Exotica in the Prehistoric Mediterranean

This book examines how exotic materials were exchanged and used across the Mediterranean from the Neolithic era to the Iron Age, focusing on the Bronze Age. A variety of materials and interpretative approaches are presented through several case studies. These emphasise how the value of exotic materials depended on the context in which they were consumed. The book firmly departs from assumptions of fixed categories such as prestige items or corresponding values, as evident in the Amarna letters. Instead, it shows how almost any object could be appreciated or ignored depending primarily on the cultural, social and economic dynamics of individual communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: May 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842176214

Book preview

Introduction

Exotica in archaeology are usually identified as any foreign as opposed to indigenous materials and products. They represent therefore the minority of materials from any site in which they are recognised, and are usually easily recognisable by trained archaeologists. Indeed, they can be so easily recognised as unusual artefacts that they are more likely to be reported than some indigenous materials for which many examples may have been unearthed. The presence of exotica can map movements of people and help recognise exchange networks by linking human societies with sometimes distant places.

Exotica can be found in very ancient archaeological contexts and often artistic or ritual objects are initially labelled as exotica. Since humans started moving around and out of Africa, exotica may have existed, although they are typically associated with the symbolic behaviours of anatomically modern humans. Homo erectus moved out of Africa up to two million years ago and reached both Europe and Africa (Antón et al. 2004; Gabunia et al. 2000; Falguères et al. 1999 and Arsuaga 2003, 60–63 on the hominids dating back 780,000 years from Atapuerca), but no exotica are known from this time. According to the Out of Africa theory (Tattersall 2009; Hoffecker 2009), which seems in agreement with genetic studies (Tishkoff and Gonder 2007; Brown 2008), a further wave of hominins (Homo sapiens) exited Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago (the earliest middens and other evidence of marine exploitation are found at Abdur on the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea and date to 125,000 years ago; Walter et al. 2000; Oppenheimer 2009). It is after this migration that exotica appear in the archaeological record.

Initially exotica were only body ornaments, such as Palaeolithic beads (i.e. shells), carrying social significance but at the same time remaining functional as accessories meant to be worn, to become part of the body, and communicate something meaningful. The earliest pigments and beads may have increased an individual’s visual impact (Kuhn and Stiner 2007, 51) to stand out, probably suggesting fitness in a biological context of sexual selection (i.e. the ornaments would have distinguished an individual and improved his or her chances of finding a mate, as occurs in nature; Mayr 1972; Miller 1999). Studies of the lithic tools have also demonstrated that rare materials were being sought for (e.g. at Howiesons Poort), but the emphasis has been on their attractiveness rather than some technological improvement that new materials and techniques could provide, and that would also provide some evolutionary advantage.

Only in contexts dating from the Neolithic onwards can exotica be recognised in contexts of social competition and particularly in social processes leading to hierarchies and separate social identities of entire groups. Exotica became an indicator of inequality, social stratification and hierarchy, but it must be stressed that the presence or evidence of exchange of exotica alone does not prove the existence of very complex societies. Exotica can therefore be defined as symbolic tools of distinction, which are inserted in social strategies to demonstrate some advantage of the individuals or groups capable of acquire or possess them. Exotica are meant to be displayed in some occasions, and challenge the notion of functionality since they are usually manufactured for some purpose, even if this may be as tools for some ritual or wealth display occasion. Practical and symbolic function cannot be easily distinguished in some contexts. Exotica were always valuable to the ancient people, but it is not easy to understand what value some artefacts had in antiquity. Rarity and foreign origin can also be difficult to prove in some contexts. To recognise and understand exotica it is necessary to identify the social strategies in which they are inserted because they are symbolic tools, artefacts that carry some special meaning regardless of their composition, origin or intended function at the time they were manufactured.

This is one of the possible keys to understand what unites all contributions in this volume: all materials and products presented here, and they are just a selection based on current research, are exotica because they carried symbolic meanings, they were valuable in antiquity (for their function, beauty, rarity, etc.) and used deliberately to attain or maintain social power.

The idea of exotica as symbolic and social tools may appear generic or limiting the real potential of studies on exotica. It is however a decisive element in understanding what made exotica valuable at the time of consumption. The long perspective of exotica throughout human history, from Palaeolithic pigmented artefacts and unusual tools to modern gadgets reveals that exotica are so deep-rooted in human behaviour that are probably present in all human cultures.

The third millennium has opened with an increasing demand from consumers for new products. New products are continuously flooding the markets, and they are both reinventions of products resulting from cross-cultural contacts (e.g. Chinese lanterns have become embedded in British popular culture, posing new threats; Kelly 2010) and new products offered by technological improvements (e.g. most new products proposed by Apple Inc. in 2010). These products are modern exotica, and they can tell much about contemporary societies, and so can ancient exotica, because humans have not changed that much in the last few millennia.

I wish to thank all contributors for their patience in seeing this volume through and the many reviewers who kindly accepted to comment on papers, often at short notice.

Andrea Vianello

Bibliography

Antón, S. C. and Swisher, I. C. C. 2004. Early dispersals of Homo from Africa, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(1), 271–296.

Arsuaga, J. L. D., Carbonell, E. and Bermúdez de Castro, J. M. A. (eds) 2003. The first Europeans: treasures from the hills of Atapuerca. Valladolid, Spain.

Brown K. 2008. DNA Modern, and Archaeology. In Pearsall, D. M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 1101–1110. New York, Academic Press.

Falguères, C., Bahain, J.-J., Yokoyama, Y., Arsuaga, J. L., Bermudez de Castro, J. M., Carbonell, E., Bischoff, J. L. and Dolo, J.-M. 1999. Earliest humans in Europe: the age of TD6 Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, Spain, Journal of Human Evolution, 37(3–4), 343–352.

Gabunia, L., Vekua, A. and Lordkipanidze, D. 2000. The environmental contexts of early human occupation of Georgia (Transcaucasia), Journal of Human Evolution, 38, 785–802.

Hoffecker, J. F. 2009. The spread of modern humans in Europe, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(38), 16040–16045.

Kelly, J. 2010. Chinese lanterns: Tranquillity masks a threat, BBC News Magazine. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11265560

Mayr, E. 1972. Sexual Selection and Natural Selection in Campbell, B. G. (ed.) Sexual selection and the descent of man: the Darwinian pivot, 87–104. London, Transaction.

Miller, G. F. 1999. Sexual selection for cultural displays. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, and C. Power (eds), The evolution of culture, 71–91. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Tattersall, I. 2009. Human origins: Out of Africa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(38), 16018–16021.

Tishkoff, S. A. and Gonder, M. K. 2007. Human Origins Within and Out of Africa. In Crawford, M. H. (ed.) Anthropological genetics: theory, methods and applications, 337–379. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

SECTION 1. THE NEOLITHIC

As a kid, I used to pick up unusual shells from the beach that I frequented in the summer months. Soon, I gathered a small collection representing all the shells that could be found there. I remember that some were very rare and could be found only combing vast stretches of beach, or I could not find them every year. The one thing that I still remember vividly is that the larger the shell, the more likely it was to be incomplete. I never considered a career in malacology; it was a little hobby to fill my time, and one that seemed popular enough among kids. Seashells can be beautiful in their ever different colours and patterns, if you take time to look at them. These thoughts came to my mind when reading the two papers of this volume focusing on seashells, and I decided to let them begin the volume, because their topic is firmly associated with my own origins. It seems that pigmented tools and rocks may have been the first recognisable exotica in the most ancient archaeological records, but salt, the topic of another paper in this section, is so essential to life that even animals appreciate it and travel far and wide to find sources of it, when their food does not contain enough salt. In short, there is no precise chronological order proposed by the order of the papers in this section. Nor there is an order based on value, as it is likely that each material and artefact was valued differently according to its availability.

The first paper by Michel Louis Séfériadès focuses on the Neolithic exchanges and significance of spondylus gaederopus. It is an impressive seashell, used by many cultures for decorative purposes and described by the author as a true jewel. It is also partly edible, which explains to some degree the efforts in procuring it at very early times: it was seafood. Some parts are toxic, and these can produce an altered state of consciousness, which Séfériadès connects to the practice of shamanism. Spondylus shells are interpreted similarly as cave art (especially European Palaeolithic cave art; Lewis-Williams 2002) and would emphasise the need of early humans to bring out from their minds the inner world of consciousness into the natural world, and make in such way a statement of humanity over the natural world.

Dragoş Gheorghiu expands his focus including several seashells and recognises that in prehistoric Europe there are artefacts inspired by shells. Could the same social and economic processes responsible for imitations of pottery shapes and decorations be applied to other categories of artefacts, such as shells? Gheorghiu concludes that this may be indeed the case, and he favours some ritual activity as agent responsible for the imitations, but he also points out to the economic significance of trades involving status symbols. The shamanic interpretation by Séfériadès suggesting a role of the shells in religious practices is accepted, but Gheorghiu emphasises that social and economic processes affected the consumption of shells.

Both Séfériadès and Gheorghiu are therefore unsatisfied with religion as primary agent for the production (or sourcing) and consumption of artefacts. Whilst Séfériadès uses a functional approach (e.g. spondylus is both edible and helps reaching a state of altered consciousness), Gheorghiu focuses on complex processes. Neither approach excludes the other.

Di Fraia introduces one of the most valuable materials in human history, salt, the natural resource that originated the word salary. Essential for life and abundant in nature, salt may be labelled both as exotica and spice, and yet it is the element that in modern times perhaps embodies the least such definitions. The author presents the case of transhumance, and how the availability of salt increased the preservation of milk-derivatives, affecting human nutrition and probably human genes. During the Bronze Age, the availability of salt meant that more areas farther from the sea or salt sources could be inhabited thanks to exchange links. Salt is also important because its production left clear traces in the archaeological record, unlike many other natural products such as herbs and natural oils which can be recognised with greater difficulty, usually by finding organic residues on pottery (Evershed 2008).

Vegetal spices, medicinal plants, herbs and oils for fragrances and cosmetics as well as honey were other natural products that were known and exchanged across the Mediterranean since Neolithic times, but not much is preserved, especially outside the ancient Near East, where the dry climate and early written documents prove their presence. Of all places, Egypt has yielded the best record (Manniche 1999; Leblanc 2003). The usual absence of such natural resources in the publications of the archaeological records outside the ancient Near East should not be accepted as a fact. The exceptional preservation of Oetzi the iceman provides some hints at a broader knowledge and consumption of herbs (Dickson et al. 2000), and not just for nutrition or production of tools, as it seems to be the case of the moss accompanying the iceman’s body. Many herbs and herbal products were used in magic and religious contexts (Manniche 1999) and herbs were often perceived as an intermediary agent between the supernatural world and the natural world. The action of preparing and applying such herbs was often seen as a practice reserved or connected to religious practitioners, such as shamans. It is possible that salt was also associated with religious practices in some contexts, such as metaphysical purification (Kopaka and Chaniotakis 2003).

Obsidian is one of the best known materials known to have been exchanged in antiquity. Robert Tykot provides an overview of detailed studies of its distribution patterns and contexts, concluding that it should be interpreted primarily as utilitarian in function. He has pioneered several analytical methods for sourcing obsidian, among which X-ray fluorescence is the latest. Obsidian is considered as an economic resource and the emerging exchange network in which it was inserted reveals the sophistication of ancient trade.

Dosedla and Krauliz focus on graphite, also emphasising the economic importance of the material for trades. No provenance information is available for graphite, but the authors have found a parallel in their own anthropological and archaeological research in Papua-New Guinea resulting in an approach that attempts to make sense of the movements of people rather than pinpointing the precise places of production and deposition of the materials. The authors in their anthropological analysis of Papua-New Guinea mention seashells as traded exotica, even if it is a large island. The relative low range of mobility of some communities has allowed some indigenous people to be unaware of the sea, and believe that seashells are fruits of particular trees. The authors also mention that salt and other natural spices were traded purely for practical needs, but some materials, such as red ochre, were the subject of special gift exchanges during which through a series of performances both the carriers and the products were purified. Despite the archaeological evidence for graphite in Europe does not allow to produce explanations with the same level of detail of the anthropological observations, the parallels are fascinating and demonstrate that both ritual and functional explanations are equally valid, and the difference may rest on peculiar practices embedded on local cultures rather than the nature of the materials and products.

The authors focusing on the Stone Age have therefore covered all key aspects of research in this field. Shamanic and ritual practices and economic and social processes have been identified as the main agents in the exchange of exotica. It seems evident that even in ancient cultures or sparsely populated territories, exotica consistently reveal impressive exchange networks, essential to procure needed materials and artefacts of functional value, and flexible enough to maintain an awareness of communities and places of interest across very long distances, even if with some distortions (e.g. seashells growing on trees), and exchange a variety of materials for a multitude of purposes. Scientific, social, economic and anthropological methodological approaches all contribute in explaining the archaeological evidence, and no single approach would be satisfactory on its own.

Functional, social and economic explanations seem to be valid as far back as the archaeological records go, but they never replace explanations based on ritual practices, which coexist. Ritual practices seem to have some practical functions, namely introducing exotic (intended as foreign) elements into a culture after some kind of cultural mediation (including the passage from supernatural status to natural according to local beliefs); maintaining social relationships especially based on status; and preserving collective memory of some practices associated with materials and artefacts (e.g. the mining and colour intensification processes applied by indigenes in Papua-New Guinea; or keeping awareness of the non-edible parts of spondylus shells).

Bibliography

Dickson, J. H., Oeggl, K., Holden, T. G., Handley, L. L., O’Connell, T. C., and Preston, T. 2000. The omnivorous Tyrolean Iceman: colon contents (meat, cereals, pollen, moss and whipworm) and stable isotope analyses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 355, 1843–1849.

Evershed, R. P. 2008. Organic Residue Analysis in Archaeology, The Archaeological Biomarker Revolution. Archaeometry 50/6, 895–924.

Kopaka, K and Chaniotakis, N. 2003. Just taste additive? Bronze Age salt from Zakros, Crete. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 22(1), 53–66.

Leblanc, C. 2003. Parfums, onguents et cosmétiques dans l’Egypte ancienne: actes des rencontres pluridisciplinaires tenues au Conseil National de la Culture, Le Caire 27–29 avril 2002. Cairo, Centre française de culture et de cooperation.

Lewis-Williams, J. D. 2002. The mind in the cave. London, Thames and Hudson.

Manniche, L. 1999. Sacred luxuries: fragrance, aromatherapy, and cosmetics in ancient Egypt. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

1. Protohistoric Spondylus gaederopus L. Shell: some considerations on the earliest European long-distance exchanges related to shamanism

Michel Louis Séfériadès

On appelle chamans les prêtres ou devins des peuplades de Sibérie

(Dupré de Saint-Maure, Anthologie russe, p. 10, 1823)

Introduction

I began writing this contribution remembering John Chapman’s article on the Eneolithic Spondylus hoard recently found at Omurtag (B. Gaydarska et al., 2004).

This important discovery brings new proof of what I had previously suggested (Séfériadès 1995b). In this paper I attempt to set out in evidence the Neolithic/ Chalcolithic nexus of cultural ideas in Central, East and South-East Europe at the dawn of European civilization by means of an extremely delicate (in many ways) index fossil: a Mediterranean shell, the spiny or thorny oyster Spondylus gaederopus L, despite, unfortunately, the lack of oral and written evidence. These shells, true ‘jewels’, have been found in caves, settlements, isolated graves, cemeteries and hoards, and were exchanged across Europe from the Aegean and Adriatic Sea to the British Channel (a complicated route of some 2500 km).

As Gordon Childe wrote as early as 1942, ‘The Danubians seem to have brought with them from the South a superstitious attachment to the shells of a Mediterranean mussel, Spondylus gaederopus, which they imported even into Central Germany and the Rhineland for ornaments and amulets.’ (Childe 1942)

Background

From Kitsos Cave, Attica, comes a small Spondylus pendant, a contour découpé representing a she-bear, apparently during labour (Lambert 1981). It is a well-known mythical animal through Eurasia since the Palaeolithic, and may have entered mythology because it hibernates every winter and reappears every spring. Kitsos Cave, like the Corycian, Theopetra, Franchthi, and Alepotrypa caves (and probably every other cave in Greece used in prehistory), was in my opinion a sanctuary, a sacred place.

Some spondylus shells have been found associated with the female skeleton of one of four individual graves found at Cys-la-Commune, in the Paris Basin (Joffroy 1972). Two pendants (perforated valves) and eight tubular beads (necklace) were found on the chest, while against the arm there was a cubitus of a crane (Megalornisgrus Lui), a migratory bird which also reappears every spring.

In the early Vinca grave of a woman at Mostonga (Voivodina), a spondylus pendant was found on the skeleton (Karmanski 1977). According to the excavator, six pictograms were incised on this perforated valve: two large fish, a hooked fish, a depiction of stars in the sky, a house standing on posts (in a marsh), and a small ship with human figures pulling oars. I think it possible that the stars represent the Ursa Minor constellation with the North Star (Polaris); the missing star is the dimmest. The prow of the boat perhaps represents a swan, which is another migratory bird (for symbolic representations of boats see e.g. Vianello 2008). I interpret these six signs as a ‘mythogram’ (for example the schematic visual representation of a myth) with a good degree of certainty. The possibility of pictograms expressing a language, i.e. pictograms being attributed meanings other than those they represent, and being used as letters in a written language, has been recently proposed for some signs associated to European cave art (Ravilious 2010) dating to 30,000 years ago. As a result, the Vinca spondylus shell may be evidence of a structured use of established signs instead of signs being meaningfully juxtaposed.

Figure 1.1. (Plate 1) Diffusion during protohistory of spondylus (Spondylus gaederopus Linné) from the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Aegean and Adriatic) to the Channel and the Baltic Sea.

Such artefacts and interpretations link to some well-known elements in ancient (Celtic and medieval) European (and perhaps Indo-European) mythologies, especially in the Welsh or Breton Arthurian literature (the Arthurian cycle of romance). Recurring elements can be recognised in the Arthurian legend, such as the bear-warrior (arz, art, artos,and arth, from the Indo-European rktos, meaning bear, respectively in Breton, Irish, Gallic and Welsh languages); Ursa Minor or the Polaris star is the central point of the cosmos; the bear’s (Arthur’s) death; the funerary bark; the legend of Lohengrin (the ‘Swanknight’); the myth of eternal return. As Philippe Walter says, ‘Les récits arthuriens apparaissent probablement comme une synthèse originale entre la tradition indo-européenne et une tradition pré-indo-européenne propre au finistère de la péninsule eurasiatique. Il serait peut-être judicieux de parler à leur propos d’une tradition eurasiatique.’ (Arthurian stories probably appear as a synthesis between the original Indo-European tradition and one predating the Indo-European tradition, specific to the edge of the Eurasian peninsula. Perhaps it would be wise to refer to them as a Eurasian tradition.) (Walter 2002, 25).

The high value of spondylus artefacts (largely pendants, bracelets and necklaces) during the Neolithic and Eneolithic periods can be evidenced in the graves of these periods, where they appear quite alone (especially in the Linearbandkeramik Culture), or associated with different precious objects such as gold jewels, copper weapons, polished semi-precious stone blades, prestigious chipped-flint knives more than 40 cm long, etc. This is clearly the case with Grave 43 at Varna (possibly a chieftain’s), where the opposite parts of the spondylus bracelet, broken in ancient times, were recovered, along with gold sheets. Inside Grave 110, where a baby of 4–6 months was buried, a bone idol, a spondylus ‘bracelet’ and several beads, gold rings, a small pottery cup, and (uniquely) a Spondylus cup finely worked in the lower valve (Egami et al. 1982) have been found. The cup seems to me comparable to precious contemporary small silver mugs, sometimes with small silver spoons, which are given at Christian baptisms in some European cultures by the godfather or godmother of the baptised child.

Spondylus artefacts were so precious in antiquity that clay pendants and beads imitating the shell have been found far from the sea. Several hoards with spondylus artefacts have been found. I present here a few of the most significant:

Figure 1.2. (Plate 2) Spondylus (Spondylus gaederopus L.) from the Mediterranean Sea.

Figure 1.3. Small Neolithic pendent made of spondylus (cut contour) from the Neolithic cave at Kitsos (Attica) (after Lambert 1981, D. Vialou).

Figure 1.4. (Plate 5) Neolithic bracelet made of spondylus from Alepotrypa Cave (Diros, Laconia) (after Papathanassopoulos 1996).

The famous Carbuna hoard found south of Chisinau is a mixture of copper and spondylus artefacts, numbering around 800 objects (Dergachev 1998, see before Sergeev, Passek and Chernysh). The artefacts were placed inside a Cucuteni-Tripolye ceramic vessel covered with another one. This vessel contained copper axes and anthropomorphic pendants, copper plate-pendants, spiral bracelets and beads, stone (marble or green-stone) hammer-axes, reindeer teeth pendants (in my opinion inherited from Mesolithic times), together with spondylus beads, perforated valves and fragments of bracelets. Nearby were found ritual vases and female clay figurines. Perhaps reindeer teeth, spondylus and metal had an equivalent importance or may have been strictly linked (for example the three natural elements earth-water-fire may have been represented respectively by deer-shell-copper). The lost myths of the Eneolithic period that may be recognised in the previously mentioned association probably had their roots in the previous Neolithic and Mesolithic periods.

The Csoka (Coka) hoard found in the Neolithic settlement on the hill of Kremenyak at Voivodina (Banner 1960, Raczky 1987) was placed inside a Tisza vase containing marble mushroom-shaped amulets, spondylus beads and ‘bracelets’, a fragment of boar tusk plate, a double bone ring, a fragment of human bone, and a piece of haematite. Metal was present here as well, and perhaps the above-mentioned association with the three natural elements may also be recognised.

The treasure of Ariusd/Erosd (Szancsuj 2005) includes mainly flat spondylus beads, polished stone objects (beads and amulets), perforated canines of boar and deer, a gold spiral, beads, and copper bracelets in the shape of spirals.

The Hirsova deposit may or may not be a hoard: raw material and the metal tools of an artisan who specialized in spondylus jewellery were found together (Comsa 1973). Fragments of broken spondylus bracelets were transformed into beads using copper tools. In this assemblage the shell reduction is proof of its great value, which was not found in the Black Sea.

The ‘magic set’ (trusa de magie) of Sultana Malu Rosu (Oltenitsa Museum) demonstrates an association among brown flint blades/dark-green bones and small stones. However, spondylus shells are absent.

The Late Eneolithic hoard of the second dwelling horizon of Tell Ormutag (Targovishte district) was also contained in a vessel. Inside there were ‘fragments of spondylus bracelets, small spondylus fragments, one unworked cardium shell, one broken perforated bone pendant, one polished stone bead, two bone chisels, three pig incisors, two fragments of flint blades, one pumice-stone, one miniature polished stone adze, two quartzite polishing pebbles.’ (Gaydarska et al., 2004) Here there was no metal, but it is possible to recognise once again the association of the three natural elements. The pumice stone may have symbolised fire, while reindeer tooth (Carbuna), boar tusk (Csoka) and pig incisor (Ormutag) are equivalent and may symbolise earth.

Figure 1.5. (Plate 4) Grave 43 (male) at the Eneolithic necropolis of Varna: on the left arm there were two gold bracelets, and a bracelet made of spondylus, with evidence of ancient breakage and repair (?), with two gold attachments (excavations: I. Ivanov) (after Ivanov, Egami et al. 1982, Eluère 1989, etc.).

I believe John Chapman (in Gaydarska et al., 2004, 11, 32) is right when he says that ‘the hoard may well constitute an assemblage of exotic and everyday things, of value in and of themselves’, when he speaks of ‘the personal links that things have to their makers and owners’. He writes that ‘each hoard brings together the material and the non-material, whether as social memory, myth or personal narrative’, that ‘the Ormutag hoard contains not only a rich set of material culture but also a complex network of enchained social relationships and object biographies’, and he concludes that ‘the hoard represents in microcosm all the structuring processes which formed and were formed by Chalcolithic societies in the East Balkans’. Such views appear more or less explicit in my previous papers (Séfériadès 1995a, b and c, 1995–6, 2000).

The Savage Mind

Like the heterogeneous assemblages in graves from the Balkans to the Rhine, a hoard is indubitably an important symbol, a symbol which is not the sum of the different symbols of the various raw materials and different objects of the deposit, rather it transcends them. It is a symbol, which reflects at a given moment of its history, a society, its peculiar cohesion, its proper economy, its original social organisation – in a word its ‘culture’ in relation with the surrounding world, in a single phase also, its ‘way of thinking’. Contemporary good ethnographic examples of what is properly an advanced stage of the Neolithic mind may be found in the Saracatsan nomadic sheep breeders of Northern Greece (Kavadias 1965). Saracatsans believe that after death they continue to live but in a way which is different from the earthly life or from Christian paradise. In the deceased’s mouth they put a silver coin, or a jewel, to pay for the dead person’s passage to the Netherworld. As death approaches, the living offer cigarettes, apples, oranges, sweets, combs, small mirrors, etc. These items are offered for the new life; and at least the gifts of fruit are presents for those who died before. The shepherd’s crook is placed near males, while the distaff is used for females. An amulet necklace worn by a child recalls the curious mix of the hoards: a Gospel miniature, a small cross attached to a blue ball, a mastic (gum) cross, a small bag containing salt and incense, a medal representing the Christian Virgin Mary, a coin, a bag containing the wing bone of a bat, an amber ball, a porcelain shell and a gabbro spindle-whorl. All these items symbolise Saracatsan magic beliefs, but we have to keep in mind that such complexity is rarely preserved in the archaeological record.

Bronislav Malinowski (1922) wrote about the Spondylus of the Kula: ‘...and one of them showing me long, thin red strings, and big, white, worn-out objects, clumsy to sight and greasy to touch. With reverence he also would name them, and tell their history, and by whom and when they were worn, and how they changed hands, and how their temporary possession was a great sign of the importance and glory of the village.... However ugly, useless, and – according to current standards – valueless an object may be, if it has figured in historical scenes and passed through the hands of historic persons, and is therefore an unfailing vehicle of important sentimental associations, it cannot but be precious to us...’. This was probably the case for the European Neolithic spondylus; many (as they were transmitted from generation to generation) are ‘worn-out and greasy to touch’ (for example Cys-la-Commune beads) (Joffroy 1972), broken and repaired (Varna or Mangalia bracelets) (Berciu 1966).

Understanding Mesolithic, Neolithic or Eneolithic symbols presupposes two apparently different but in fact complementary approaches. First, I should mention the artistic approach which is not adopted by everyone, and secondly the scientific one. In relation to the artistic approach, I have tried to show in a previous paper (Séfériadès 2005a) the meaning of ancient sculptures from an artistic perspective. For the second approach, it is necessary to reflect on the following question: what was the Neolithic or Neolithic mentality? The best answer to such question, in my opinion, is that provided more than forty years ago by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his famous book La mentalité primitive (1922) (see also E. E. Evans-Pritchard: Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of primitive mentality,1934), Lévy-Bruhl concluded that the primitive mentality was largely affected by mystical causality. As a result, it is very difficult to understand and follow in all its dynamics. As Evans-Pritchard wrote, ‘Perhaps Lévy-Bruhl’s most important contribution to sociology is to have shown that ignorance, like knowledge, is often socially determined and that primitive thought is unscientific because it is mystical and not unscientific/mystical because of an inherent incapacity to reason logically.... Lévy-Bruhl’s writings show clearly how primitive mystical thought is organized into a coherent system with a logic of its own.’ (Evans-Pritchard 1934: 36) In his last works, Lévy-Bruhl renounced the notion of the pre-logical mind, ‘denying to primitive mentality, as Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, the cognitive character he had initially conceded to it, and casting it altogether into the midst of affectivity.’ (Lévi-Strauss 1973)

Figure 1.6. (Plate 6) Incised Neolithic spondylus from the necropolis of Nitra, and perforated spondylus from Iza (Slovak Republic) (after Pavuk 1981).

What Lévi-Strauss has written about the ‘savage’ (more exactly Neolithic) mind needs to be recalled here, partly because it disagrees with Lévy-Bruhl’s position. ‘It is therefore better, instead of contrasting magic and science, to compare them as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge. Their theoretical and practical results differ in value, for it is true that science is more successful than magic from this point of view, although magic foreshadows science in that it is sometimes also successful. Both science and magic however require the same sort of mental operations and they differ not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied. These relations are a consequence of the objective conditions in which magic and scientific knowledge appeared. The history of the latter is short enough for us to know a good deal about it. But the fact that modern science dates back only a few centuries raises a problem which ethnologists have not sufficiently pondered. The Neolithic Paradox would be a suitable name for it. It is in Neolithic times that man’s mastery of the great arts of civilization – of pottery, weaving, agriculture and domestication of animals – became firmly established. No one today would any longer think of attributing these enormous advances to the fortuitous accumulation of a series of chance discoveries or believe them to have been revealed by the passive perception of certain natural phenomena.... Neolithic, or early historical, man was therefore the heir of a long scientific tradition. However, had he, as well as all his predecessors, been inspired by exactly the same spirit as that of our own time, it would be impossible to understand how he could have come to a halt and how several thousand years of stagnation have intervened between the Neolithic revolution and modern science like a level plain between ascents. There is only one solution to the paradox, namely, that there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. There is certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination; the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.... Myths and rites are far from being, as often be held, the product of man’s myth-making faculty, turning its back on reality. Their principal value is indeed to preserve until the present time the remains of methods of observation and reflexion which were (and no doubt still are) precisely adapted to discoveries of a certain type: those which nature authorised from the starting point of a speculative organization and exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms. This science of the concrete was necessarily restricted by its essence to results other than those destined to be achieved by the exact natural sciences but it was no less scientific and its results no less genuine. They were secured ten thousand years earlier and still remain at the basis of our own civilization.’ (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 26–30)

Figure 1.7. Cylindrical beads necklace, ‘pendants’ (perforated valves) in spondylus from the Neolithic necropolis of Vedrovice (Moravie) (after Podborsky 2002, photo J. Spacek).

Figure 1.8. Biconical beads, perforated valve (disc) and bracelets made of spondylus from the Neolithic necropolis of Vedrovice (Moravia) (after Podborsky 2002, photo J. Spacek).

Figure 1.9. Perforated valve of spondylus (pendant) from Cys-la-Commune (Musée des Antiquités Nationales, Saint-Germain-en-Laye (photo M. Séfériadès).

Reading this synthesis, which is the fruit of many years of research on the primitive mind, it is difficult to add more. I can add to confirm how arts can influence minds, regardless of time, that Brancusi’s Mademoiselle Pogany has Vinca eyes, and that The Gate of the Kiss (La Porte du Baiser) reminds me of the Gumelnita Lovers at Targu Jiu, perhaps because the great sculptor was not only in Oltenia when he was young, but during all his life in Montparnasse, Paris, he remained in his core a Carpathian shepherd. This means that understanding Neolithic mentality and its symbols requires the help of ethnography, and much care in drawing conclusions. The case of the Balkan area, where some traditions inherited from Mesolithic/Neolithic times still remain well established, is an excellent case-study.

Protohistorical Shamanism and Spondylus

Shamanism is ubiquitous on all continents throughout prehistory, at least since the Aurignacian (Clottes 2004, 2007; Clottes and Williams 2001), with regard to the northern hemisphere. Shamanism is also recognisable in later periods (Neolithic, Eneolithic, Bronze Age) and even in contemporary times it has not been entirely abandoned by some cultures.

From the earliest (Palaeolithic) times, specific attitudes of human beings in relation to their immediate environment (habitats, ecosystems), have been extended to the broader world through regulatory behaviour. The shaman provides a ‘link’ between natural and social realities. It leverages on a range of myths that, unfortunately, archaeologists may never reconstruct. In the absence of texts and an ethnographic approach, but in the light of Eurasian historical documents, protohistoric shamanism acts on a set of extremely complex dialectical relationships between human beings and nature.

Figure 1.10. Dancing shamans (?): Neolithic potsherd from Sesklo (Thessaly) (after Theocharis 1973).

Figure 1.11. Neolithic shaman (redochre on white background, Tisza region, Hungary (after Kalicz and Raczky 1987).

In the context of marine traders, the strong associations for shellfish is well known, such as the clams of the Kwakiutl (Bella Bella) Native Americans. Also well recognized are the strong powers that the spondylus held for Balkan Neolithic and Eneolithic, including probably their power to bewitch, ‘the ogre who descends every morning on the beach to dig clams as Bukwus, the spirit of the woods, feeds on cockles (cokles) and the Tsimshian employed the shells to hunt the otters on land, as well as other evil spirits.’ (Levi-Strauss 1976, 25–7) At the same time there is the problem of the toxicity of spondylus shells, which have some inedible parts, across communities and seasons.

Shamanism is inseparable from the allegory of spring and the change of seasons, which is replicated later in the Renaissance with Botticelli and then Vivaldi: Venus comes out of the water on a giant scallop shell...

Figure 1.12. Carbuna (Moldavia): possible parts (copper, spondyle, perforated deer canine) of the costume of a shaman (after Dergachev 1998).

The spondylus, those shellfish that were spread across a large part of Europe during the Neolithic period, and that were transported over considerable distances, were exotica (venus d’ailleurs) and surrounded by an aura of mystery – inextricably linked, I think, to some elementary forms of religious behaviour.

Unfortunately, suggesting shamanism as agency too often results in superficial, lax, or uninteresting definitions. I refer here at first to the works of M.-F. Guédon, on Native American shamanism (northwest coast of North America), although the origin of the term comes from Siberian studies (Tungus cultures). Guédon (1985, 7) says, ‘Je le définirai étroitement comme un système de croyances, dont celles relatives à l’exisence indépendante d’une âme humaine séparable du corps, de méthodes et techniques mentales rituelles ayant pour but le développement et le contrôle de facultés et pouvoirs surhumains incluant toujours le don de guérir les malades ; il fait habituellement partie d’un contexte culturel dépendant d’une économie de chasse, pêche et cueillette et insiste sur les pouvoirs obtenus par l’individu qui réussi à entrer en contact personnel avec le monde.’ (I define it narrowly as a system of beliefs, including those relating to the independent existence of a human soul separable from the body, methods and ritual mental techniques whose purpose is the development and control of faculties and superhuman powers including always the gift of healing; it is usually part of the cultural context of hunter-gatherer societies, and shamanism stresses the powers obtained by the individual who managed to make personal contact with the world.)

The shaman is in charge of sealing the ‘treasures’, ‘caches’ or ‘deposits’ (Baudez 1999). Most of these ‘treasures’, if not all of them, represent in my opinion the necessary paraphernalia of the shaman as a ‘technician of the sacred’ (Guédon 1995). They are central to the rituals ‘here or elsewhere’ made by the shaman.

It is also possible to consider that the Moldovan ‘deposit’ from Carbuna (Dergachev 1998) resembles, since certain objects can be considered talismans (e.g. perforated marble axe-hammer, spiral-shaped copper bracelet, etc.), ‘decorative’ elements of the shamanic costume as suggested by the multiple perforations cut on the copper, the fragments of spondylus or deer canines (Lot Falk 1953). However, it is also possible that some of these perforated objects belong (as for example among the Chukchi of Siberia) with strings of amulets (Lot-Falck 1953), or have been associated with ‘rattles’ (e.g. among the Tsimshian and the Tlingit of North America, Guédon 1985).

In addition, a valve of