d'Errico Francesco, Baker Jack, Pereira Daniel, Álvarez-Fernández Esteban, Lázničková-Galetová Martina, Rigaud Solange
CNRS UMR 5199 De la Préhistoire à l'Actuel: Culture, Environnement, et Anthropologie (PACEA), Université Bordeaux, Talence, France.
SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
PLoS One. 2025 Jun 4;20(6):e0323148. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323148. eCollection 2025.
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.
传统上，石器制品一直是旧石器时代晚期考古文化定义的主要代理指标。然而，现有的文化历史框架构建缺乏系统性，且受区域研究传统影响，存在诸多公认的缺陷。在此，我们利用个人装饰品来探究旧石器时代早期文化实体的本质，并确定它们在多大程度上代表了独特的或不断演变的文化适应方式。我们对一个更新的地理参考数据集进行了分析，该数据集由来自旧石器时代晚期两个关键连续技术复合体——奥瑞纳文化（42000 - 34000年前）和格拉维特文化（34000 - 24000年前）的个人装饰品组成。通过一系列多元统计分析，我们证明，在欧洲和区域尺度上，属于这些技术复合体的人们佩戴着相似的个人装饰品，尽管完整形状的个人装饰品在不同技术复合体之间看起来差异更大。我们还表明，与格拉维特文化相比，奥瑞纳文化装饰品的变异性表明其文化集群更为分散，这意味着后者具有更广泛的象征网络。尽管基于其他考古代理指标长期以来存在一种共识，强调这些文化实体之间的差异，但我们的结果表明，旧石器时代晚期文化的本质是复杂的，其特点是经济和技术系统的不连续性以及身体文化化的连续性。
