Organic technology in the Pastoral Neolithic: osseous and eggshell artefacts from Luxmanda, Tanzania
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Organic technology in the Pastoral Neolithic: osseous and eggshell artefacts from Luxmanda, Tanzania Michelle C. Langley 1 & Mary E. Prendergast 2 & Katherine M. Grillo 3
Received: 17 April 2017 / Accepted: 7 July 2017 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017
Abstract Hard animal materials were key components of prehistoric daily life, with many such raw materials shaped into diverse tool types and personal ornaments. With few exceptions, outside of the far south and north of Africa, osseous artefacts have been largely understudied on the continent, with this situation particularly applying to pastoralist contexts. Well-documented worked bone, ivory, or ostrich eggshell (OES) assemblages tend to be associated with huntergatherers and are generally interpreted with reference to contemporary hunter-gatherer toolkits. Study of osseous and OES technologies used by ancient or modern pastoralist populations, on the other hand, remains in its infancy. In this paper, we present an analysis of 14 worked bone, ivory, and OES artefacts from the Pastoral Neolithic site of Luxmanda located in north-central Tanzania. We apply technological trace analysis to understand histories of manufacture, use, and discard and compare our findings against the corpus of osseous and eggshell technologies recovered from terminal Pleistocene through Holocene sites of eastern Africa, providing a synthesis of this region for the first time. Finally, we explore the limited record for comparable technologies in recent Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-017-0528-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Michelle C. Langley [email protected]
1
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Australia
2
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
3
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, USA
pastoralist communities and argue that forager/food producer distinctions based on organic technologies are neither present nor meaningful based on current evidence. Keywords Bone technology . Worked bone . Ivory . OES . Ornamentation . Projectile technology . Pastoralism . East Africa
Introduction The study of prehistoric pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa has shifted over the past several decades: while previous research focused on the essential work of developing basic chronologies and cultural sequences, archaeologists are now able to build ethnographically and archaeologically informed models for the social dynamics of daily life (Gifford-Gonzalez 1998a, b, 2014; Russell and Lander 2015; Parsons and Lombard 2017). Technology, as a central component of daily practice, must form part of such examinations; however, most appraisals of prehistoric pastoralist technology are focused on stone tools and/or pottery, as these artefacts have preserved almost without exception. By contrast, assembla
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