Institute For Ice Age Studies

The full range of ornamental raw materials preserved in the record includes various mineral and animal substances including limestone, schist, talc-schist, talc, mammalian teeth, bone, antler and ivory, fossil and contemporary species of marine and freshwater shells, fossil coral, fossil belemnite, jet, lignite, hematite, pyrite. However, this relatively extensive list should not be taken to suggest a kind of random use of materials encountered in the environment. A number of pronounced choices were made.

If one examines the species of animals whose teeth were chosen for Aurignacian objects of suspension, there are clear choices that vary somewhat regionally. In France, Belgium, Germany and Russia fox canine teeth predominate followed in much smaller quantities by the vestigial canines of cervids, almost always red deer. In Spain and Italy, almost all pierced teeth are vestigial canines of red deer, with fox canines being absent. At Mladec in Czechoslovakia, beaver incisers dominate, closely followed by moose and bovid incisors. In nearly all instances the species sample for objects of suspension is fundamentally different from that found in the food debris, suggesting choices based on ideas exclusive of dietary preferences.

Pierced marine, freshwater and fossil shells (Taborin 1993) constitute perhaps a third of the objects of suspension found in French Aurignacian sites. Outside of France, with the possible exception of Northern Italy (Bartolomei et al 1992), they are so rare as to be considered virtually absent in Aurignacian-age sites in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia. Local marine fossils (belemnite, coral) served as raw materials for objects of suspension in some Aurignacian-age sites in Russia (White 1993).

Occasional pierced objects in limestone are found throughout Europe. On the other hand, rarer soft stones, such as talc, lignite and hematite were turned into Aurignacian-age items of suspension most often in southern France, but also occasionally in Spain, Italy, and Germany.

Personal ornaments are frequently manufactured of materials exotic to the regions in which they are found. This is especially true of shells and rare minerals, but may also be true of ivory, since mammoth remains are virtually absent from Aurignacian I sites (Delpech 1983) in SW France (although the collection by Aurignacian people of subfossil ivory from geological sources is a distinct possibility: see below). In general, rare minerals in France fall off with distance from point of natural origin. For example, talc attenuates as one proceeds north from the Pyrenees. Likewise Atlantic and Mediterranean shell species attenuate as one proceeds into the French interior.