Magdalenian Personal Ornaments on the Move: a Review of the Current Evidence in Central Europe

Abstract

[EN] The Magdalenian is the period in the Upper Palaeolithic in which the greatest number of beads and pendants has been documented. Few sites with levels of this period have not provided examples of this type of artefact. The variety of raw materials used to make them (animal’s teeth, marine or fossil molluscs, antler, ivory, etc.) and the decoration on some of them, inform us of contacts between regions remote from each other. This paper reviews the different types of pendants that have been recorded from Magdalenian sites, with the aim of roughly establishing the network of contacts that existed among the groups of hunter-gatherers in Central Europe. It studies the context in which these artefacts were found, in well recorded stratigraphies at sites researched in recent decades. The study of certain types (marine shells from Atlantic and Mediterranean sources, certain kinds of perforated objects made in jet, such as discs and “Gönnersdorf type” schematic female figures, reindeer teeth sawn off at the alveoli, or discs made from scapulae) enable us to infer the existence of complex networks of long-distance contacts between human groups in the Late Glacial.