Abstract
This paper focuses on a special case of mortuary habit in the treatment of human bodies during the Upper Paleolithic. Human teeth present a good available raw material source; however, until now, 12 Czech and French sites have been identified with human teeth pendants dated from the Aurignacian to the Magdalenian. Our study investigates four human teeth (Pav 15, Pav 25, Pav 39, and DV 8) from Pavlov I and Dolní Věstonice I that display perforations in the root area. This paper aims at distinguishing traces of human manipulation and perforation activities from traces caused by non-human depositional and post-depositional processes. Furthermore, broad paleoanthropological and archeological approaches were undertaken to understand the possible functional and symbolic meaning of these objects. The habit of functional usage and wearing human remains encompasses a comprehensive spectrum of analogies in human prehistory and recent ethnology.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to J.-J. Hublin, H. Temming, D. Plotski, and N. Stephens from the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig; V. Zhitenev from Lomonosov Moscow State University; E. Trinkaus from Washington University, Saint Louis; J. Svoboda and Š. Hladilová from the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University; and M. Novák, S. Boriová, and T. Janoušek from the Institute of Archeology at Czech Academy of Science in Brno.
Funding
The paper was financially supported with Czech national institutional support RVO: 68081758 (IA CAS Brno) and the specific research grant: MUNI/A/1528/2018 (MU Brno).
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Sázelová, S., Hromadová, B. Human teeth pendants from the Mid-Upper Paleolithic sites Pavlov I and Dolní Věstonice I, Czech Republic. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 41 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-01008-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-01008-x