Personal Ornaments and the Middle Paleolithic Revolution

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is a watershed. By the later Upper Paleolithic, all continents were occupied, all the world’s ecosystems were exploited, and all aspects of ethnographically observed hunter-gatherer culture the archaeological record can preserve are indeed found. Prior to about 100,000 years ago, such is not the case. There is therefore little reason to question the notion that, in a geological or evolutionary time scale, that transition is a "revolution" in the sense of Gilman’s (1984) "Upper Paleolithic Revolution:" a protracted process of technological improvement and demographic growth, combined in a feedback loop with developments towards more sophisticated modes of communication and social organization. However, we now know that body painting, personal ornamentation, object decoration and formal burial emerged as early as ~120,000 years ago. As otherwise implied by the fact that, in Europe, the beginnings of cave art date to >65,000 years ago, which implies Neandertal authorship, that emergence is more amenable to social- or demography-based explanations than to cognitive- or human taxonomy-based ones. Given that the association of formal burial with residential localities is strongly suggestive of formalized territoriality, this Middle, not Upper Paleolithic Revolution may well represent the emergence of ethnicity and ethnic boundedness.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22830