Institute For Ice Age Studies

A schematic outline of the constituents of a châine opératoire for Aurignacian (or any other) system of personal ornamentation might look something like the following:

1. Cultural assumptions about personhood.
2. Beliefs about the relationship between materials, representational acts, representational constructs and social/supernatural efficacy.
3. Choice and acquisition (by direct extraction or by social mechanisms of exchange) of raw material based on above.
4. Choice of forms, textures, colors or subject matters.
5. Organization of production, (social, temporal and spatial).
6. Combination of gestures and tools into techniques for ornament production that are coherent with the encompassing, regional technical system and that enable
7. Representation of desired signifiers of social identity, age, reproductive status, supernatural associations, etc.
8. Use of the ornamental representations in (socially, esthetically and cosmologically) meaningful acts.
9. Purposeful (based on intentions for future retrieval/use or ideas about their residual power and efficacy) or accidental (as a biproduct of human activity) disposal of the ornaments.

It is important to emphasize that, procedurally, archaeologists tend to work in reverse through these chains; beginning with basic pattern recognition concerning the distribution of objects in the ground and moving backward through multifacetted, higher order analyses and inferences.