By far the majority of preserved personal ornaments in European Aurignacian-age sites (White 1995b) were fabricated of ivory. Indeed, many of the famous Vogelherd statuettes were pierced for suspension. In the Western European Aurignacian, facsimiles of red deer canines and marine shells were executed in ivory (examples are also known in talc and limestone). In addition, there is a variety of more-or-less idiosyncratic "pendants" manufactured of ivory and, less often, of bone, antler or talc. For reasons of space, I shall focus here on operational sequences for the mass production of ivory "beads," giving less detailed treatment to rarer ivory ornaments.
Two formal attributes of Aurignacian I beads and pendants are particularly noteworthy: surface lustre and facsimile. First, texturally, almost all Aurignacian I beads and pendants exhibit remarkable surface lustre that is not a product of post-depositional processes. The lustre on ivory beads (Figure 2) was intentionally produced by techniques (discussed later in this paper) of grinding and polishing, especially the use of an effective metallic abrasive: powdered ochre (hematite).
The potential of ivory to take on lustrous polishes can be seen as having been exploited through the creation and application of appropriate techniques for replicating the naturally occurring tactile characteristics of other ornamental media, such as mother of pearl, talc/steatite and dental enamel. In other words, the polishing of ivory was itself a representation of textures experienced elsewhere in the natural world. Our own predominant cultural medium of representation is visual; as a result we have tended to treat tactile characteristics of objects as non representational or minimally representational. However, a moment of reflection will reveal that, even in the so-called "Western Tradition, polished ivory's tactile qualities have been so sought-after that elephants have been brought to the verge of extinction.
The hypothesis that the polishing of ivory was an attempt to represent the surface qualities of other substances of tactile interest is supported by the existence in Aurignacian I sites of ivory facsimiles of seashells (mother-of-pearl), and animal teeth (dental enamel and naturally lustrous dentine). Indeed, the basket-shaped ivory and talc beads so frequent in SW French Aurignacian I sites (see below) show a striking resemblance in form and size (size standardization is discussed below and has been quantified in White 1989) to a species of Mediterranean seashell found in some Aurignacian I sites in SE France: Cyclope neritea (Figure 3 ). In light of this hypothesized tactile constituent of Aurignacian I representation, it is perhaps not surprising to observe that more than 95% of Aurignacian I personal ornaments are constructed of ivory, talc, shell or animal tooth.