Material Culture, Behavior, and Identity: The Human Body as Experiential Nexus

Abstract

It has been argued that when examining hunter-gatherer archaeology from the millennial past, objects recovered may not make sense to us within our own modern materialist and sedentary context. In response this note makes a close examination of a particular human lion figurine and situates the discussion within its Aurignacian (c.32,000 BP) archaeological context. Examining the components of this figurine in relation to archaeological evidence of behavioral adaptation suggests that modern categories of human, animal, and material culture obfuscate how humans entering Europe modeled their predatory adaptation on that of an established felid (animal of the cat family) population. This adaptation was behavioral and the figurine under discussion reflects a preoccupation with felids in association with the human body. Ethnographic evidence shows how modeling patterns of animal movement and behavior changes how humans experience the world, no longer human or animal but a complex of human-animal experiences and behaviors. More appropriate may be to describe the figurine as a material expression of “cyborgian” felid identity. This recognizes an Aurignacian preoccupation with the human body as reflecting its importance as experiential nexus through which behavioral identities were lived. Material culture then is an archaeologically recoverable expression of lived behavioral identity.