Magdalenian Personal Ornaments on the Move: a Review of the Current Evidence in Central Europe

[EN] The Magdalenian is the period in the Upper Palaeolithic in which the greatest number of beads and pendants has been documented. Few sites with levels of this period have not provided examples of this type of artefact. The variety of raw materials used to make them (animal’s teeth, marine or fos...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Álvarez Fernández, Esteban
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2009
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Salamanca (USAL)
Repositorio:GREDOS. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Salamanca
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:gredos______::023c55331dde77158488787a7d840efa
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10366/171649
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Personal ornaments
Upper Palaeolithic
Magdalenian
Central Europe
5504.05 Prehistoria
5505.01 Arqueología
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] The Magdalenian is the period in the Upper Palaeolithic in which the greatest number of beads and pendants has been documented. Few sites with levels of this period have not provided examples of this type of artefact. The variety of raw materials used to make them (animal’s teeth, marine or fossil molluscs, antler, ivory, etc.) and the decoration on some of them, inform us of contacts between regions remote from each other. This paper reviews the different types of pendants that have been recorded from Magdalenian sites, with the aim of roughly establishing the network of contacts that existed among the groups of hunter-gatherers in Central Europe. It studies the context in which these artefacts were found, in well recorded stratigraphies at sites researched in recent decades. The study of certain types (marine shells from Atlantic and Mediterranean sources, certain kinds of perforated objects made in jet, such as discs and “Gönnersdorf type” schematic female figures, reindeer teeth sawn off at the alveoli, or discs made from scapulae) enable us to infer the existence of complex networks of long-distance contacts between human groups in the Late Glacial.