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"Traditionally, lithic artefacts have served as the principal proxy for the definition of archaeological cultures in the Upper Paleolithic. However, the culture-historical framework in use, constructed unsystematically and shaped by regional research traditions, features a number of widely acknowledged drawbacks. Here we use personal ornaments to explore the nature of Early Upper Paleolithic cultural entities and establish to what extent they represent distinct or evolving cultural adaptations. We present an analysis of an updated georeferenced dataset composed of personal ornaments coming from two key successive Upper Paleolithic technocomplexes, the Aurignacian (42–34,000 years ago) and the Gravettian (34–24,000 years ago). Using a range of multivariate statistics, we demonstrate that, at both European and regional scales, people belonging to these technocomplexes wore similar personal ornaments, though fully-shaped personal ornaments appear more different between technocomplexes. We additionally show that the variability of the Aurignacian ornaments suggests more fragmented cultural clusters compared to the Gravettian, implying more extensive symbolic networks in the latter. Despite a long-standing consensus based on other archaeological proxies, which emphasises the dissimilarity between these cultural entities, our results demonstrate the complex nature of Upper Paleolithic cultures which are characterised by discontinuities in economic and technical systems and continuity in the culturalisation of the body."
Construction
"We applied Archaeological Social Network analysis to investigate the connections between sites attributed to the Aurignacian and the Gravettian based on shared personal ornament types. The two networks showing each technocomplexes separately (Figure 8) are colour-coded by regional group. However, these networks do not show connections between sites belonging to the other technocomplex. To address this topic, we also generated a network with both technocomplexes in a single graph (Figure 9), revealing connections between sites across both periods. However, this visualisation only indicates a site’s attribution to one of the two complexes, without showing its regional group. To provide a more comprehensive view, we created an additional version of this network that displays both the regional groupings and the connections between sites across technocomplexes (Supplementary Figure 5)."
"We also calculated the summary statistics for all the networks presented in the main text (Supplementary Table 2) using code adapted from Pereira et al. (2023). The results show that the network density is higher in the Gravettian network than in the Aurignacian network. All network interval statistics are provided in Supplementary Table 3. Additionally, the average similarity in personal ornament assemblages between sites is slightly higher in the Gravettian than in the Aurignacian (Supplementary Tables 3)."
"Our dataset is comprised of updated versions of four previously published databases assembling information on personal ornaments from the Aurignacian [42] and the Gravettian burial and occupation sites [43,51,102,103] (Fig 1; S1 Dataset Worksheets ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, and ‘E’). Following the publication of Baker et al. 2024, the research team was expanded to improve the reliability of cultural attributions, addressing potential ambiguities in site classification. This included a more extensive review of literature in original languages, stricter criteria for associating ornaments with a specific technocomplex, and an increased emphasis on radiocarbon dating when available. As a result, the updated Gravettian dataset includes: the addition of 3 burials and 30 occupation sites, the removal of 9 burials and 8 occupation sites, the addition of radiocarbon dates for 2 burials and 4 occupation sites, the removal of radiocarbon dates for 1 burial and 2 occupation sites, and the addition of 31 ornament types. For the Aurignacian, 4 occupation sites were added."
Pereira, D., Manen, C., Rigaud, S., 2023. The shaping of social and symbolic capital during the transition to farming in the Western Mediterranean: Archaeological network analyses of pottery decorations and personal ornaments. Plos one 18, e0294111.
Vanhaeren M, d’Errico F. Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments. J Archaeol Sci. 2006;33(8):1105–28.
Baker J, Rigaud S, Pereira D, Courtenay LA, d’Errico F. Evidence from personal ornaments suggest nine distinct cultural groups between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago in Europe. Nat Hum Behav. 2024;8(3):431–44. pmid:38287173
d’Errico F, Vanhaeren M. Upper Palaeolithic mortuary practices: reflection of ethnic affiliation, social complexity, and cultural turnover. In: Renfrew C, Boyd M, Morley I, editors. Rituals, social order and the archaeology of immortality in the ancient world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2015. p. 45–62.
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