Evidence brief: Aterian shell beads from the coastal site of El Mnasra Cave (Rabat-Témara, Morocco): Specificities of the north African MSA personal ornaments

Abstract

The use of Nassariidea shells as personal ornaments is attested to an increasing number of Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeological sites in northern and southern Africa. The chronological extent of this behavior is constantly moving back in time; currently, the oldest evidence has been identified at the Bizmoune cave site in Morocco back to the MIS 6. Although these evidences make it possible to refine the spatial and temporal distribution of this behavior, shell beads remain rare in Middle Stone Age assemblages and are generally composed of several beads, or at best dozens, for each of these sites. This restricts our understanding of the behaviors specifically related to the collection, selection and preparation phases of shells, and potentially limits our understanding of their use. In this article, we studied shell beads from MSA layer US 8 from the coastal archaeological site of El Mnasra Cave (Rabat-Témara, Morocco). This collection corresponds to the largest MSA shell bead assemblage in Africa (272 Tritia cf. gibbosula, 6 Tritia corniculum and 3 Columbella rustica in US 8 with 154 of them showing smoothing of the perforation edge, facet of abrasion, or traces of pigment). The shell bead assemblage of El Mnasra presents features previously observed at other MSA sites, connecting it to a North African cultural context; however, the size of the El Mnasra shell bead assemblage, and the presence of shell sources near the site, allows us to identify specific features that could be related to particular modes of use as ornaments. These specific features include the prevalence of un-perforated shells, some of which show use-wear, that could have been fixed on items without having been perforated. These results provide new insights into the wide range of variants and originalities of shell bead uses over a relatively “short” chronological phase, between 115 and 94 ka and can be correlated with the multistep evolutionary scenario proposed for South Africa. The archaeological documentation presented here shows that El Mnasra Cave provides a significant contribution to the study of culturing the Palaeolithic body in North Africa.

Introduction

Personal ornaments correspond to standardized items that shared symbolic meaning among a particular group or other groups of the same culture [1,2]. The discovery of ancient ornaments in Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeological contexts has therefore focused the scientific community’s attention on the ongoing debate concerning the appearance of a “cultural modernity” [3–9]. They are regarded as one of the most important archaeological artifacts evidencing the emergence of more complex human social interactions and a culturalization of the human body [10,11]. Nassariidae shells used as ornaments are commonly found in Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeological contexts in the Levantine area and Southern and Northern Africa sites, dated between 100 and 80 ka, and even earlier in the latter. In fact, the oldest evidence of shell ornaments dating back to the Middle Pleistocene was recently found at the Bizmoune Cave site in Morocco [12]. From these earliest manifestations, the use of perforated shell beads shows a degree of standardization with similar modes of use. With the exception of Qafzeh Cave (Israel), which yielded perforated bivalves of Glycymeris [13], all the species used throughout the African continent, are also similar in shape and are phylogenetically close [10]: Nassarius kraussinarius in Southern Africa (Blombos); Tritia gibbosula and Nassarius circumcintus in Northern Africa (Bizmoune, Contrebandiers, El Mnasra, Taforalt, Ifri n’Ammar, Rhafas, Oued Djebanna) and the Levantine area (Skhul) [14–22]. More recently, the presence of unperforated shells in 100 ka levels at Blombos Cave led d'Errico et al. [10] to suggest that these shells were collected and used as cultural items in the form of amulets or similar objects. For these authors, the use of un-perforated shells as cultural objects falls within a ten-step evolutionary scenario of the culturalization of the human body. The use of un-perforated shells would therefore precede a generalization and standardization of the use of shell as ornaments in beadwork configuration, with an increasing complexity of the bead's nature (naturally or artificially perforated shell, ochre or heating color modifications, association of different species), as well as types and modalities of bead arrangements.