Personal Ornaments : Contexts of Production, Use and Disposal
Lacking direct association between Aurignacian I beads and human skeletons, we are obliged to design research strategies to demonstrate first, that these were indeed objects of suspension and second, how precisely, they were suspended. A combined SEM/Experimental replication program has already yielded to us significant insight into the attachment of Aurignacian basket-shaped beads. Sewn-on clothing clothing beads are implied, but there is substantial variation in patterns of wear (Figure 9) on the surfaces of bead-holes.
Elsewhere, I have proposed that sites where beads were manufactured in quantity were special places on the landscape, perhaps loci of aggregations of otherwise distant groups. This would explain the hyper-abundance of exotic raw materials in these sites. I have also noted that adjacent sites show abundant but differing frequencies of bead production stages, perhaps indicating more complicated divisions of labor than previously imagined. There is substantial evidence that beads were worked down to a penultimate stage (e.g., perforated but not shaped by grinding/polishing, stored as such, and only finished at the moment at which they were to be sewn or strung. This may have allowed the ivory worker the flexibility to create a final product tailored to the size and form requirements of the moment.
More than 25% of Aurignacian I basket-shaped beads show prehistoric breaks, usually across the neck of the hole. This could easily be explained by beads broken off a garment during activity, or by the mending of garments at which time worn or broken beads may have been removed and discarded. However, if use and maintenance of beaded garments are suggested, so is intensive production of beads manifest in large quantities of fabrication debris. Caching of large numbers of beads, or even of whole, decorated garments, cannot be excluded and might explain the high percentage of intact, unbroken beads. Unfortunately, excavation techniques early in this century did not involve spatial proveniencing of artifacts; thus, spatial analysis within sites is impossible for the moment.
