INTRODUCTION
Since Leroi-Gourhan wrote these words nearly three decades ago, the work of his students and sympathetic followers has demonstrated clearly our ability to address successfully the question of "la vie technique." Subsequent research by Paleolithic archaeologists makes it clear that technological aspects of Paleolithic culture cannot be understood in isolation from intellectual, religious, social and esthetic components. Yet traditionally in social anthropology technology has tended to be ignored in studies that address social and symbolic aspects of modern cultures. As Leroi-Gourhan (1964:210) recognized,
...l'infra-structure techno-économique n'est intervenue le plus souvent que dans la mesure ou elle marquait de manière indiscrète la superstructure des pratiques matrimoniales et des rites. La continuité entre les deux faces de l'existence des groupes a été exprimée avec pénétration par les meilleurs sociologues mais plutot comme un déversement du social dans le matériel que comme un courant à double sens dont l'impulsion profonde est celle du matériel.
Recently, there has been a significant trend in social anthropology toward viewing social identity as constructed and communicated through the medium of bodily adornment (Strathern and Strathern 1971; Turner 1980). According to Andrew Strathern (1981:15), What people wear, and what they do to and with their bodies in general, forms an important part of the flow of information -- establishing, modifying, and commenting on major social categories, such as age, sex and status, which are also defined in speech and in actions. Whatever the precise origins of clothing, then, they can be sought only within the general context of the development of social communication and of society itself.
At the same time, there has been renewed interest in what Appadurai (1986) has called "the social life of things." Unfortunately, the very social anthropologists who espouse the construction-of-social-identity view of bodily adornment seldom address the material means by which natural substances are transformed into objects that act as social signifiers. Thus, we are frequently missing an integration of technology and social dynamics through which we might gain access to the culturally-embedded technological production sequences from which socially meaningful decorative styles emerge.
In this paper, I wish to take this notion of the construction of social identity quite literally by examining the materials and technologies behind Aurignacian-age personal adornment in Europe. My approach has been inspired by perspectives on technology forged by Lechtman (1977, 1984), Lemonnier (1983) and several French lithic specialists, inspired by Leroi-Gourhan, who focus on operational sequences or "chaines opératoires." I have defined my subject as "Aurignacian-age" materials (roughly 40-25,000 B.P.), because as one proceeds eastward into Russia the distinctive traits that have been used to define the Aurignacian in Western/Central Europe attenuate considerably, or even disappear. This is the confusing world of the Eastern European Gravettian, and its relationship to the Aurignacian is close in some cases and distant in others. For example, no experienced Upper Paleolithic archaeologist would label the flat-faced-burin dominated assemblage from the lower level of Kostenki 17 (Praslov and Rogachev 1982) as Aurignacian, although it carries two dates of ca. 32,000 and 36,000 B.P.. In contrast, the lithic and organic assemblage from Sungir (Bader 1978), for which there are old Groningen dates of 24,430 +-400 and 25,000 +-200 B.P. and more recent Moscow dates (N. Praslov, personal communication) of ca. 28,000 B.P. (but see Bosinski 1990), is very Aurignacian, both typologically and technologically.
Although I begin with a brief overview of current evidence for the earliest body ornaments and the materials and techniques used to create them, my focus throughout the remainder of the paper will be entirely on formed beads and pendants to the exclusion of pierced animal teeth and marine shells. I will proceed broadly West to East, including in my presentation preliminary results of my analysis of the several thousand objects of personal adornment from habitation and burial contexts at the Russian Early Upper Paleolithic sites of Kostenki 17 and Sungir.