1Conventional wisdom holds that the accumulation of wealth - and differential access to that wealth - emerged with agricultural production and the increased capacity for surplus storage that it presented. High levels of mobility place constraints on the kind of disparities in wealth-accumulation that can intensify social inequalities over the course of multiple generations. To say that mobile societies are limited in the amounts of wealth they accumulate, though, is not to say that they operate entirely without it. Examinations of inequality across several modes of production (foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture) suggest that it was the intergenerational transmission of wealth in pre-agricultural societies that formed the foundations of more pronounced forms of material inequality that developed later among sedentary societies (Bowles et al. 2010). The colloquium on Ice-Age inequality from which these proceedings stem reflects a growing acknowledgement within the archaeological community that inequality existed in the Palaeolithic, though an abundance of questions and a variety of perspectives remain regarding the nature, extent, and impact of those inequalities. In order to address these questions, we must proceed with definitions of wealth and models for its social functions that are appropriate to mobile societies. Drawing on recent discourse about wealth in contemporary and ethnohistorical hunter-gatherer societies, this paper frames the production of standardized ivory beads in the Early Upper Palaeolithic as the generation of wealth and examines various ways in which this wealth may have functioned. It argues that the intensified production of beads occurred within a context of increased social complexity and in response to specific environmental and economic conditions. Following Spielmann’s (2002) discussion of ritual production in small-scale societies, I propose that processes of production/participation in the creation and circulation of wealth may have had greater importance in Pleistocene societies than the acquisition and display of it. Re-centering the discussion of wealth on participation/production instead of accumulation/display presents opportunities to interrogate the motivations for large-scale production.

2Cross-cultural analyses of forager societies reveal considerable variation in social organization and consistent relationships between social equality and factors like mobility, richness and predictability of resources, and group size. Due to the historical forces of the past 500 years, the contemporary ethnographic record is largely skewed toward groups at the less hierarchical end of the scale (which for the most part inhabit territories that are of little interest to agricultural and industrial societies). At the other end of this spectrum are more sedentary hunter-gatherer groups which occupied environments with abundant and predictable resources and spent most or all of the year either in fixed settlements or rotating between relatively fixed seasonal encampments. These societies, such as those of the Northwest Coast of North America, had pronounced material and social inequality at the time of European invasion (that included elaborate ceremonial and prestige objects, hereditary elites, marked class differences, and systems of slavery) and have become the standard reference for complex foraging societies. Determining where Pleistocene societies fell on these continua is one of the most challenging aims in the field of Paleolithic research. Factors such as group size and patterns of mobility – crucial variables in discussions of inequality – become increasingly difficult to estimate with increasing time-depth. With few or no well-preserved human remains dating to the EUP, opportunities to observe physical signatures of mobility (such as isotopes in teeth) and inequality (such as differential access to resources reflected in diet) are rare. Length of occupation can be challenging to determine with any precision, raising questions about whether abundant deposits represent a wealth of materials accumulated in a relatively restricted time frame, or more slowly accrued through repeated occupation events over the course of several centuries, or even millennia. Under these circumstances, material culture is crucial evidence in the assessment of social organization. Equally critical are the lenses, terminologies, and concepts that we apply to their study.

Wealth in hunter-gatherer societies

3A special issue of Current Anthropology (Bowleset al. 2010) on the topic of “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies” provides a vocabulary and framework suitable to the discussion of wealth in Paleolithic contexts (see also the contribution in this volume from E. Honoré). Building on the economic concepts of embodied and exosomatic wealth (Kaplan 1996), and physical and human capital (Schultz 1961), the editors offer an intentionally broad definition of wealth as “an attribute of the individual that contributes to the flow of valued goods and services” (Bowles et al. 2010 p. 9). They further define three primary types of wealth: material, embodied, and relational.Material wealth is wealth as we generally tend to think of it – material goods of value – whether practical or prestige objects. Embodied wealth is the physical potential of an individual to contribute to the productivity and success of the group. This includes physical endowment (ex: strength, agility, reproductive health) as well as skills and cognition such as facility in making stone tools or crafting garments, knowledge of animal behaviors and productive hunting grounds or strategies, and cultural knowledge. Finally, relational wealthis the nature and extent of the social connections that an individual maintains within and beyond the immediate community, as well as the rights and privileges that these relationships may engender (ex: membership in a ritual or political society, access to restricted spaces or rites, and access to territories and resources that are controlled by others). Relational and embodied wealth are more difficult to quantify than material wealth but may have direct material correlates. They can also, in a more limited sense than material wealth, be transmitted from one generation to the next. With regard to small-scale, mobile societies: “Intergenerational wealth transmission is low to moderate in these populations, but is still expected to have measurable influence on an individual’s life chances.” (Smith et al. 2010 p. 19). Similarly, variations in embodied and relational wealth have a greater impact on individual success and survival in these groups than variations in material wealth.

The case study: Ivory beads of the French Aurignacian

5The site complex of Castel-Merle (fig. 1) in the Vézère Valley of the Périgord region of France, roughly 14 km northwest of Les-Eyzies and 10 km southwest of Lascaux/Montignac, is the location of perhaps the most intensive bead-production in the EUP of Europe. Early Aurignacian deposits from the sites of Abri Blanchard, Abri de La Souquette, and Abri Castanet have yielded the single largest assemblage of ivory beads known from the period (Heckel, in press; Wolf and Heckel, 2018). Artifact assemblages and radiocarbon dating at all three sites suggest broadly contemporaneous occupation (White et al. 2012; Bourillon et al. 2018; O’Hara et al. 2015). The majority of the beads are of the basket-shaped type, depicted in fig. 2,tab. 1 provides an overview of the quantities of beads and bead-production preforms recovered from each site. The only other Aurignacian sites in Europe to yield comparable assemblages of ivory beads are those of the Swabian Aurignacian in the Lone and Ach Valleys (chief among them the sites of Vogelherd and Hohle Feels; see Wolf and Heckel 2018; Wolf 2015).

6With very few exceptions, most Aurignacian sites have yielded very small quantities (n≤6) of ornaments that are made on locally abundant materials with minimal modification (meaning that the only modification of the raw material is preparation for suspension by perforation or gouging; Heckel in press). In other words, the production of large numbers of high-modification beads at the Castel-Merle site complex is an exceptional case in the Aurignacian. Equally exceptional are the levels of standardization that the basket-shaped beads display. Examples of basket-shaped beads appear in Aurignacian deposits beyond the region of Dordogne, at such sites as Gatzarria, Isturitz, and Brassempouy (White 2007) and in Liguria, at Riparo Mochi (Tejero and Grimaldi 2015). Morphometric and statistical analysis combined with quantitative and qualitative studies of the distribution of production debris supports an argument for site-level specialist production of basket-shaped beads and circulation of the final products in regional networks of exchange that included marine and fossil shells as well as high-quality flint materials (Heckel 2018).

Ivory beads as material wealth

7The concept of Palaeolithic beads as a form of material wealth is not new; Vanhaeren (2002) provides several examples of early prehistorians [ex: Fischer 1876; Rivière 1904a; Jackson 1916] who entertained the possibility that certain shells, especially those found cached in large quantities, served as early forms of currency. Due in part to preconceptions about the egalitarian nature of Palaeolithic societies, terms like “wealth,” “currency,” and “commodity” have fallen out of favor in discussions of Pleistocene material culture. In their place a variety of complex terminologies have emerged to describe what are, basically, objects of widely recognized value: “socially valued goods” (Spielmann, 2002), for example, or “prestige goods” (Hayden, 1998). My point is not to detract from the use of these terms and concepts – they frequently refer to very precise and context-specific functions of material culture – but to point out that what we are usually describing with such terms can also be generally referred to as wealth in its material, relational, and embodied forms.

8Aurignacian ivory beads have several characteristics that justify their inclusion in the category of “material wealth.” As White (1992 p. 560) has observed, personal ornaments of the Upper Palaeolithic were most frequently “constructed of the rare, the sacred, the exotic, or the labor/skill-intensive.” In her examination of the social and ritual bases for economic intensification among small-scale societies, Speilmann (2002) has identified a similar suite of characteristics that define “socially valued goods:” geographic distance, transformation, skilled craftsmanship, and enchantment. The latter refers to “the way in which the form, color, ornamentation, polish, and tactile qualities of an item compel the viewer to desire it” (Spielmann 2002 p. 200). With regard to the production of beads in the Palaeolithic, different types of beads reflect different levels of investment (Heckel 2018, in press). Minimally modified, locally abundant materials – such as the perforated tooth or shell of a locally-abundant animal, constitute the lowest level of economic investment in ornament production. The selection of teeth or shells that are relatively scarce in the local environment introduces an element of scarcity and consequently an investment of time devoted to procurement that lends value to the ornaments. Several scholars have noted that the shells consistently selected for use as ornaments in the Palaeolithic were not from the most naturally abundant species (Taborin 1993; Stiner 2014; Bar-Yosef Mayer 2005; 2015). As shells from coastal sources move inland, for example the Atlantic and Mediterranean shells recovered at Abri Castanet, they gain an additional value through geographic distance. Low-modification ornaments on locally scarce materials constitute a mid-level investment. At the highest end of the scale are highly modified and relatively rare materials – such as the ivory and soapstone beads of the Vézère Valley. The painstaking transformation of ivory tusk-fragments into hundreds of small and standardized beads involved extensive investment of time and skill at levels consistent with specialized craft production (Heckel 2018). Adhering to strict formal standards in bead production (Heckel 2016) introduces an additional level of control over the production and circulation of this wealth. In his cross-cultural analysis of “beads as money,” Graeber (1996 p. 13) emphasizes the unique ability that standardized beads have to move back and forth between “radically different domains of exchange” and back and forth between the category of object of personal adornment and object of exchange. As commodities that circulated in regional networks of exchange, these beads constituted both material wealth (created through the appropriation and transformation of natural forms and raw materials) and allowed the societies of the Vézère Valley to remain active participants in the kinds of relational networks that constitute a significant form of wealth among hunter-gatherer societies.

Beads and relational wealth

9With reference to contemporary and ethnohistorical contexts, Bird et al (2019 p. 96) observe that: “Most mobile hunter-gatherers live in groups dominated by links between non-relatives, where residential group membership is fluid and supports large-scale social networks of interaction.” Relational wealth, or the nature and extent of social relationships within and beyond the residential group, is therefore a significant form of wealth for foragers, whose survival frequently depends upon it (Smith et al. 2010; Chaudhary et al. 2016; Bird et al. 2019). As a result, the generation of material wealth rarely occurs for its own sake and is generally applied to the creation, maintenance, expansion, and negotiation of social relationships and networks. In fact, the production, exchange, and display of objects like ornaments play central roles in the complex resource-management strategies of hunter-gatherer societies. “A primary motivation for subsistence intensification and craft specialization in small scale societies lies not in subsistence provisioning but in the demand for items critical in social reproduction” (Spielmann 2002 p. 195). A classic example is the circulation of ostrich eggshell (OES) beads in the!hxaro systems of delayed exchange that form the basis of mutual support networks in San society (Wiessner 1984, (fig. 2). The beads are so central to the !hxaro system that the word may refer to either the system/act of exchange or to the beads themselves. Wiessner’s interviews with Ju/’hoãn beadmakers revealed how important skilled craftsmanship was in these social rituals, and how far-reaching their social networks were. The average distance of trading partners in her study was 50 km, with each individual having at least one trading partner at a distance of 150-200km. Recent analysis of strontium isotopes in ostrich eggshell beads from Pleistocene contexts in South Africa document that these objects have been moving long-distances (at least several hundred km) in networks of exchange since at least 33,000 BP (Stewart et al. 2020). Such networks are also the most parsimonious explanation for the presence of shells and flint materials from distant sources at the Castel-Merle sites. Analyses of the human remains from Sungir, now dated to the Early Upper Palaeolithic, suggest that “the human HG [hunter-gatherer] social structure of low levels of within-band relatedness, complex family residence patterns, relatively high individual mobility, and multilevel social networks were already in place among Upper Paleolithic societies 34,000 years ago” (Sikora et al. 2017 p. 358).

10The value of body ornaments as relational wealth in the Upper Palaeolithic has been widely addressed in previous publications (Taborin 1993; White 1989. 1993; Gamble 1998; Vanhaeren 2002; Kuhn and Stiner 2007, 2009; Stiner 2014). For Gamble (1998), it was the external storage of information in shared systems of symbolic material culture, including beads, that allowed for a “release from proximity” in social interaction and the geographic expansion of social networks. Stiner and Kuhn (2006) have demonstrated correlations between the resilience of Upper Palaeolithic societies and “strategies for evening-out or sharing risk,” by participating in enlarged social networks. For Stiner (2014), it was the desire to participate in networks of exchange and reciprocity - in other words, the desire to generate and expand relational wealth - that produced the standardization of form we see in ornaments of the Upper Palaeolithic. Even in the earliest Upper Palaeolithic, the acquisition, display, and exchange of ornaments, whether perforated shells and teeth or beads shaped from ivory and soapstone, was a vital element of participation in the expanded social networks of the EUP and a valuable currency in the creation and maintenance of relational wealth.

Beads and embodied wealth

11Embodied wealth is very difficult to discuss in any detail for Aurignacian populations; thus far only fragmentary human remains from the period have been discovered in Western Europe. Nonetheless, certain general observations about ornaments and embodied wealth can be made. Recall that embodied wealth includes not only physical fitness and ability but also knowledge and skill. Making Aurignacian basket-shaped beads is a complex process that requires knowledge as well as manual dexterity. The beads range in size from 4mm to 8mm in size and average around 6mm. Production is a complex process involving several stages of transformation. At the site of Isturitz, two discarded bead-blanks were recovered that were not viable for bead production, the perforation having been placed too high on the thinned preform to achieve the characteristic basket shape (Heckel, 2017). This suggests an attempt at bead manufacture by people familiar with, but not proficient in, the production process. Even perforating shells and teeth with without breaking them requires a certain amount of skill and dexterity. Beyond the skill involved in making them, ornaments may also reference, display, or invoke other forms of embodied wealth, such as hunting prowess, reproductive success oravailability, or access to scarce and valued materials. For example, the display of red-deer canines was historically an index of wealth and hunting success among the Lakota (Night Pipe 2012) and the ubiquitous use of perforated red-deer canines in the Upper Palaeolithic may have served a similar purpose (see Tejero et al. 2020). The wearing of certain types or arrangements of ornaments can also signal a wide range of embodied states: wealth and success; special ritual, political, or religious roles; availability for partnership and/or childbearing. Finally, the wearing of certain materials may have served to invoke certain desirable properties or characteristics associated with the source of the objects, in terms of places and/or animals, thus linking them to the wearer in the minds of others. For White (1992), this kind of metaphorical thinking was essential to the emergence of symbolic material culture. In the case of the Aurignacian, it may be impossible to define with any precision how beads related to different forms of embodied wealth, but we can nonetheless maintain an awareness of the potential of such connotations. Additionally, the earliest adorned burials of the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic, at the site of Sungir, have long been interpreted as evidence of wealth inequality. The large numbers of beads recovered from the child burials at Sungir burials have been interpreted as evidence of ascribed (inherited) social status and evidence “that complex social systems arose prior to and independent from systems based on agricultural production, and long before the Late Glacial Maximum at 18,000 BP” (White 1993 p. 296).

Discussion

12The accumulation of large amounts of material wealth and large public displays of wealth in the archaeological record are hallmarks of certain types of societies with certain types of practices involving material wealth. Seeking the origins of those behaviors is an entirely worthwhile pursuit in itself. However, if we wish to understand the emergence of wealth and inequality, we would benefit from decoupling the concept of wealth from this set rather limited set of behaviors. In other words, pronounced inequality must have been preceded by more subtle inequalities, and the existence of wealth and the mechanisms for its production are prerequisites for wealth inequality. Considering how beads - and other objects - may have operated in specific systems of material, relational, and embodied wealth in Upper Paleolithic societies is a valuable exercise even if these societies were not defined by pronounced wealth inequality. Social complexity - including various forms of inequality - did not emerge in linear fashion and observations about a single site complex or region do not necessarily apply to a period as a whole. Significant variability in social organization and levels of equality must have existed in the Aurignacian period. In their study of resource management among the modern Evenk (mobile hunter-gatherers who subsist seasonally on reindeer) Grøn and Turov (2007 p. 67) observe that “Evenk groups are able to accumulate wealth to a degree that does not correspond to our ideas of mobile hunter-gatherers” and that there is “dynamic wealth-related variation in the economic strategies and settlement patterns employed by neighbouring clans belonging to the same cultural group.” We can expect similar patterns of variability over both time and space in prehistory, and the kind of complexity I describe for the Early Upper Palaeolithic certainly has antecedents in the African record (d’Erricoet al. 2020; McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Tryon et al. 2018).

13As always, caution must be exercised in extending ethnographic analogy to the prehistoric past. Conclusions about the function of beads in a local context must draw on many other lines of evidence related to the material and social lives of a given people. Based on the parameters that have been established for identifying social complexity in the archaeological record (Price and Brown 1985; Keeley 1988), I propose that the bead-producing societies of the Early Aurignacian at the Castel-Merle site complex displayed several other markers of relative social complexity. A complete review of the evidence is beyond the scope of this discussion, but I highlight sources that will provide the reader with more extensive discussions and bibliographies. The descriptions of the features of social complexity listed below are quoted from Keeley (1988 - p. 373-374), who summarizes the five characteristics defined by Price and Brown (1985) and adds three additional features to this list. Two of the features of social complexity either do not apply to the Early Aurignacian or are impossible to determine based on available evidence. They are: “Larger and more internally differentiated settlements” and “Nonequalitarian allocation of wealth, status, and authority signalled by the presence of hereditary ranks, incipient classes, or wealth distinctions.” Without burials, and a sufficient number of samples to draw meaningful comparisons, one can only speculate on the potential disparities in the distribution of wealth in the Aurignacian. If we define wealth inequality simply as “variability in the accumulation of a range of material wealth items” (Prentisset al. 2012), we can confidently assume that there was at leastsome kind of variability in the distribution of that wealth at the individual level and within and between groups.

14“More complex technologies which involve larger inventories of items and greater complexity in the construction of these items.” One of the distinctive features of the Early Aurignacian of southwestern France, relative to preceding periods, is the expansion of composite technologies and the use of osseous raw materials in strictly-regimented systems (Liolios 1999; see also Tejero et al. 2012; Doyon 2019; Kitagawa and Conard 2020). Within this system, bone was used in the production of domestic tools, antler in the production of hunting projectiles, and ivory in the production of ornaments. In addition to the large quantities of beads described in this paper, Tartar and White (2013) have noted that split-based points in reindeer antler were produced at the Abri Blanchard in quantities (n=79) that far exceed short-term or immediate provisioning.

15“An intensified subsistence economy that involves the exploitation of a wide range of species and habitats as well as greater concentration on a few staple species.” Soulier (2013) has characterized the subsistence economy of the Early Aurignacian in southwestern France as having a greater concentration on reindeer on a seasonal basis with a simultaneous expansion in the range of species exploited, especially for pelts and furs.

16“Greater sedentism in the form of longer annual occupations of specific sites, even permanent occupations.” While conclusive evidence is not available at this time for the sites in the Castel-Merle complex, the faunal record in southwestern France supports a model of seasonal mobility marked by extended stays of substantial length at certain sites (Soulier 2013). The sites at Castel-Merle may have served as an aggregation hub where large stocks of reindeer were provisioned for use over the winter (see White et al. 2017).

17“The beginnings of occupational specialization at the individual, familial, and/or settlement level.” I have elsewhere argued that the production of Early Aurignacian beads at the Castel-Merle site complex can be considered an early form of specialization, at the settlement level if not the individual/familial levels (Heckel 2018).

18“Greater territoriality evidenced by greater use of symbols of identity.” The substantial intensification of symbolic material culture is one of the hallmarks of the European Upper Palaeolithic, beginning in the Early Aurignacian. The parietal and mobiliary engravings, shells, and ivory beads of the Castel-Merle sites are among them.

19To the list created by Price and Brown (1985), Keeley (1988) adds:

208) “Heavy dependence on stored foods.” This is certainly a more pronounced feature in agricultural societies, many hunter-gatherer groups with lower levels of mobility depend fairly heavily on stored foods. This is the case for modern Evenk reindeer hunters (Gron and Turnov 2007) and, and a similar pattern of stocking large quantities of reindeer meat in the fall for consumption over the winter is entirely reasonable for the Early Aurignacian in southwestern France (see Soulier 2013).

219) “Larger amounts and wider networks of trade, which is related to the increasing specialization of production noted above.” The presence of shells and lithic raw materials from distant sources shows that the Castel-Merle sites were connected to large networks of exchange in which materials moved between 200 and 600 km (see Tartar and White 2013; Féblot-Augustins 1993).

2210) “As a correlate of the above, the use of standard mediums of exchange.” The production of hundreds of highly standardized ivory beads at Abri Castanet, Abri Blanchard, and Abri de la Souquette constitutes a substantial investment in transforming raw materials into a material medium of relational wealth. It is particularly notable that the adoption and transformation of materials like ivory and soapstone occurs most intensively – indeed nearly exclusively – at sites that are distant from coasts and therefore from ready sources of shell ornaments. As White (1993 p. 558) has put it, “Two- and three-dimensional representation was an invention and like all inventions had to be coherent in and useful to its cultural context in order to be adopted.” The resemblance of basket-shaped beads to several forms of ornamental shells has long been noted, and several pendants from the Vézère Valley also mimic the natural form of other shell types and of the vestigial canines of red deer – another popular ornament of the Palaeolithic. It was arguably people who were clearly familiar with - but geographically removed from the sources of - shell ornaments who manufactured large quantities of beads in other materials.

23Wealth production in the Early Aurignacian may well have emphasized communal participation over individual accumulation, driven by a desire to participate in larger systems of reciprocity and exchange and to gain access to materials from distant sources. While my focus has been on ivory beads, many other artifact types, both durable and ephemeral, could have constituted material wealth in the same contexts. Indeed, by the broadest definition, all material culture is a form of wealth. Further, the act of craft production in small-scale societies is highly social and participatory. Possession of fine objects is less important than participation in social rituals in which they are produced and exchanged. In contexts that value continuous circulation over individual acquisition, the ceremonial disposal of valued objects in burials or caches may not have occurred.