Needle case, sound instrument or something else? A worked and ornamented swan (Cygnus sp.) ulna from a Late Mesolithic male burial, Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, Northwest Russia

Mannermaa, Kristiina; Rainio, Riitta

doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2020.02.032

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One is the find of a worked and ornamented object made from swan ulna from the Late Mesolithic site of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Russia, discovered within a burial. Interpretations offered for its function are needle case and sound instrument, and experimental reconstruction demonstrated that the sound producing properties of this item are quite possible (Mannermaa & Rainio, 2020). Another burial, from the Neolithic period, from the site of Ajvide in Sweden, yielded 44 bird bone tubes, from ulnae or radii of a swan.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bird bone artifact from the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age site of Zók (Hungary)

Vitezović

Bulatović

Mitrovic

2023

Intl J of Osteoarchaeology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bird bones were rarely used for production of artifacts, due to various reasons—they were much smaller and thinner than bones of mammals usually selected for tool production; they also have specific shapes and fine structure, inadequate for the majority of common artifact types. They were occasionally used for some specific objects, such as flutes, pipes, needle cases, and amulets. When it comes to the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age periods in south‐eastern Europe, bird bone artifacts are rare; only few have been discovered thus far. In this paper, we will present one additional finding of a bird bone artifact, from the site of Zók–Gradina, situated in present‐day Hungary. Excavations carried out in 1920 by the National Museum in Belgrade revealed a multi‐period site, with major parts of the stratigraphic sequence belonging to the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age Vučedol culture (2900–2500/2400 BC). Vučedol layers yielded relatively large quantities of worked bone, including one artifact produced from a bird bone, that will be presented here. The object in question was produced from the right radius of a Cygnus sp.; it is in the shape of an elongated tube; carefully cut at both ends. The function of this item is uncertain—it may have served as some sound‐producing instrument (flute), or it was some sort of a handle or needle case. It is interesting to note that bird representations, in particular, ornithomorphic vessels, are among the specific traits of the Vučedol culture; therefore, the choice of a bird bone for the production of this artifact may have had a certain symbolic significance as well.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bird bone artifact from the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age site of Zók (Hungary)

Vitezović

Bulatović

Mitrovic

2023

Intl J of Osteoarchaeology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Tooth pendants and other invested beaver objects. Beaver tooth pendants are relatively rare and currently confined to the eastern Boreal zone, where some examples have been reported from the Middle Mesolithic site of Ozerki 17 (Zhilin, 1996: 218), Late Mesolithic Okajomovo 5 and Nushpoli 11 at the Dubna River (Zhilin, 2007), Late Mesolithic Kubenino at the Onega River (Kashina et al, 2021), and >1200 beaver teeth in total were found in human burial contexts within the extensive Late Mesolithic/ Early Neolithic hunter-gatherer cemetery of Oleniy Ostrov in what is today Karelia (Grünberg, 2013;Mannermaa and Rainio, 2020), making up about 20% of all animal tooth pendants originally published by Gurina (1956) for the site. Some of these were cut into plates, show macroscopic use-wear traces and bear notches and/or grooves, suggesting that they were worn extensively (Grünberg, 2013: 235;Mannermaa et al, 2019), perhaps by more than a single person.…”

Section: Macro-patterns In Beaver-related Materials Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Human-beaver cohabitation in the Early and Mid-Holocene of Northern Europe: Re-visiting Mesolithic material culture and ecology through a multispecies lens

Hussain,

Brusgaard

2023

The Holocene

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Eurasian beaver ( Castor fiber) was an important member of Early and Mid-Holocene landscapes and animal communities in Northern Europe. Previous zooarchaeological research has established the alimentary roles of beavers for Mesolithic societies and their importance for fur procurement. In this paper, we develop an integrated biocultural approach to human-beaver interactions, examining the position of humans and beavers in Mesolithic and Early Neolithic multispecies systems. We contextualize beaver landscape agency in hydroactive environments with human behaviour, synthesizing currently available data on mammalian assemblages, ichtyofauna and beaver-related material culture across Northern Europe. This cross-cultural, diachronic analysis reveals previously overlooked facilitations of human behaviour by beaver practices and ecological legacies. We show that long-term trajectories of human-beaver cohabitation differed between northern European regions. While in Southern Scandinavia, human-beaver intersections witnessed major re-organizations during the Mid-Holocene, beavers retained a key role for human societies across Northeastern Europe throughout much of the Holocene and played an important part at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Dutch wetlands. Divergent pathways are also evidenced by Mesolithic beaver-related material culture, highlighting the cultural keystone status of Castor fiber in higher latitude European landscapes. We argue that this keystone status is grounded in the supply of human hunting, fishing, and gathering affordances by the animals, pointing to the generative commensality between Mesolithic foragers and their beaver neighbours. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of the beaver in the making of Early and Mid-Holocene forager societies in Northern Europe and illustrate the fruitfulness of deploying an integrated multispecies approach.

show abstract

“…butchery marks), but they can also be linked to the making of bone objects (e.g. Laroulandie et al, 2020;Mannermaa and Rainio, 2020) or the extraction of feathers (e.g. Lloveras et al, 2020).…”

Section: This Volumementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The biomolecular study of eggshells (Demarchi et al, 2020) and the use of mites for bird taxonomic identification (Llorente-Rodríguez et al, 2020) have already been discussed, but there are other approaches worth mentioning. Mannermaa and Rainio (2020), for instance, use experimental archaeology to suggest that bird bone objects from Mesolithic Russia were likely to have been used as acoustic devices. Bartosiewicz's (2020) interpretation of the Hungarian turkey also relies on etymology and linguistics.…”

Section: This Volumementioning

confidence: 99%

The Archaeology of Human-Bird Interactions: Essays in Honour of Dale Serjeantson Part I

Albarella

Baker

Browaeys

et al. 2020

Quaternary International

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Needle case, sound instrument or something else? A worked and ornamented swan (Cygnus sp.) ulna from a Late Mesolithic male burial, Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, Northwest Russia

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Bird bone artifact from the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age site of Zók (Hungary)

Bird bone artifact from the Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age site of Zók (Hungary)

Human-beaver cohabitation in the Early and Mid-Holocene of Northern Europe: Re-visiting Mesolithic material culture and ecology through a multispecies lens

The Archaeology of Human-Bird Interactions: Essays in Honour of Dale Serjeantson Part I

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About