Raw Material Choice and Acquisition
The full range of ornamental raw materials preserved in the record includes various mineral and animal substances including limestone, schist, talc-schist, steatite, 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 constitute perhaps a third of the objects of suspension found in French Aurignacian sites (Taborin 1993). With the possible exception of north coastal Italy, 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, as we shall see below.
Occasional pierced objects in limestone are found throughout Europe. On the other hand, rarer soft stones, such as steatite, lignite and hematite were turned into Aurignacian-age items of suspension most often in southern France, but also occasionally in Spain (Bernaldo de Quiros 1982), Italy (Mussi 1988-89), and Germany (Hahn 1972, 1986, 1988).
Personal ornaments are frequently manufactured of materials exotic to the regions in which they are found. This is especially true of shells (Taborin 1987, 1993) and rare minerals, but may also be true of ivory (White 1989a), at least in the SW French Aurignacian, although this remains to be firmly demonstrated. In general, there appears to be a source-distance gradient, for example, with rare minerals in France falling off with distance north from the Pyrenees, and Atlantic and Mediterranean shell species becoming more attenuated as one proceeds into the French interior.
By far the majority of personal ornaments in European Aurignacian-age sites were fabricated of ivory. Indeed, even some of the famous Vogelherd statuettes were pierced for suspension (Hahn 1986, this volume). In the Western European Aurignacian, facsimiles of red deer canines and marine shells were executed in ivory (examples are also known in steatite and limestone). In addition, there is a variety of more-or-less idiosyncratic "pendants" manufactured of ivory and, less often, of bone or antler. 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.
