Identifying the animal species used to manufacture bone arrowheads in South Africa
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Identifying the animal species used to manufacture bone arrowheads in South Africa Justin Bradfield 1,2
&
Tim Forssman 3 & Luke Spindler 4 & Annie R. Antonites 5
Received: 28 March 2018 / Accepted: 23 August 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The identification to species of completely worked bone tools is impossible using standard skeletal morphological markers. Worked bone studies therefore have focused on questions about manufacture and use, rather than on issues of raw material selection strategies. Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) is a technique that uses unique collagen biomarkers to fingerprint and identify species of origin from small amounts of bone or ivory. We present the first ZooMS analysis of bone arrowheads from southern Africa. Our findings show that a narrower selection of species was selected for tool manufacture than for food, while, at some sites, certain antelope species were selected for tools that are not present in the unmodified faunal remains. We examine what this selectivity might suggest about mechanical suitability and symbolic associations of the species chosen to make tools. We conclude that mechanical suitability was probably of primary concern and that probable symbolic connotations that were attached to certain species did not translate to the technological sphere to the same extent that they did in other parts of the world. Keywords ZooMS analysis . Species identification . Worked bone . Zooarchaeology . Southern Africa
Introduction Animals played an important role in prehistoric societies. They were a source of food, raw material, and, in some cases, reverence (Lewis-Williams 1987; Ingold 1988; Willis 1993). The use of animal bone as raw material for tools dates back at least 1.8 million years (Backwell and d'Errico 2001) and was a well-established tradition in certain areas of southern Africa by the Middle Stone Age (d’Errico et al. 2012). Bone
continued as an important raw material throughout the history of southern Africa, being used to manufacture a wide range of implements (Shaw and van Warmelo 1974; Davison 1976; Plug 2012; Bradfield 2015a). Perhaps, the most iconic artefact to be fashioned from bone is the near-ubiquitous arrowhead, found in both hunter-gatherer and farmer contexts in southern Africa (Bradfield 2015a; Antonites et al. 2016). Most bone tools recovered from archaeological excavations are so pervasively modified that it is impossible to
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0688-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Justin Bradfield [email protected] Annie R. Antonites [email protected] 1
2
Centre for Anthropological Research, Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 524, Auckland Park, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and School of Geography, Archaeology and E
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