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Keywords
Star Carr; Mesolithic; animal agency; effects/affects; bodies
Between 1949 and 1951, 21 antler frontlets were recovered from excavations
at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire (Clark 1954). Each of these
objects, dating from the 10th millennium B.P., consists of the uppermost
part of the skull of a red deer, with the antlers still attached (Figure 1).
The antlers had been lightened through truncation and hollowing of the
beams and tines, the inside of the skull treated to smoothen or remove
protuberances, and two artificial perforations had been made through the
skull. These modifications are presumed to have facilitated their use as headgear.
The excavator of the site, Professor J.G.D. Clark, offered two interpretations of these unusual objects. Citing supportive ethnographic analogies in
both cases, he suggested they could have been used either as hunting aids,
to permit hunters to stalk animals at close range without being seen, or as
headgear in ritual dances (Clark 1954, 170). By offering both a functional
and a ritual analogy, Clark appeared to have covered all possibilities. And
since both hypotheses were based on a single ethnographic example, Clark
left no objective means for choosing between the two. As a result, Clarks
interpretations of the frontlets produced an impasse such that, with the
exception of syntheses that reiterate his views (Smith 1992, Prior 2003,
Mithen 2003), in the intervening 50 years they have been ignored. Though
various authors may instinctively prefer one or the other interpretation (e.g.
Mithen 2003, 137), due to the intransigence of the problem, they ultimately
recapitulate both possibilities.
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Figure 1 The Star Carr antler frontlets (photograph courtesy of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology).
This is a pity, for it has led to the frontlets and also certain other items
of material culture recovered from Star Carr, such as barbed antler points,
beads and axes, being neglected. Thus the numerous reinterpretations of the
site (see below) have continued in the structural-functionalist and economic
vein Clark established and focused on his preoccupations site function,
economy, seasonality of occupation and relationship with the surrounding
environment.
In this paper I would like to offer what I feel is a more productive
account of the frontlets, an account which, rather than adjudicating between
Clarks hypotheses, proceeds from a different perspective altogether. This
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recent approaches have noted unusual patterns of deposition at Star Carr and
suggested a ritual component to actions undertaken at the site (Pollard 2000;
Conneller 2000; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003; Chatterton 2003).
Since 1976 further excavations have been undertaken around the edge of
Lake Flixton (Schadla-Hall 1987; 1988; 1989; Conneller and Schadla-Hall
2003; Lane and Schadla-Hall, forthcoming). These have revealed a number
of new Early Mesolithic sites (Figure 3) and for the first time permitted an
assessment of the local context and significance of Star Carr. One immediately
obvious contrast between Star Carr and neighbouring sites is in the range
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Figure 3 Location of Early Mesolithic sites in the Vale of Pickering. The contour in bold represents the
lake edge.
of material culture recovered. Many objects found at Star Carr are simply
not present elsewhere in the vale. During 25 years of excavation along the
shoreline of Lake Flixton we have found no more antler frontlets and no
more beads. Only one barbed point has been found in comparison with the
191 examples found at Star Carr and only two axes, compared to the 12
found in Clarks excavations and more recent fieldwalking in the area of
the site. Though organic preservation has deteriorated since Clark excavated
Star Carr due to modern intensive drainage practices, well-preserved faunal
remains have been recovered from many of the new sites, suggesting more
significant processes are operating. This difference between sites does not
appear to represent a cultural distinction since all sites contain Star Carrtype microliths (Radley and Mellars 1964; Reynier 1998) and utilize the
same flint sources.
Another difference between Star Carr and other Early Mesolithic sites is
in the scale and frequency of occupation. The newly excavated sites appear
to represent a series of fairly small-scale activity areas around the lake edge
(Conneller 2000; 2001; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003). These include
both generalized sites, where a variety of tools were manufactured and
used, and task-specific sites. These latter include a site where scrapers were
manufactured, a site where nodules were decorticated and cores prepared,
a site where microliths were manufactured and sites lacking manufacturing
debris entirely where previously prepared tools were used in various tasks.
These are all much smaller in size than Star Carr and, with the exception of
sites VPD and Flixton I (on Flixton Island), all have lower lithic densities.
Sites were rarely reoccupied and, on the few occasions they were, the focus of
activities seems to have changed. Seamer D, for example, was successively a
cache of raw material and a place were tools were used. This also represents
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a contrast with Star Carr, which the dating evidence suggests was repeatedly
occupied.
It is in the context of these patterns of activity that the antler frontlets must
be considered. To people in the area, the Vale of Pickering was a familiar
place that was repeatedly visited; a wide variety of tasks were undertaken
in the vale and several caches were left for later retrieval. Once abandoned,
old occupation sites tended to be avoided, with new activity taking place in
adjacent areas. In contrast, however, Star Carr was repeatedly occupied and
was the focus of deposition for a number of different objects, including the
frontlets, that are rare or absent from other sites in the vale. With this new
understanding of the local context of Star Carr, it is possible to re-examine
Clarks interpretation of the frontlets and offer a new understanding of their
role.
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These examples are not presented as analogies of the events and processes
that might have been occurring at Star Carr. I do not view these accounts
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de Castro and Deleuze and Guattari offer possibilities for the transformation
and breaking down of animal bodies. Seeing animals as an assemblage of
bodily effects, or as part of broader assemblages of affects, seeing their agency
distributed in their connections with other things, has important implications
for thinking about objects made from their remains: for in manufacturing
artefacts from them, animal bodies were broken down into their constituent
parts and were then reassembled with other things.
Animal effects
It has become an axiom of recent material culture studies that objects have
agency (e.g. Kopytoff 1986; Gell 1998; Knappett 2002). In contrast to earlier
symbolic approaches in which things were regarded as relatively passive
recipients of the meanings that people ascribe to them, this perspective has
stressed the extent to which things act back (as Lucas 2000 has it) on people,
changing the ways in which they act, think and perceive. In this view, action
is not simply something that people do to things. Rather it is something that
emerges in the dialectic between the two (e.g. Jones 2001), or, as Latour
(1999) has it, in a somewhat different way, it emerges through networks or
associations combining different people and things. But what if an object is
itself manufactured from part of a once-living organism? Does this change
the kinds of agency that can be attributed to it? This is an important question
for Star Carr, where a large proportion of the material culture recovered was
made from animal remains.
Barbed antler points, elk antler mattocks, various bone tools and red
deer tooth and bird bone beads were recovered in addition to the frontlets.
Furthermore, usewear on scrapers reveals that hideworking was a major task
at the site (Dumont 1988; 1989). Connections between two of these artefact
types the antler frontlets and barbed antler points suggest that some of
these items at least retained a strong sense of their animalness. Both of these
classes of object, though common at Star Carr, are rare elsewhere. Antler
frontlets have not been found on any other British Mesolithic site; the only
other examples known come from three sites in Germany (Reinbacher 1956;
Schuldt 1961; Street 1991; 1998). Though numerous barbed points were
recovered from Star Carr (Figure 4), as described earlier, more than 25 years
of excavation around the edge of the lake on which Star Carr was situated
have yielded only one additional barbed point. Furthermore, Jacobi (1978)
notes that only the initial stage of the manufacturing process of the barbed
antler points is represented at Star Carr. The points were finished elsewhere
and used in various parts of the landscape in the hunting of different animals,
including red deer themselves. However, the points were specially returned to
the site for deposition in the waterlogged part of the site. The task of barbed
point manufacture also appears to have been intimately connected to the
life history of the frontlets. As I described earlier, the Star Carr frontlets
have had some tines removed and beams hollowed. However, a similar
pair of antler frontlets, recovered from the German Early Mesolithic site
of Bedburg-Konigshoven,
are intact. Martin Street (1991) thus suggests tines
were removed from the Star Carr frontlets not to lighten them but because
they have been exploited as a source of raw material for the manufacture
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Figure 4 Bone and antler artefacts from Star Carr (no. 7 actual size, others half size). 1: elk antler
mattock head, 2 and 6: barbed points, 3: wooden paddle, 4: aurochs metapodial scraper, 5: elk
metapodial awl, 7: amber bead. (Reproduced with permission from Mellars and Dark 1998).
of barbed points. Many of the frontlets are also broken and could have
been broken up as a source of raw material, or exploited when no longer
used.
The barbed points and the frontlets are thus connected through their life
histories; though they were used in different ways and had different functions,
they originated from the same source and were reunited through deposition
in the same place. They are absent or near absent from the rest of the Vale
of Pickering since they were aggregated and specially deposited together in
the waterlogged part of the Star Carr site. Despite being different objects I
would argue that they were treated in the same way in deposition because
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of a lingering connection with the animal they originally derived from. This
reassembling of these different objects, after the death of the animal they
were once part of, implies that the people who occupied Star Carr retained
a conception of the animalness of both artefacts. Rather than viewing these
objects as passive recipients of meaning, as retaining some symbolic sense
of animal, these artefacts can be seen as incorporating elements of their
original animal agency or, more particularly, as animal effects. So taking on,
for instance, barbed points made of red deer antler would allow people to
harness antler effects in order to enter into particular relationships with the
world and in doing so to incorporate new perspectives on it. In a similar
fashion, Ingold, in a discussion of animistic societies, notes that very often
animal skins are tailored to cover corresponding parts of the human body,
so the skin of the head would be made into a hood, that of the legs into
trousers or boots (Ingold 2000, 124). In this fashion the person wearing the
skin would not simply make use of the functional qualities of the skin, but of
the effects and perspective of the animal-in-action.
Human bodies
Taking on parts of animal bodies that act as animal effects has important
implications for the human body. For Westerners, the human body has
traditionally been seen as natural, as a biological given, existing as a stable,
bounded entity prior to, and unalterable by, any cultural ornaments (such
as antler frontlets) it might later acquire. However, in the past two decades
feminists and queer theorists have problematized the idea of the body as a
natural biological entity, existing prior to cultural elaboration. Butler (1990;
1993), for example, has examined how what we consider to be naturally
sexed bodies are produced through repetitive acts of gender stylization, thus
bringing into question the idea of bodies as natural objects unaffected by
the social conditions of their generation. Others have problematized the idea
of bodies as bounded entities, describing the incorporation of objects within
the human body (Strathern 1991) or hybrid machineorganisms (Haraway
1991). If, then, humans are taking on and utilizing particular properties of
animals at Star Carr, how does this change the way in which we theorize the
body in this context?
At, or in the vicinity of, Star Carr, animal bodies were broken down and
reassembled with other things and agents. Antlers were partitioned from red
deer and transformed into the frontlets and also into barbed points. Elk antlers
were made into mattock heads (Figure 4). Elk and aurochs bones were used
for tools such as scrapers and awls. Red deer teeth and bird bones were used
as beads. As noted above, usewear reveals that hideworking was a major
task at Star Carr (Dumont 1988; 1989), while the recovery of faunal remains
indicates that flesh was also partitioned at the site. In all these ways, animal
effects extended the human body. People wore animal skins and beads of
animal teeth and bone, they ate animal flesh as food and used parts of animals
to extend their capacities in various tasks. These animals were intrinsic parts
of different human identities. So in this sense there is already, in mundane
daily activity, ambiguity about where human bodies end and animal bodies
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start. Parts of humans transform animals, who in turn alter and extend human
bodies.
In a Deleuzian sense, then, these humananimal connections can be viewed
as producing new assemblages assemblages composed of human hands and
animal antler objects, or human skin and animal skins. These assemblages
break down distinctions between humans and animals and challenge the
boundedness of bodies. But can it be argued, as Viveiros de Castro does in
his study of Amerindian understandings of animals, that these concepts had
some meaning for the people at Star Carr who used tools made of animal
remains? Did they see the animal tools as literally extending their bodies, in
a manner analogous to the canoes that Strathern argues extend the bodies of
the Gawan (Strathern 1991)? Were objects made from animal remains media
through which human bodies were explicitly transformed?
Becoming animal
The evidence from Star Carr indicates that the frontlets, or more particularly
objects made from antler, had more formal significance in the way people
thought about human and animal identities. The frontlets effects in
transforming the human body and rendering its boundaries ambiguous seem
to have been more explicit than the effects of some other animal tools. As I
argued earlier, the frontlets and the barbed points, linked through their rarity
and the special depositionary practices accorded them, retained a sense of their
animalness. The unusual depositionary practices at the site seem particularly
focused on objects made from the antlers of red deer. Antler also appears to
have had a special connection with the site. Though faunal remains suggest
the site was occupied in the late spring and summer, both shed and unshed
antler has been recovered from the site. This suggests that antler raw material
was collected at all times of the year and saved for use at Star Carr. Antler
objects, rather than other animal-derived materials, such as food or clothing,
appear to have been the most significant media through which people thought
about the relationship between humans and animals.
Consumption of food and the wearing of clothes often appear in
ethnographic accounts to be important ways in which these ideas are mediated
(e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1952). Though this could also have been the case at Star
Carr, there is no evidence to prove this. While food refuse and at least the
manufacturing implements associated with skin production are found at Star
Carr, these are also found on most sites in the vicinity. This is in stark contrast
to the paucity of frontlets and barbed points recovered from surrounding
sites. This suggests that though clothing and food could have been one way
people thought about the relationship between humans and animals, at Star
Carr they had at least less formal significance than the antler artefacts. So
the antlers, and possibly also the face of the animal, as the reconstruction
(Figure 5) shows, appear to have been the animal effect considered most
vital in its animalness. And so by taking on this deer-effect, by wearing
the frontlets, people at Star Carr explicitly drew attention to their bodies,
renegotiating their bodily boundaries and perspectives. The formal taking on
of parts of animals enabled the transformation of the human body. Similar
transformations are explored by Deleuze and Guattari, who offer what is in
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This is not to say that the person following this recipe will literally become a
dog. Becoming animal is not about moving between different bodies. Though
the animal is not literal, the transformation is. Parts of human bodies connect
with parts of animal bodies to produce a new assemblage of bodily effects,
one that is something else entirely, not human, not dog, that relates to the
world in a new way. Just as the animal part transforms the human body, so
the conjunction with human parts transforms the animal.
With these insights in mind, we can move beyond Clarks ritualfunctional
impasse. We can stop seeing the frontlets as a disguise, but rather explore
how humans and animal bodies were produced at Star Carr. As animal
effects, the frontlets facilitated a bodily transformation. This was not a literal
transformation into deer, but one that turned the human body into something
else, by taking on the effects of the animal. Taking on the frontlets also enabled
new ways of seeing. As Donna Haraway points out, viewpoints of the world
are not simply related to biologically discrete organisms or individuals, but
are materially mediated and are constructed and extended through the use
of tools and instruments. In this way, she talks of the need to learn to see
faithfully from others point of view even if the other is our own machine.
(Haraway 1988, 583). By machine she refers both to the human body and its
organs and to the machines and tools through which perceptual translations
are arrived at. Wearing the frontlets would be one such way of seeing from
anothers point of view, since it would facilitate engagement with the world
from a different perspective.
In light of this analysis, we can return to the question of agency. Having
examined the histories of objects made from animal parts at Star Carr, we
can see how different parts of animals change or extend the human body in
different ways. Armed with the idea of animal effects and mindful of recent
work in material culture studies, I have argued that in some way all animal
objects can be seen as agents. Animal tools affect things and people and extend
the human body. But I would also argue that the agency of certain animal
objects was seen as qualitatively different by the people who occupied Star
Carr. These objects appear to have been more formally significant in their
effects in transforming and extending the human body. I have argued that
the frontlets and barbed points were important because they retained a sense
of their animal agency and that antlers were particularly significant in the
red deer effect they rendered. It is thus not enough simply to think of objects
as agents. Certain agencies are qualitatively different from others in their
potency and the range of effects they render. All things have some degree of
agency, but it is the context that reveals the power of particular objects in the
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past. In this way, my account has attempted to move beyond the more general
debate about agency, to examine the specific ways in which different things
are seen to modify or extend the capacities of people in particular contexts.
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Conclusions
This paper has examined objects made from animal remains and the roles they
played in producing and transforming human bodies at the Early Mesolithic
site of Star Carr. I have argued that, rather than being passive, these objects
retained a sense of their animality and, following Viveiros de Castro (1998),
that they can be viewed as animal effects i.e. part of an assemblage of
acting in the world in a particular way. Working with these effects extended
the human body and bodily perspectives on the world and rendered the
boundaries between human and animal bodies ambiguous. At Star Carr
objects manufactured from red deer antlers appear to have been particularly
significant a fact suggested by the large number in which they were found
at the site, their rarity elsewhere and the unusual manner of their deposition.
I have argued that this special treatment was accorded to red deer antler
because the antlers were part of an explicit renegotiation of the boundaries of
the human body. The evidence suggests that the antlers in some way stood for
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the deer, that they were the significant red deer effect (Deleuze and Guattaris
something else) that permitted a fundamental corporeal transformation. The
connection of the antler effects to the human body, which necessitated the
taking on of the animals bodily perspective, produced a new kind of body and
way of acting in the world. This was a particularly important transformation,
one which was repeated at Star Carr over many decades, even as other aspects
of Mesolithic occupation of the area changed.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lesley McFadyen, who encouraged me to collect these
thoughts and to give an early version of this paper in her 2001 TAG
session Construction sites. Thanks also to Thomas Yarrow and Duncan
Garrow for their helpful comments on various versions of this paper and to
the anonymous reviewers. Figure 2 is reproduced courtesy of Archaeology
international, Figure 3 was produced by Barry Taylor.
References
Ahlback,
H., 2002: Art. Context and tradition in the PalaeolithicMesolithic
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