A. The Sample
European sites attributed to Aurignacian I (roughly 35-30,000 bp) have yielded an abundance of personal ornaments in the form of beads, pendants, pierced animal teeth and pierced marine shells (White 1989; Taborin 1993; Hahn 1972; 1986). Elsewhere, I have explored in detail raw material choice and fabrication techniques and the ways in which these varied across the European landscape at the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. It has been and it remains my position that this large corpus of personal ornaments, following a near absence in the preceding Mousterian (White 1995a), is reflective of significant transformations in human society with the onset of the Aurignacian sometime prior to 35,000 years ago. In light of what we know generally about the social context of modern human bodily adornment, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the first appearance in the archaeological record of large and varied assemblages of personal ornaments implies the material construction and representation of a diversity of individual and social identities.