Abstract
In this paper, we describe 485 Oliva spp. shell beads recovered from four archaeological cave sites Jerimalai, Lene Hara, Matja Kuru 1, and Matja Kuru 2, located in Timor-Leste, Island Southeast Asia. While Pleistocene-aged examples of modified marine shells used for personal ornamentation are common in African and Eurasian assemblages, they are exceedingly rare in Southeast Asia, leading some researchers to suggest that these Modern Human societies were less complex than those found further west. In Timor-Leste, the lowest Oliva bead to be recovered was directly dated to ca. 37,000 cal. BP, making it the oldest piece of personal ornamentation in Southeast Asia. Morphometric, taphonomic, use wear, and residue analyses of these beads alongside modern reference specimens, and experimentally made examples indicate that the Oliva shells were modified to be strung consecutively (as in a necklace), and while their mode of production changed remarkably little over the thousands of years they were utilised, an increase in their deposition around 6,000 cal. BP suggests that there was a change in their use coinciding with sea-level stabilisation. These tiny beads demonstrate that early Island Southeast Asian societies produced the same kinds of symbolic material culture we have come to expect from the more intensively studied African/Eurasian region, and that limited sampling and poor recovery methods have biased our perspectives of this region.
Highlights
Representing a behaviour specific to humans whereby standardised items are displayed on the physical body to project symbolic meaning to members of the same or nearby groups, ornamentation in the form of beads or pendants made from marine shells and animal teeth, continues to be one of the best sources of information regarding social behaviour in early Modern Human communities (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11])
We report an assemblage of 485 Oliva spp. shell beads recovered from Jerimalai, Lene Hara, Matja Kuru 1 (MK1), and Matja Kuru 2 (MK2) in Timor-Leste
The evidence recovered from Jerimalai, Lene Hara, MK1, and MK2 indicate that Oliva shell bead production in Timor-Leste begun in the first few thousand years after initial settlement, though apparently after the selection of Nautilus shell for ornamental purposes [23]
Summary
Representing a behaviour specific to humans whereby standardised items are displayed on the physical body to project symbolic meaning to members of the same or nearby groups, ornamentation in the form of beads or pendants made from marine shells and animal teeth, continues to be one of the best sources of information regarding social behaviour in early Modern Human communities (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]). While there have been several significant finds of perforated animal teeth and shells in north and central Chinese sites such as Zhoukoudian, Xiaogushan, and Shuidonggou 2 [17,18], to date the only convincing examples of Pleistocene-aged pieces of personal adornment from Southeast Asia consist of two perforated mammalian teeth from Xom Trai Cave and Du Sang Rockshelter, Vietnam dated to between 22,000 and 19,000 cal. It has even been suggested that as biologically and behaviourally Modern Human populations moved away from their African homeland, they somehow ‘lost’ key technological features which separated them from more ‘archaic’ hominid groups [20]. While such arguments have largely been centred on lithic technology, the lack of personal ornamentation throughout Southeast Asia has supported such notions. With no direct dating of individual beads, these finds have gone largely unstudied and unintegrated into a more concise understanding of human adornment in Southeast Asia
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