Oldest Beads
But then, in 2004, came Christopher Henshilwood's
find:
|
Blombos, South Africa -
75000ya
Blombos photo:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0415_040415_oldestjewelry.html
Nassarius kraussianus http://www.gastropods.com/Taxon_pages/TN_Family_NASSARIIDAE.html
From the
archaeologists' report:
http://scienceweek.com/2004/sc040625-6.htm |
(Comments in italics by me) |
| 'The
MSA tick shells cannot derive from the cave walls, are too
small to be leftovers from human
food ... |
- why not? Many people
eat winkles
- these are
possibly known locally as 'tick shells' because they stick
around on something - just like large animal
ticks
|
| and were
not brought to the site accidentally by animals, because their
only known predator is a gastropod (Natica tecta) that lives,
like N. kraussianus, only in estuarine environments. If the
tick shells had been accidentally brought to the cave site
from 20-km-distant estuaries in wracks of dead Zostera
capensis, a (sea) grass used for bedding by Later Stone
Age LSA) hunter-gatherers, all age classes would have been
present, whereas Blombos Cave MSA beads include shells of
adults only. |
- one of the
very strange things about shells is that you can find very
very small juveniles and adults, but very seldom the stage in
between. So this reported absence of age classes doesn't mean
anything very much. It's mindlessly following a similar
convention on animal bones.
|
Of the MSA
tick shells, 88% are dorsally perforated near the lip. This
type of perforation is absent in living populations and
accounts for only 8.6% of naturally pierced shells in modern
thanatocoenoses.
|
- But 12% of
the shells weren't dorsally perforated - what happened to
those? Were they naturally perforated or not at
all?
-
the "8.6% of naturally
pierced shells in modern thanatocoenoses" means only that they
picked up 116 natural modern dead shells and found 10 of them
had holes - very clean ones caused by the drill of predator
shellfish. But the photo of a dead shell collection shows a
very different picture.
-
Thanatocoenoses
presumably means dead animal collections - so why didn't they
just say so? Such jargon and over-use of obscure technical
terms gives archaeology a bad name
(malaproponomy). |
| Microscopic
analysis of the MSA shells reveals a use-wear pattern, absent
on natural shells, consisting of facets that flatten the outer
lip or create a concave surface on the lip close to the
anterior canal. A similar concave facet is seen opposite to
the first one, on the parietal wall of the aperture of many of
the shells. This use-wear pattern is consistent with
friction from rubbing against thread, clothes, or other beads
and is the principal factor that defines the MSA shells as
beads. |
-
Nassarius shells (see photo) have a natural,
home-grown groove at the top and bottom of the aperture - it
is diagnostic of the genus.
Pick up a nassarius shell
sometime, punch a hole in its back, then put a thread through,
straight through the open mouth. See if you
can possibly get this thread to rub against either
the anterior or parietal wall of the
aperture. |
| Microscopic
residues of ochre detected inside the shells suggest that
either the material in contact with the beads or the beads
themselves were colored red.” |
Or
maybe, over a couple of thousand years, they were coloured by
ochre already present in the
cave. |
Strip photo: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html |
Blombos -
the full series
http://www.handthoughts.com/archaeologydigs.htm |
Looking at the complete collection of 48 'beads',
you'll notice that most of them have very large holes,
and that one of them even has a broken lip. In the first
sample in the strip photo (above) the dorsum has been almost
completely removed. |
traumwerk.stanford.edu/.
../index.php?cat=7
Photo darkened and
arrows added |
The natural grooves are at
either end of the aperture.
There is some suspiciously sharp-edged wear
around the sides of the aperture, almost as if someone
has scraped the shell with a knife (or cleaned it too
enthusiastically ?).
In fact, the whole shell
looks as if it has been scraped clean, as you can see from the
next photo. |
|
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Art/BlombosBeads.jpg
http://www.afrol.com/images/release_photos/Blombos_shell_beads.jpg
|
'Wear'
marks - strangely, no 'wear' marks are shown for the
dorsal piercings or for the dorsal suface itself, where
shell beads would be expected to rub together.
I
make beads for a living - shell beads are very hard - even
drilled ones can wear through a string in no time, and their
lips are harder still - so I
wouldn't expect to see 'string wear'.
I have
never, ever seen wear on a shell in a modern necklace, but
then the kind I make are designed with a
inbuilt obsolescence, not for
posterity. |
|
http://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/blombos/Artefact_Review_
2/images/BigRecent-Nassarius-necklac.jpg
|
This photo is titled "Big
recent Nassarius Necklace"
- It's a convincing picture
showing a recent parallel
- but was it collected for
the Museum as a necklace ?
- or strung together
afterwards ?
Do these 'beads' show similar wear patterns to the
older ones found at Blombos ?
And it's a fairly crude
design, isn't it? Just stringing together a bunch of
very badly-pierced shells and letting them hang as they
will.
These shells also look as if they are
"de-naturing" rapidly - they have lost their polish and
colour. Many shells do this through mildly acid rainfall -
hence few shell remains from very old archaeological
sites. If it was found on the surface, it could as well be an
old snack as the Blombos 'beads' |
|
http://www.svf.uib.no/sfu/blombos/Picture_Gallery/images/Bigfreshnassarius.jpg
|
A
'wash-together' (thanatocoenosis ?) of dead Nassarius
shells.
I can count at least a dozen shells
'pierced' identically to the Blombos 'beads' in this
photo, and a larger number of shells much better
drilled by predator snails.
If the Blombos shells
were beads, did 'do-it-yourself' have a premium over 'found'
art even 70,000 years ago ?
If aesthetics didn't come into the equation, what symbolism
could a random collection of common shells have? |
I don't think the Blombos shells were intended as beads at all -
they were just eaten as a snack. Maybe they were strung together
later, but there is no hard evidence of
this.
Oddly enough, a well-known archaeologist agrees with me -
it may be one of the very few times when our views have
concurred:
| "Richard Klein, an anthropologist at
Stanford University who has worked extensively at dig sites in
South Africa, is a major proponent of the idea that modern
behavior appeared rapidly, around 45,000 years ago, possibly
as the result of a genetic change that facilitated our use of
language. He is not convinced that the shells found at Blombos
are actually beads.
"The holes are irregular and look fresh,"
Klein said. "We need to know why [the investigators at the
Blombos site] think they were made by human hand and how they
think they were made—were the holes punched out, did they file
them, were they drilled out? Shell beads are very common in
late Stone Age coastal sites, and you can see they're clearly
modified as beads.
"There are ten sites in South Africa that have
been excavated, and at only one do we find this kind of
evidence for precocious behavior. I don't think the case has
been clearly made yet that these are beads. | |
If these shells have been
collected purposefully for, and then pierced for beads, the maker didn’t
do a great job – but the later ostrich eggshell beadsmith certainly
did:
|
Ostrich shell beads from
Enkapune Ya Muto
A rock
shelter in the Rift Valley of Kenya. They have been dated to 37,000 to 39,900 years ago. Thirteen
complete beads, twelve preforms and 593 shell fragments were found.
It is clear from the illustrations that each bead was made
individually, not by the heishi technique – (stringing the beads,
then rounding them by rolling them against a grindstone
–RP).
From: Big
Bird, Dinosaurs and Beads By
the late Peter Francis, Jr
Today,
African Khoi-San hunter-gatherers produce the ostrich beads by
breaking the egg shells, drilling holes into the pieces and
polishing them. Ethnographic studies show the modern beads are often
traded.
Roughs and
finished beads
http://www.handthoughts.com/archaeologydigs.htm
 
Recent
ostrich-shell beads, showing the heishi technique - drill, string,
and then grind the beads to size on the
string.
http://www.nfobase.com/html/big_bird__dinosaurs_and_beads.html
|
But then,
also in 2004, The Arizona State group (Mary Stiner's home base) found even
earlier ostrich shell beads, although
these haven't yet (2005) been dated accurately
|
Earlier "Oldest Beads"
In contrast, very much older ‘beads’ from
Europe, the ‘source of civilization’ have proved to be natural
artifacts:
photo: http://www.handthoughts.com/worldsoldestbeads.htm
"Perforated wolf incisor and
triangular, flaked bone point perforated
at the base. From
Repolusthöhle find. (Up
to 300,000ya)
Original image
from http://www.semioticon.com/frontline/pdf/bednarik.pdf.
Photo
lightened and arrows added.
"Update June 2003:
Since (the late Peter Francis,
Jr) Pete's death
in December 2002, and as he anticipated, the verdict has come in.
The objects in the Repolusthöhle find were not perforated by people.
See Backwell and d’Errico, "The origin of bone tool technology and
the identification of early hominid cultural traditions," a paper
presented at the International Roundtable, "From Tools to Symbols:
From early Hominids to Modern Humans, March 26-28,
2003".
http://www.handthoughts.com/worldsoldestbeads.htm |
But univalve (Snail-shaped) shells are easier to eat
if you crack them like a boiled egg, rather than try to winkle them
out:
Large univalve shells (Strombus and Cowry)
cracked on dorsum and eaten by Siargao islanders (March
2005)
– (own photo)
This will be an illustration for a
future web page on ‘Invisible Seashore Archaeology – Or What To Look For’
at this website http://www.coconutstudio.com/
Strangely, the
Blombos shells are a very close species indeed to the shells found in
Turkey, some 30,000 years and about 5000 miles apart,
compact,
tough little shells with a very swollen and tough lip, quite unlike
other members of their genus
- see http://www.gastropods.com/Taxon_pages/TN_Family_NASSARIIDAE.html for comparisons.
If both are beads, this is the most interesting
fact of all.
 Other Nassaria species are still
used for modern jewellery, including the 'white nassa' in these
anklets. These are more simply made by knocking the top spire off, and
threading through the shell.
The mouth part only of another small
species is used (after grinding off the dorsum, for sewing to a cloth
background.
Nassarius spp shells, are normally
found in inter-rock sand patches, or shallow water estuaries or creeks.
Empty shells are often washed together as 'natural gravel' in pockets
between rocks, etc.
The particular Nassaria species used at
Blombos and Üçagizli are not nice little curly snails,
but flattened ventro-dorsally, with a very strong lip. Most of them have a
horny operculum, well inside the shell aperture when the shell is out of
water. It would be very difficult to winkle them out with a pin. The best
way would be to pierce the thinner dorsum near the lip, break the
operculum seal, then poke, suck, or blow the meat out.
In contrast, the various (and often much more
attractive) Natica shells (winkles) found on wave-beaten rocky shores
directly facing the sea (as, perhaps, at Blombos cave itself - the 'bead'
shells are said to come from an estuary some 15km away), are extremely
tough, and almost impossible to pierce or drill – I know – I’ve tried
it.
They are also very edible - see www.coconutstudio.com\cuisinebyseashore2.htm
The money cowry, found all along the East African
coast, is a completely different genus of shell, but also has very strong
lips - the thinner dorsum is usually broken or ground off for stringing or
sewing to cloth - but the mouth extends the full length of the shell, so
the stringing is usually lengthwise. It is not available from the colder
waters of the Mediterranean or South Africa - perhaps the makers of the
Blombos and Üçagizli beads were trying to emulate it.
|
Conclusion
Both the Blombos and
Üçagizli shells have been punctured, not drilled like the later
ostrich shell beads. And not very carefully. This suggests they were
eaten first, and, if at all, strung afterwards.
All the
shells found at Blombos could have come from a single picnic
snack
– see http://www.coconutstudio.com/Shoreline%20Foraging.htm
The
Blombos beads are said to show microscopic wear patterns suggesting
wear by a string (but these may be natural grooves or scrapings) –
the Üçagizli ones don’t appear to. The Blombos shells also show
traces of ochre, suggesting they (just) may have had some more
purposeful use than just as souvenirs of a nice lunch.
This
seems very little for a whole theory of the 'Birth of Symbolism' to
be built on.
This shell evidence would suggest that the
adornment function for beads came first (ie a female forager ate
them and only then thought they looked pretty) and then (quite some
time later – about 35000 years) beads started getting made
purposefully.
Later still, shells were used as a means of
exchange, leading on to cowry shell money, and the whole miserable
economic mess we’ve got ourselves
into.
See: Shelling Out -- The Origins of Money
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.htm |
| Beads - Symbolic or Not
?
This shows a completely phony
(invented by me) traditional island cowry pendant.
The idea was
that a girl would either show the closed side (No!) twiddle it
(Maybe?)
or show the open side (Yes! Yes!) as a shorthand
signal in courting.
Its total failure as a sales
gimmick suggests to me, at least, that young females have their own
mating signals with which they feel perfectly secure. My experience
in trying to sell beads convinces me they use them as status signals
to their peers (they often buy beads for unwilling male
partners).
Perhaps there were earlier cynics
who also turned shell adornments into symbols.
And maybe we
look for earlier signs of symbolism because we need
to.
When innocent decorative beads
became chains of office, money, and so on, we were well on our way
to perdition. |
Richard Parker - June 2005
Last updated: Friday, 01 July 2005
If you have any comments or corrections for
this site, please Email me at:
coconutstudio2000@yahoo.com
Internet Plagiarism Policy: I unapologetically utilize other
people's website information, on the basis that it is freely available at
no cost to anyone, nor of pecuniary value to the author. However, I do try
to give full credit and link my information to the original website so you
can follow up, and probably get the same information, and more, from the
real experts. It is simply too difficult to try and trace the original
writers of websites for permission to use their material. If I'm asked to
stop doing this, I will. I haven't enough money to be worth
suing.
 Back to Coconut Studio Home Page
|
