Unfortunately, there are no Aurignacian burials prior to those of Cro-Magnon and Sungir at around 28,000 B.P.. Therefore, lacking direct association between early Aurignacian beads and human skeletons, we are obliged to design research strategies to demonstrate first, that these were indeed objects of suspension and second, how precisely, they were suspended. Detailed microscopic analysis of the basket-shaped beads from Abri Blanchard yielded to McLean (1991) significant evidence that they were sewn on rather than strung as is often presumed. The situation is much simplified when large numbers of ornaments are found in burial context, such as at the remarkable site of Sungir.
The site of Sungir (Bader 1978; USSR Academy of Sciences 1984), discovered during clay extraction operations in 1956, was excavated by Otto Bader from 1956 to 1977. Excavations were re-opened by Bader's assistant Ludmilla Mikhailova and Bader's son Nicolai in 1986, and continue today. Sungir is an enormous early Upper Paleolithic living site located on the outskirts of the city of Vladimir, about 150 km east of Moscow in the Russian Republic.
Technologically and typologically, Sungir might well be considered a Northeastern extension of the Aurignacian (carinate scrapers, few burins, thick, triangular débitage, a Mladec point, a variety of worked antler tools, no backed pieces), although the presence of a small number of Strelezkaya points and leaf-shaped foliates gives it a certain originality. For a detailed discussion of Sungir's chronological status, see White (1993). Very briefly, C14 dating of Sungir has proven ambiguous, with several erratic dates. Bader accepted two Groningen dates of about 25,000 B.P. as the most credible, but explicitly suspected that the site might be older (Bader 1970:24). Bosinski (1990) has recently echoed those suspicions, and new dates from the Geological Laboratory in Moscow (Praslov, personal communication) are in the 28,000 B.P. range.
The description that follows was made possible by the generous sharing of unpublished contextual and frequency data and free access to the Sungir artifacts granted by N. Bader, L. Mikhailova, and the curators of the Vladimir-Suzdal State Museum. In three weeks I was able to study approximately 2500 beads and pendants from Sungir, and was able to perform the first microscopic analysis of these materials. Beads and pendants from the burials were systematically sampled according to anatomical placement.
While inhabiting Sungir, at least five of the site's occupants perished. According to Russian physical anthropologists (USSR Academy of Sciences 1984), these consisted of a 60 year-old man, a 7 to 9 year-old girl, a 13 year-old boy, an unsexed (male?), headless adult and an adult female skull. From my reading of the evidence, the often represented adult burial is clearly an older male. However, I am not convinced that it is possible to sex the adolescents.
The two adolescents and the adult male were buried in two shallow graves three meters apart, dug into the permafrost beneath the living surface of the site. All three of the corpses were laid on their backs with their hands folded across their pelves. The fourth individual was represented by an isolated poorly preserved female skull placed beside a stone slab in an area stained with red ocher, and was found overlying the relatively well known man's burial. The fifth skeleton, that of a headless adult, was so poorly preserved as to be practically unrecoverable. It was found immediately on top of the two adolescents, who were buried together in a head-to-head fashion in the middle of an apparently abandoned circular dwelling structure.
Each of the three intact individuals was lavishly decorated with thousands of painstakingly prepared ivory beads arranged in dozens of strands, perhaps basted to their clothing. Although it is almost certain that the three individuals buried intact at Sungir were members of the same social group, there are remarkable differences among them in details of body decoration and grave offerings. The man was adorned with 2,936 beads and fragments arranged in strands found on all parts of his body including his head, which was apparently covered with a beaded cap that also bore several fox teeth. His forearms and biceps were each decorated with a series of polished mammoth-ivory bracelets (25 in all), some showing traces of black paint. They were thin, flat strips of mammoth-ivory, cut longitudinally along the tusk. They were pierced at each end, some with one hole, others with two, apparently to keep the ivory bent into a circle. What appear to be brush strokes from the application of pigment are visible on at least one specimen. Around the man's neck, he wore a small, flat schist pendant, painted red, but with a small black dot on one side.
Fig. 13: The two faces of the drilled animal pendant in ivory from the cultural layer at Sungir. The darker areas are heavily stained with red ochre.
The issue of the use of color in the construction of personal identity at Sungir is an interesting one. Two ivory objects from the cultural layer add further detail. One, a pendant in the form of an animal (Figure 13), perhaps a horse, has an identical series of depressions carefully drilled on each of its faces. The surface is deeply stained with red ocher. In 1990 I was able to perform a careful microscopic examination, something that had never been done previously with the Sungir material. It revealed that each of the depressions had black pigment (Figure 14), probably, manganese, drilled into it. The glossy black inner surfaces of the holes showed the circular striations indicative of rotational drilling. This had been a red horse with black dots. Another fragmentary animal pendant from the cultural layer has a black smudge on each side.
Fig. 14: Drilled depressions lined with black pigment from the drilled animal pendant from Sungir.
Another object from the cultural layer, an ivory disk with drilled punctuations on each side radiating from a central perforation (Figure 15), had apparently been treated in the same way. Although in this case the surface had been badly eroded, black pigment was still visible in the bottoms of the depressions.
Fig. 15: The two faces of the ivory disk from the cultural layer of Sungir.
Fig. 16: The two faces of the animal pendant from the supposed boy's chest at Sungir.
Fig. 17: The carved ivory disks from the childrens' burial at Sungir (at different scales).
The supposed small boy was covered with strands of beads--4,903 of them--that were roughly 2/3 the size of the man's beads although of exactly the same form. He also had a beaded cap with some fox teeth. Unlike the man however, he had around his waist--apparently the remains of a decorated belt--more than 250 canine teeth of the polar fox. On his chest was a carved ivory pendant (Figure 16) in the form of an animal. At his throat was an ivory pin, apparently the closure of a cloak of some sort. Under his left shoulder was a large ivory sculpture of a mammoth. At his left side lay a medial segment of a highly polished, very robust human femur, the medullary cavity of which was packed full of red ocher. At his right side, and continuing partially alongside the girl was a massive ivory lance, made from a straightened woolly mammoth tusk. It is 2 meters, 40 cm in length, and weighs more than 20 kg. (Given the weight of these objects, I doubt very much if they were functional lances). Near it is a carved ivory disk (Figure 17d) with a central perforation, which sits upright in the soil. As we shall see in the case of the supposed girl's burial, this had apparently been mounted over the tip of a no longer preserved (wooden?) "lance," up to a point a few centimeters from the tip.
Fig. 18: Schematic representation of the dominant bead production sequence at Sungir.
The supposed girl had 5,274 beads and fragments (also roughly 2/3 the size of the man's beads) covering her body. She also wore a beaded cap and an ivory pin at her throat, but her burial contains no fox teeth whatsoever. Nor does she have a pendant on her chest. However, placed at each of her sides there were a number of small ivory "lances," more appropriate to her body size than that accompanying the boy. Also at her side are two pierced antler batons, one of them decorated with rows of drilled dots. Finally, she was accompanied by a series of three ivory disks with a central hole and carved latticework, like that adjacent to the supposed boy's burial. One of these (Figure 17a) the size of a quarter, was found on the left side of her head. The other two (Figure 17b,c), much larger, were at her sides accompanying the pointed ivory shafts. One of the pointed ends of the ivory shafts was actually inserted some six inches into the central perforation of one of the disks, a bit like the basket on a ski pole. A linear arrangement of microflakes extending from the disk distally to the point of the lance suggested to Bader (1978) that this had been a lance armed with flint barbs.
Overall, seven types of beads and pendants occur at Sungir:
All seven are present both in the cultural layer and the burial complex, confirming the contemporaneity of the burials with the living surface. However, beads and pendants vary greatly in their distribution and relative frequency from one individual to the next. For example only the supposed boy has flat tabular beads and animal sculptures. Only the man has a schist pendant. Only the supposed girl lacks animal teeth.
Fig. 19: The interlocking pattern of the Sungir beads.
The technology of the dominant form of bead production at Sungir was systematic, redundant and clearly a variation on the Aurignacian approach to ivory bead manufacture discussed earlier. The process (Figure 18) began with an ivory baton ellyptical in section. It was then circumincised and snapped into blanks. The blanks were then scored across the width of each face, creating a grooved blank. Bilateral drilling through this groove was then employed to perforate the piece. At first, I presumed that this groove had been employed to reduce the thickness of the blank to facilitate drilling. I was confronted by the true motivation only during the process of photographing intact strands of beads, all of which had been curated in the precise sequence in which they had been discovered. At first, I carefully positioned these according to my own esthetic, which was to arrange them all in the same direction. After having photographed a few hundred in this carefully posed fashion I became frustrated with the unwieldiness of a particularly long strand. I simply shook the strand and much to my shock they fell in a perfect sequence, each bead at 90 degrees to the next (Figure 19), a pattern created by the tranverse groove. In other words, the desired esthetic effect, or style as it might be described by some, was deeply embedded in even the earliest stages of production.
It must be noted however, that in the few published photographs that exist of the Sungir burials, the beads all seem to be oriented in the same direction (i.e., not interlocking). It is unclear whether these were arranged for the field photographs (as I had done), or whether they were actually found this way. It is possible that in the absence of the gravity orientation of a standing, living person, the interlocking pattern was diffused. It is also possible that the waisting was employed as a means of looping the filament around each side of each bead in a strand in order to hold them all in the same vertical orientation.