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:
- Cultural assumptions about personhood.
- Beliefs about the relationship between materials, representational acts, representational constructs and social/supernatural efficacy.
- Choice and acquisition (by direct extraction or by social mechanisms of exchange) of raw material based on above.
- Choice of forms, textures, colors or subject matters.
- Organization of production, (social, temporal and spatial).
- Combination of gestures and tools into techniques for ornament production that are coherent with the encompassing, regional technical system and that enable
- Representation of desired signifiers of social identity, age, reproductive status, supernatural associations, etc.
- Use of the ornamental representations in (socially, esthetically and cosmologically) meaningful acts.
- 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.