Exceptionalism and Raw Material Choice in Western European Early Upper Palaeolithic Symbolism

Summary

Since the Lower Palaeolithic, rare, exotic and unusual mineral and fossilized materials (e.g. amber, jet, belemnite, ammonite, soapstone) have constituted objects of interest for humans and our recent ancestors across Eurasia and Africa. There are examples of novel materials being collected, curated and/or minimally modified since nearly the beginning of prehistory. Beginning in the Upper Paleolithic, a number of these raw materials became, for the first time, a habitual part of human technological practice, coinciding with, and utilized systematically within, the fluorescence of symbolic behavior witnessed at this time across Eurasia. Due to the relatively small quantity, diverse morphological typology and materially variable composition of this corpus, in the past, study of these materials as materials has fallen secondary to studies of more ubiquitous material classes such as flint lithics and osseous artifacts or unified artifact classes such as projectile points, beads or female figurines. This being the case, a systematic study of the utilization of these rare mineral raw materials in the historically significant region of SW France, may add a valuable valence to the material aspects of the nature of the earliest, systematic, widespread symbolic behavior by humans and the way we study this period today.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage