J. Chavaillon (eds) The use of tools by human and non-human primates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 302–17. Petréquin, P., Errera, M., Petréquin, A.-M. and Allard, P., 2006. The Neolithic quarries of Mont Viso, Piedmont, Italy: Initial radiocarbon dates. European Journal of Archaeology, 9, 7–30.

Bibliography

147

Peyrony, D., 1935. Le gisement Castanet, Vallon de Castelmerle, commune de Sergeac (Dordogne). Aurignacien I and II. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 32, 418–43. Pigeot, N. 1990. Technical and social actors: Flintknapping specialists and apprentices at Magdalenian Etoilles. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 9, 126–41. Pinçon, G., 2007. À la recherche du cheminement d’idées au cours du Magdalénien: essai sur les représentations féminines du Roc-aux-Sorciers (Angles-sur-Anglin, Vienne). In R. Desbrosse and A. Thévenin (eds) Arts et cultures de la Préhistoire: homage à Henri Delporte. Paris: CHTS, 55–64. Pitts, M.W., 1979. Hide and antlers: a new look at the gatherer-hunter site at Star Carr, N. Yorks, England. World Archaeology, 11, 32–42. Plènier, A., 1984. Grotte de Marsoulas. L’art des cavernes: atlas des grottes ornées Paléolithiques Francaises. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 446–50. Pluskowski, A., 2002. Hares with crossbows and rabbit bones: integrating physical and conceptual approaches to medieval fauna. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 18, 153–82. ——, 2004. Narwhals or unicorns? Exotic animals as material culture in Medieval Europe. European Journal of Archaeology, 7, 291–313. ——, 2007. Breaking and shaping beastly bodies: animals as material culture in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxbow. Poinar, H.N., Schwarz, C., Qi, J., Shapiro, B., Macphee, R.D.E., Buigues, B., Tikhonov, A., Huson, D.H., Tomsho, L.P., Auch, A., Rampp, M., Miller, W. and Schuster, S.C., 2006. Metagenomics to paleogenomics: Large-scale sequencing of mammoth DNA. Science, 311, 392–94. Pollard, C.J., 2000. Ancestral places in the Mesolithic landscape. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 17, 123–38. Poplin, F., 1995. Délitage et débitage dans le travail de l’ivoire vrai sur des examples du début du Paléolithique supérieur. In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Wideman (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 17–28. Price, T.D., 1982. Willow tales and dog smoke. Quarterly Review of Archaeology, 3, 4–8. Pye, D.W., 1968. The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., 1981. Things of beauty replete with meaning – metals and crystals in Colombian Indian cosmology. In A. Emmerich (ed.) Sweat of the sun, tears of the moon. Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 17–33. Richards, C., 2004. Labouring with monuments: constructing the dolmen at Carreg Samson, south-west Wales. In V. Cummings and C. Fowler (eds) The Neolithic of the Irish Sea. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 72–80. ——, 2009. Building the great stone circles of northern Britain: questions of materiality, identity and social practices. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow, 54–63. Ricoeur, P., 1978. The rule of metaphor. London: Routledge, 1978. Rival, L., 1999. Blowpipes and spears: the social significance of Huaorani technical choices. In P. Descola and G. Palsson (eds) Nature and society: anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 145–64.

148

Bibliography

Rompler, H., Rohland, N., Lalueza-Fox, C., Willerslev, E., Kuznetsova, T., Rabeder, G., Bertranpetit, J., Schoneberg, T. and Hofreiter, M., 2006. Nuclear gene indicates coat-color polymorphism in mammoths. Science, 313, 62. Ross, W.D., 1964. Aristotle. London: Methuen & Co. Rowley-Conwy, P., in press. The animal bone. In T. Schadla-Hall and P. Lane (eds) Archaeological investigations in the Vale of Pickering 1975–1998. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Rudebeck, E., 1998. Flint extraction, axe offering and the value of cortex. In M. Edmonds and C. Richards (eds) Understanding the Neolithic of Northwest Europe. Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 312–27. Rudwick, M.J.S., 1972. The meaning of fossils: episodes in the history of palaeontology. London: MacDonald. Sacchi, D., 2003. Le Magdalénien: Apogée de l’Art Quaternaire. Paris: La Maison des Roches. Sackett, J., 1981. From de Mortillet to Bordes: a century of French Palaeolithic research. In G. Daniel (ed.) Towards a history of archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson. ——, 1982. Approaches to style in lithic archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 1, 59–112. Saunders, N.J., 1999. Biographies of brilliance: pearls, transformations of matter and being, c. AD 1492. World Archaeology, 31, 243–57. ——, 2001. A dark light: reflections on obsidian in Mesoamerica. World Archaeology, 33, 220–36. ——, 2004. The cosmic earth. Materiality and mineralogy in the Americas. In N.P.D. Boivin and M.A. Owoc (eds) Soils, stones and symbols: cultural perceptions of the mineral world. London: UCL Press, 123–41. Scheer, A., 1995. Pendoloques en ivoire durant le Gravettien en Allenmagne du Sud; un indice chronologique et social? In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Widemann (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 137–72. ——, 2001. The utilisation of mammoth remains as raw material and its importance for the Gravettian people of the German Danube. In G. Cavarretta, P. Gioia, M. Mussi and M.R. Palombo (eds) The world of elephants. Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 455–59. Schlanger, N., 1994. Mindful technology: Unleashing the chaîne opératoire for an archaeology of mind. In C. Renfrew and E. Zubrow (eds) The ancient mind: elements of cognitive archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 143–51. ——, 1995. Flintknapping at the Belvedere: archaeological, technological and psychological investigations. Unpublished PhD. Thesis, University of Cambridge. ——, 1996. Understanding Levallois: lithic technology and cognitive archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 6, 231–54. Schmidt, R.A., 2000. Shamans and northern cosmology: the direct historical approach to Mesolithic sexuality. In R. Schmidt and B. Voss (eds) Archaeologies of sexuality. London: Routledge. Schulting, R. and Wysocki, M., 2005. ‘Pursuing a rabbit in Burrington Combe’: New research on the Early Mesolithic burial cave of Aveline’s Hole. Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society, 23, 171–265. Shell, H.R., 2004. Casting life, recasting experience: Bernard Palissy’s occupation between maker and nature. Configurations: a Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 12, 1–40.

Bibliography

149

Shepherd, W., 1972. Flint: its origin, properties and uses. London: Faber. Sieveking, A., 1979. Style and regional grouping in Magdalenian cave art. Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, 16, 95–109. Sigaut, F., 1999. The chaîne opératoire and beyond. Embedded technologies. Lampeter workshops in archaeology. Lampeter. Simondon, G., 1964. L’Individu et sa genése physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Smith, P.H., 2000. Artists as scientists: nature and realism in early modern Europe. Endeavor, 24, 13–21. Soffer, O., 1985. The Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Spurrell, F.C.J., 1880. On implements and chips from the floor of a Palaeolithic workshop. Archaeological Journal, 37, 294–99. Stead, I., 1991. The Snettisham treasure: excavations in 1990. Antiquity, 65, 447–64. Strathern, M., 1988. The gender of the gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——, 1990. Negative strategies in Melanesia. In R. Fardon (ed.) Localizing strategies: regional traditions of ethnographic writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 204–16. Strauss, L., 1996. Le territoire des Pyrénées Occidentales. In H. Delporte and J. Clottes (eds) Pyrénées préhistorique: arts et sociétés. Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, 103–16. Street, M., 1991. Bedburg-Königshoven: A preboreal Mesolithic site in the Lower Rhineland, Germany. In R.N.E. Barton, A.J. Roberts and D.A. Roe (eds) The Late Glacial in Europe: human adaptation and environmental change at the end of the Pleistocene. London: CBA Research Report, 256–70. ——, 1998. A pre-Boreal lithic assemblage from the site of Bedburg-Königshoven. In N. Ashton, F. Healey and P. Pettitt (eds) Stone Age archaeology: essays in honour of John Wymer. Oxford: Oxbow Monograph 102, Lithic Studies Society occasional paper, 165–73. Street, M., Gelhausen, F., Grimm, S., Moseler, F., Niven, L., Sensburg, M., Turner, E., Wenzel, S. and Joris, O., 2006. L’occupation du basin de Neuwied (Rhénanie centrale, Allemagne) par les Magdaleniens et les groupes a Federmesser (aziliens). Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française, 103, 753–80. Sturt, F., 2006. Local knowledge is required: a rhythmanalytical approach to the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic of the East Anglian Fenland. Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 2, 119–39. Svoboda, J., 2007. On modern human penetration to northern Eurasia: the multiple advance hypothesis. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef and C. Stringer (eds) Rethinking the human revolution. Cambridge: McDonald Institute, 329–40. Svoboda, J., Pean, S. and Wojtal, P., 2005. Mammoth bone deposits and subsistence practices during Mid-Upper Palaeolithic in Central Europe: three cases from Moravia and Poland. Quaternary International, 126–28, 209–21. Taborin, Y., 1993. La parure en coquillage au Paléolithique. Paris: CNRS éditions. ——, 2004. Langage sans parole: la parure aux temps Préhistoriques. Paris: La Maison des Roches. ——, 2007. Le territoire des Magdaléniens pyrénéens. In R. Desbrosse and A. Thévenin (eds) Arts et cultures de la Préhistoire: homage à Henri Delporte. Paris: CTHS, 99–104.

150

Bibliography

Taçon, P., 1991. The power of stone: symbolic aspects of stone use and tool development in Western Arnhem Land, Australia. Antiquity, 65, 192–207. Taylor, M., 1998. Identification of the wood and evidence for human working. In P. Mellars and P. Dark (eds) Star Carr in context. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 52–63. Teyssandier, N., 2007. l’émergence du Paléolithique supérieur en Europe: mutations culturelles et rythmes d’évolution. Paléo, 19, 367–89. Thiault, M.-H., 2001. L’exploitation et la transformation de l’ivoire de mammouth. Une étude technologique d’objets gravettiens de la grotte du Pape (Brassempouy, Landes). Gallia Préhistoire, 43, 153–74. Thomas, J., 1996. Time, culture and identity: an interpretative archaeology. London: Routledge. ——, 2007. The trouble with material culture. Journal of Iberian Archaeology, 9, 11–24. Tilley, C., 1996. An ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric societies in southern Scandinavia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——, 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths, and monuments. Oxford: Berg. ——, 1999. Metaphor and material culture. Oxford: Blackwell. ——, 2004. The materiality of stone: explorations in landscape phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. ——, 2007. The Neolithic sensory revolution: monumentality and the experience of landscape. In A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds) Going over: the MesolithicNeolithic transition in North-west Europe. Oxford: Proceedings of the British Academy, 144, 329–48. Tomásková, S., 1997. Places of art: art and archaeology in context. In M. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann and N. Jablonski (eds) Beyond art: Pleistocene symbol and image. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences. Van Gijn, A., 2009. The ideological significance of flint for Neolithic and Bronze Age communities in the Rhine/Meuse Delta of the Netherlands. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow, 127–37. Vang Petersen, P., 1993. Flint fra Danmarks oldtid. Copenhagen: Høst & Søn. Vanhaeren, M. and d’Errico, F., 2006. Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33, 1105–28. Vanhaeren, M., d’Errico, F., Stringer, C., James, S.L., Todd, J.A. and Mienis, H.K., 2006. Middle Paleolithic shell beads in Israel and Algeria. Science, 312, 1785–88. Verpoorte, A., 2005. The first modern humans in Europe? A closer look at the dating evidence from the Swabian Jura (Germany). Antiquity, 79, 269–79. Vialou, D., 1986. L’Art des grottes en Ariége magdalénienne. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Villa, P. and d’Errico, F., 2001. Bone and ivory points in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Journal of Human Evolution, 41, 69–112. Viveiros de Castro, E., 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4, 469–88. ——, 2004. Exchanging perspectives:the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. Common Knowledge, 10, 463–84.

Bibliography

151

——, 2010. Intensive filiation and demonic alliance. In C.B. Jensen and K. Rødje (eds) Deleuzian intersections: science, technology, anthropology. New York: Berghahn. Wainwright, G., 1963. A reinterpretation of the microlithic industries of Wales. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 29, 99–132. Warnier, J.-P., 2009. Technology as efficacious action on objects … and subjects. Journal of Material Culture, 14, 459–70. Warren, G., 2009. Help, I’m a rock! The materiality of stone on the Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland. In B. O’Connor, G. Cooney and J. Chapman (eds) Materialitas: working stone, carving identity. Oxford: Oxbow, 95–104. Warren, G. and Neighbour, T., 2004. Quality Quartz: working stone at a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote, near Calanais, Isle of Lewis. Norwegian Archaeological Review 37, 83–94. Weissner, P., 1983. Style and social information in Kalahari San projectile points. American Antiquity, 48, 253–76. White, R., 1989. Production complexity and standardization in Early Aurignacian bead and pendant manufacture. In P. Mellars and C. Stringer (eds) The human revolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 366–90. ——, 1992. Beyond art: toward an understanding of the origins of material representation in Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 537–64. ——, 1993. Technological and social dimensions of ‘Aurignacian-age’ body ornaments across Europe. In H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay and R. White (eds) Before Lascaux: the complex record of the Early Upper Paleolithic. New York: CRC Press, 277–99. ——, 1995. Ivory personal ornaments of Aurignacian age: technological, social and symbolic perspectives. In J. Hahn, M. Menu, Y. Taborin, P. Walter and F. Widemann (eds) Le travail et l’usage de l’ivoire au Paléolithique supérieur. Rome: Instituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 29–62. ——, 1997. Substantial acts: from materials to meaning in Upper Palaeolithic representations. In M. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann and N. Jablonski (eds) Beyond art: Pleistocene image and symbol. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 93–123. ——, 2003. Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of mankind. New York: Harry Abrams. ——, 2004. La parure en ivoire des hommes de Cro-Magnon. Pour la Science, 43, 98–103. ——, 2007. Systems of personal ornamentation in the Early Upper Palaeolithic: Methodological challenges and new observations. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. BarYosef and C. Stringer (eds) Rethinking the human revolution. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Whitehead, A.N., 1920. The concept of nature: Tarner lectures delivered in Trinity College, November 1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: Wojtal, P. and Sobczyk, K., 2005. Man and woolly mammoth at the Krakow Spadzista Street (B) – taphonomy of the site. Journal of Archaeological Science, 32, 193–206. Yarrow, T., 2010. Not knowing as knowledge: questioning asymmetry between archaeology and anthroplogy. In D. Garrow and T. Yarrow (eds) Archaeology and anthropology. Oxford: Oxbow, 13–27. Zilhão, J. and d’Errico, F., 2003. An Aurignacian ‘Garden of Eden’ in Southern Germany? An alternative interpretation of the Geissenklosterle and a critique of the Kulturpumpe model. Paleo, 15, 69–86.

152

Bibliography

Zilhão, J., Angelucci, D.E., Badal-Garcia, E., d’Errico, F., Daniel, F., Dayet, L., Douka, K., Higham, T.F.G., Martinez-Sanchez, M.J., Montes-Bernardez, R., Murcia-Mascaros, S., Perez-Sirvent, C., Roldan-Garcia, C., Vanhaeren, M., Villaverde, V., Wood, R. and Zapata, J., 2010. Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107, 1023–28. Zvelebil, M., 2003. The people behind the lithics: on social structure and ideology of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe. In L. Bevan and J. Moore (eds) Peopling the Mesolithic in a northern environment. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 1157, 1–26. ——, 2008. Innovating hunter-gatherers: the Mesolithic in the Baltic. In G. Bailey and P. Spikins (eds) Mesolithic Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 18–59.

Index

Abri Blanchard (France) 40, 42, 67, 69, 111 Abri Castanet (France) 40, 41, 42, 67, 69, 111 Abri Patuad (France) 67 aché powder 14–15, 16 ‘aesthetics of brilliance’ 6, 79 Africa 108–9, 111 Afro-Cuban diviners 14 Ageröd (Sweden) 85–6 Althin, C.-A. 85–6, 90 Altxerri (France) 37 Amazonia 121 amber 40, 42, 104, 111, 113 Amerindians: animist ontologies 51–3, 61, 120, 122; and materials 3, 5–6, 11, 14–15, 79–80, 124 ammonites 95–8, 96 animals: in cave art 34, 37, 39, 97–8; in clay 7–8; depicted on beads 34; depicted on bones 39; engraved on flint 83, 101; as figurines 68, 106–8, 112, 116–18, 120; heads as pendants 34–6; hunting of 53, 59–60, 67, 69–71, 110, 119–20; as masks 121; as materials 49–75, 120; in Pyrenees 33; relations with humans 49, 51–4, 58–65, 71, 73–5; technologies of 18; see also individual species animism 18, 51–3, 61, 119–22, 125, 128 antlers: for barbed points 54–8, 75; for beads 40, 112, 113, 114; deposition 64–5; frontlets 62–4, 63, 75; as materials 104, 106, 109, 118; red deer 57–60, 61, 62; roe deer 65; for spearpoints 70, 111, 115; technologies 57–68, 115–16; tools 110 Aquitaine region (France) 67, 95 Archaeologist’s guide to flint and chert (Luedtke) 9–10

Arcy caves (France) 69, 97 Aristotle 5, 12, 24, 29 art see cave art Arudy (France) 38 Atahuallpa 6 Aurignacian beads see beads Aurignacian period ontologies 119–20, 122 aurochs 58 Aveline’s Hole (Somerset) 98 awls 91, 108, 109 axes 78–9, 82, 90, 103 Azéma, M. 71 Bacho Kiro (Bulgaria) 110 badgers 40 barbed points 54–8, 55, 75 Barnhouse (Orkney) 79 Bas Léon (France) 81 basket-making 30, 32, 39, 126 basket-shaped beads 39–46, 41, 44, 47, 72, 102, 113–14, 117, 123 Bateson, G. 19 beads: basket-shaped 39–46, 41, 47, 72, 102, 113–14, 117, 123; depicting animals 121; materials for 40–2, 45–6, 64–5, 72–3, 95, 106, 108–21; shale 76–7 bears: in cave art 34, 69; deposition 53; figurines 68, 106, 117; teeth for beads 40, 110, 117; transformation into 121 beavers 18, 40 Bedburg-Konigshöven (Germany) 63 Bédeilhac (France) 37 beetle carved in lignite 92–3, 93 behavioural modernity 39–40, 102, 106–8, 109 Belcayre (France) 69 belemnites 95, 96, 97

154

Index

bifurcation of nature 10, 128 bilobate beads 40 bilum bags 46–7 binding technologies in the Pacific 46–7 Binford, L.R. 22, 56 bird bone 64, 106, 109, 117, 118 birds 69; in cave art 34, 37; as figurines 68–9, 106, 117; in Pyrenees 33 bison 34, 35 Blombos Cave (South Africa) 83, 108–9 Boivin, N. 3 bone tools 103–4 bones: ancestral 78; for beads 40, 117; birds 64, 106, 109, 117, 118; butchered 50, 60; decoration 39, 72, 86–7; fossils 94–7, 101; mammoths 66–8; as materials 68, 72, 106, 108, 113, 114, 116, 118; as ornaments 33–9, 35, 38, 45, 47, 48; tools 103–4 Bookan (Orkney) 79 Bordes, François 26 borer 94 bovids 38; in cave art 34; figurines 68, 106, 117; in Pyrenees 33; teeth for beads 40, 41, 117 Brassempouy (France) 40, 42, 43, 69, 72 Breton menhirs 80, 81 brick-making 30–1 burials 83, 98, 100–1, 103, 108 burins 57, 90, 94

connaissance 28, 42 contours découpés 34–6, 35, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48 Contrebandiers (Morocco) 109 Cooney, G. 76, 78 corals 95, 96 cores (flint) 85, 85–7, 94, 99, 100 cormorants 69 cortex 101 cortex (flint) 83–6, 84, 85, 90–1 Coupaye, L. 17, 51, 128 Crabtree, Don 26 crinoids (sea-lilies) 95, 96, 97 Cyclope neritea sea shell 45, 72, 113

Caillois, R. 61 cairn of Olcote (Isle of Lewis) 81 calcite 40, 41, 42, 111, 113 Caminade Est (France) 110 caprids 69 Carter, R.J. 56 Castillo, (Spain) 70 Castlemerle Valley, (France) 40–2, 67, 72, 97, 111 cave art 34, 37, 39, 69–70, 97–8, 111, 118 Cellier (France) 69 cervids 40, 69, 109 châine opératoire 16–20, 28, 50–1, 90, 119, 127, 128 chamois 33, 34 changing worlds and new materials 102–23 chert 9–10, 83, 97 chlorite 40, 41, 42, 113 Clark, J.G.D. 22, 56, 57–8 clay 7–8, 31 Clottes, J. 37, 39, 69, 97–8 Columbus, Christopher 6

echinoids (sea urchins) 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 99–100 El Conde (France) 69 elephant bone 103 elk 40, 53, 58 Elliott, B. 57–8 engravings 83–6, 84, 85, 88, 101, 111 Enlène (France) 34 exchange relationships 112–14

decoration: in binding 46–7; of bone 39, 72, 86–7; in cave art 34, 37; of figurines 120; of flint 77, 83–91, 101, 116; of teeth 40 deer: in cave art 34; and humans 58–65; teeth for beads 40, 41; see also antlers Deleuze, G. 12–13, 19–20, 126 Democritus 10 deposition of animal remains 53, 64–5 Descola, P. 51 design see decoration Discours Admirables (Palissy) 8 Dobres, M.-A. 18, 51 drop beads 45–6 dugong (or sea cow) 94

fallow deer 40 felids 68 felines 34, 69 females 83, 106 Ficateur, Adrien (Dr) 91 figurines: animals and birds 68–9, 106–8, 112, 116–20; females 106; ivory 68–9, 112, 116–19; as material culture 104; ‘Nab Head Venus’ 76–7 Finlay, N. 18, 32 fire, and flint 100–1 Fischer, Anders 87 fish dental plates 96

Index flint 76, 82; decoration 77, 83–91, 84, 101, 116; and fire 100–1; and fossils 97, 101; properties 9–10, 83; sources 98; till 98–9 flint nodules 86–90, 88, 99–100 flint tools 2–3, 87–8 flint working 28–9 flutes 70, 106, 118 Fontanet (France) 34 form: mental template 26–7, 105; relationship with materials 21, 24–33, 38–9, 45–8, 105; relationship with matter 30–1; stones 91–5 fossil shells 41, 95, 97, 109, 112–13 fossils 91–101, 96, 103 fox teeth 40, 41, 110, 114 Franco-Cantabrian caves 69 French Pyrenees see Pyrenees frontlets 62–4, 63 Gaudzinski, S. 45, 118 Geber 4–5, 7 Geissenklösterle (Germany) 67, 68, 70, 106, 114, 117, 118 Gély, B. 71 gold 4–6, 7, 15, 79, 124 Goldcliffe (Newport) 77 Gonnerdorf (Germany) 72 Gough’s Cave (Somerset) 84 Goyet (Belgium) 70, 114 Grande Grotte, (France) 69 Grosz, E. 61 Grotte Bayol (France) 69 Grotte Chauvet (France) 37, 69, 71, 111 Grotte de Renne (France) 110 Grotte des Hyènes (France) 42 Grotte du Trilobite (France) 91–3 Grottes de Jaurias (France) 94–5 Guattari, F. 12–13, 19–20 haematite 40, 41, 113 Hahn, J. 68–9 Halitherium 94, 97, 101 Haraway, D. 53, 75 Hawkes, C.F.C. 8 Heidegger, M. 25, 29, 39 Hengistbury Head (Dorset) 84, 86 Hohle Fels (Germany) 67, 68, 69, 70, 106, 114, 121 Hohlenstein-Stadel (Germany) 68, 106, 116, 117, 121 Holbraad, M. 14, 16 Holmegå´rd (Zealand) 86–9, 88, 89 Homo sapiens 105, 108–10, 111

155

horses 35, 69, 117; in cave art 34, 37; engraved on flint 83; figurines 68, 106, 106; head as pendant 34, 35; hyoid bones 35, 36; in Pyrenees 33; teeth 40, 114 Huaorani Amerindians 53 human revolution 39–40, 104 human-lion figurines 106, 107, 108, 116, 117, 120, 121 humans: in cave art 34; and materials relationship 18, 20, 32, 102, 108–10; relations with animals 49, 51–4, 58–71, 73–5, 118–19 hunting 53, 67, 69, 110, 118–19, 120; mammoths 69–71; red deer 59–60 Hurcombe, L. 10 hyenas 40, 41 hyoid bones 35, 36 ibex 34, 39, 40, 69 Ifri n’Ammar (Morocco) 109 Ingold, T.: animism 51–2, 61–2, 120–1; definition of materials 3; form and materials 18, 24–6, 28–30, 32, 39, 126; On weaving a basket 30; properties of materials 11–13, 16, 20–1; Society, nature and the concept of technology 29–30 insects 92 iron 5 Isturitz (France) 34, 35, 40, 42, 70, 94, 110–11 ivory: for beads 40–6, 65, 70–3, 106, 110–17; figurines 68–9, 112, 116–19; and mammoths 70–1; as new material 104; as ‘plastic’ material 27; for spearpoints 106; Swabian Jura 114–16; technologies 42–5, 115–17; tools 70 jade 3 jadeite axes 78–9 jet 40, 113 Jones, A. 3, 79 Jordan, P. 53 Julien, M. 25, 28 Jura, Swabian 68, 106–8, 114–16 Karlin, C. 25, 28 Karsten, P. 84–6 Katanda Cave (Democratic Republic of Congo) 108 Knappett, C. 121–2 Knarrström, B. 84–6

156

Index

Knecht, H. 115 Krakow Spadzista Street (Poland) 67 Ksar ‘Akil (Lebanon) 109 Küchler, S. 46–7 Kulturpumpe hypothesis 107 La Baume (France) 69 La Croze à Gontran (France) 69 La Ferrassie (France) 69 La Souquette (France) 40, 67, 69, 72, 111, 113 La Vache (France) 34, 95 La Viña (Spain) 35, 69 Labastide (France) 35 Lake Flixton (Yorkshire) 56, 57, 57, 58, 64, 98 Lambay Island (Ireland) 78 Langdale Fells (Cumbria) 78 Laouza (France) 110 Larsson, L. 86 Lartet (France) 69 Latium (Italy) 103 Latour, B. 50 Laugerie-Basse (France) 34, 35 Le Poisson (France) 69 Le Tuc d’Audoubert (France) 35, 37 Lechtman, H. 26 Legge, A. 55, 60 Lemonnier, P. 26 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 26, 27 Les Bernous (France) 69 Les Trois Frères (France) 37 Lewis-Williams, J.D. 37, 39 lignite 40, 41, 92–3, 113 limestone 40, 82, 113 lion-human figurine 106, 107, 108, 116, 117, 120, 121 lions 40, 69, 106 Llandegai (Gwynedd) 77 Locke, J. 10, 11 Lovelock, J.E. 47 lowenmensches (‘man-lions’) 68 Luedtke, B. 9–10 lustre 46, 72, 73, 74, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 122 lynx 40 malanggan figures 46–7 males 87, 89 mammoth tusks 39, 40, 42–3, 44, 46, 70, 113 mammoths 65–73, 118–19; in cave art 34, 69; figurines 68, 104, 106, 117; ivory. see ivory

‘man-lions’ (lowenmensches) 68 Manton Warren (Lincolnshire) 76 Marche-les-Dames (Belgium) 70 marine shells 109 Marsoulas (France) 37 Mas d’Azil (France) 34, 35, 37 masks of animals 121 Massat (France) 37 material culture 3, 24, 50, 104–5, 111, 112, 122–3 material revolution 112–14 material worlds 102–23 materials: archaeological understanding of 1–3; definition 3, 4–7; and form relationship 21, 24–33, 38–9, 45–8, 105; and humans relationship 18–20, 102, 108–10; properties 2, 4–7, 8–16; and technologies 7–9, 16–18, 27–9, 103–4, 111–14, 126; see also individual materials matter: and form relationship 30–1; movement of 11–13 Mauss, Marcel 17 menhirs in Brittany 80, 81 ‘mental template’ of form 25–7, 105 Mesoamericans see Amerindians Mesolithic period 22–3, 126–8 metallurgy 13, 19 Middle Magdalenian of the Pyrenees 33–4 mirrors 79, 80 monkeys 53 Montespan (France) 37 monuments 80–2 motifs see decoration musical instruments 70, 106, 118 Nab Head (Pembrokeshire) 76–7 ‘Nab Head Venus’ 76–7 narwhal tusks 74 nature/culture divide 49, 51, 52, 73–4 Neanderthals 103–4, 105, 111, 119 Neighbour, T. 81 new materials 102–23, 105, 110–12 Newton, Isaac 10 Niaux (France) 34, 37 Nuer people of the Sudan 59 nummulites 95, 96 Nunamiut ethnoarchaeology (Binford) 56 Oakley, K.P. 94 obsidian 79–80 ochre 3, 82, 83

Index Ølby Lyng (Zealand) 85 Olcote (Isle of Lewis) 81 Olsen, B. 24 On weaving a basket (Ingold) 30 Origin of the Work of Art, The (Heidegger) 29 Orkney 79 Orula god 14 ostrich egg-shell 109 Otte, Marcel 70 Oued Djebbana (Algeria) 109 Palaeolithic period see Upper Palaeolithic period Palissy, Bernard 7–8 Pedersen, M.A. 119, 120 Pelegrin, J. 25, 28 pendants 34–6, 104, 111, 116–17 people see humans Périgord (France) 69, 70 personal ornaments 34–6, 46 perspectivism 120–2 phenomenological approaches 25, 29–30, 48 Pigeot, N. 32 pigs 40 Pincevent (France) 83 Placard (France) 95, 98 polished axes 78, 82 polishing of bone tools 108–9 Portel (France) 34 pots of Neolithic period 79 Pradiéres (France) 34 Predmostí (Czech Republic) 67 Pye, D.W. 11 Pyrenean chamois (izard) 34 Pyrenees 33–4 pyrites 6, 40, 100, 113 Qafzeh (Israel) 83, 108, 109 quarrying 78, 81 quartz 80, 81 Question Concerning Technology, The (Heidegger) 29 Quneitra (Golan) 83 red deer 58–60, 74; antlers 57–60, 61, 62; in Pyrenees 33; teeth 40, 45–6, 113–14 reindeer 33, 35, 40 relationships: animals and humans 49, 51–4, 58–65, 65, 71, 73–5; exchange 112–14; form and materials 21, 24–33, 30–1, 38–9, 45–8, 105;

157

humans and materials 18, 20, 32, 102, 108–10; material and form 24–33, 119–20 Réseau Clastres (France) 37 Rhafas (Morocco) 109 Rhede (Germany) 103 rhino 34, 69 Rhuddlan (Clwyd) 77 rhyolite 76 Riparo al Fumane (Italy) 110 Rival, L. 53 Roc du Sorciers (France) 83, 90 roe deer 65 rondelles 33, 38, 38–9, 48 Rothschild (France) 110 Rowley-Conwy, P. 55, 60 Rudebeck, E. 90 saiga 33 St Germain-la-Rivière (France) 98 St Thomas Aquinas 7 Salzgitter Lebenstedt (Germany) 103 sarsen 82 Saunders, N.J. 3, 5–6, 15, 79 Saussurean linguistics 26, 105 savoir-faire 28 Scandinavian flint 84–91 schema opératoire 28, 39 Schipluiden (Netherlands) 100 schist 40, 82, 113 Schlanger, N. 28, 32, 95 Schreger lines 43 sea urchins see echinoids (sea urchins) Seamer Carr (North Yorkshire) 2–3, 98–100 Segebrø (Sweden) 86 shale beads 76–7 shamanic associations 6, 120, 121 sharks’ teeth 40, 95, 96, 97 shells: for beads 40, 41, 72, 83, 95, 103, 109; exchange relationships 112–14; as new material 104; personal ornaments 46; replication 113; skeuomorphs 73 Siberia 72 Siberian Khanty 53 signs and symbols 34, 83, 120 Simondon, G. 12–13, 24, 30–1 Skateholm (Sweden) 98 skeuomorphs 48, 72, 73, 113–14, 121–2 Skhul (Israel) 108, 109 slate 82 soapstone 104

158

Index

Socety, nature and the concept of technology (Ingold) 29–30 spearpoints 70, 103, 106, 109, 111 sponges 95, 96 Spurrell, F.C.J. 26 Spy (Belgium) 70, 113, 114 Staple Cragg (County Durham) 76 Star Carr (North Yorkshire) 54–60, 55, 62, 64–5, 74, 76 statuettes see figurines steatite 113 stone quarries 78, 81 stone tools 76–7, 103 stones 103; archaeological writings on 2–3; and fossils 91–100, 101; importance of location 77–80; inscribed surfaces 83–91, 101; mass and depth 101; as material 40, 41, 82–3, 83, 104; monuments 80–2; at Nab Head (Pembrokeshire) 76–7; properties 3, 82–3, 95–7, 101; to replicate shells 113 sub-fossil ivory 43, 71–2 surface affects 81 Swabian Jura 68, 106–8, 114–16 symbolic explosion 93, 102–3, 105–8 symbolic expression 83, 108 Taborin, Y. 36, 39, 41, 42, 45 Taçon, P. 78 Taforalt (Morocco) 109 Tå´gerup (Sweden) 85–6, 86, 87 talc 40, 41, 42, 46, 113 technologies 24–9, 81–2, 103–4; of animals 18; of antlers 57–68, 115–16; binding in the Pacific 46–7; and materials 7–9, 16–18, 27–9, 103–4, 111–14, 126 teeth 40, 41, 46, 106, 110, 113, 117 tekhne 29 Tezcatlipoca 79 Thomas, J. 24, 29 Thomsen, C.J. 1 till flint 98–9 Tilley, C. 80–1, 81, 82, 83

tools 70, 77, 94, 97, 103, 104, 109 Treatise on Nomadology (Deleuze and Guattari) 12–13 trilobite 91–3, 92 Trou de la Mere Clochette (France) 110 tuff 76 tusks 39, 40, 42–3, 44, 46, 70, 113 Üçagızlı Cave (Turkey) 109 Undeløse Bro (Zealand) 85 Unstan (Orkney) chambered tomb 79 Upper Palaeolithic period 22–3, 103–5, 111–13, 126–8 Vale of Pickering (North Yorkshire) 54 Vale of Pickering Research Trust 56, 100 Van Gijn, A. 100 Venus of Hohle Fels 106 Vérteszölös (Hungary) 103 Villingbaek Øst, (Denmark) 87 Viveiros de Castro, E. 61, 122 Vogelherd, Germany 68, 70, 106, 117, 118 vultures 118 Waltham Abbey (Essex) 54 Wandsworth (Greater London) 54 Warnier, J.-P. 17 Warren, G. 81 water birds 69, 106, 118 weasels 34 wedges 109 Western Arnhem Land (Australia) 78 White, R. 42, 40, 45, 67, 119 Whitehead, A.N. 10–11 Wildhaus (Germany) 70 Wildsceuer (Germany) 70 wolves 40 wood 103, 104 woolly mammoths see mammoths Yorkshire Wolds flint 98–9 Zealand cores 85–6