Informative teeth

Sometimes, one realizes that small objects are holding a wider range of information that would have been thought. Simple teeth in the archaeological record are an example of that situation; it seems that an assemblage of pierced teeth in an archaeological burial can give us information on how prehistoric people hunted, in which environment and even which type of animal was preferred. Those are at least the conclusions reached by d’Errico and Vanhaeren in their 2002 paper.

This paper could be divided into three main parts. The first one is an attempt to find a way of assessing the age and sex of deer by looking at metrical and morphological measures. In order to come with an effective model to age animals, d’Errico and Vanhaeren look at two British reference collections of red deer (Cervus elaphus) teeth. As the age of those teeth is already known, they can play around to find the model that is best-fitting to the real situation. Seeing dimorphism between stag and hind teeth, they divide those two groups and come to a different equation for each sex to predict the age of a teeth based on its morphology and wear pattern. Both equations predict 80% of the age of the teeth with an error ranging from 2.5 years (male) to 4 years (female).

The second part is an attempt to apply those equations to an archaeological assemblage of 196 deer canines found in a multiple burial at the site of Aven des Iboussières (dated to around 10,210 + 80 BP) in order to see the pattern of kill of the occupants of the site. Based on the high number of prime-age males and the wide variety of age in females seen in the assemblage, they come to the conclusion that hunters were targeting males in the time of rut, while going at random in hunting females, which is hard to understand for me. Why would they try to find specifically prime-age males but kill any female that crossed their paths? The authors’ explanation is that this would have prevented a depletion of reproductive females, thus acting for a renewal of the hunted population. This makes sense but I feel that, in this situation, it would have been more productive to target older females… What also surprises me is that, by looking at those prehistoric teeth, they are capable of inferring that those animals were being hunted in wooden environments. While I am very interested in this possible link between mortality profile, sex ratios and environment, I cannot keep myself from wondering if this is a solid assumption. I do not claim to have any particular knowledge of animal behavior and thus I wonder if the social organization of deer is really that different according to the environment in which they are found.

In the third part of the paper, the authors combine the ratio of paired to unpaired teeth in the Aven des Iboussières assemblage to the differences in decoration on certain teeth to suggest systematic gift-exchange of single tooth between individuals. If this hypothesis makes sense, it unfortunately misses empirical data to back it up. D’Errico and Vanhaeren quickly mention that this type of behavior is found in ‘traditional societies’, but they do not explain this any further. I would be interested in getting more information on those social behaviors in order to have a better idea of the material they would leave in the archaeological record.

I found this paper very interesting. Even if some of the links it made are unclear to me, it brings up very important issues for archaeologists. The emphasis put on the importance of differentiating between the hunting practices in regard to the sex of the animals should be kept in mind for future research. The equations used to age prehistoric teeth seem promising and should be applied to assemblages in which we have associations between skeletons and ornaments. In those situations, we could go further into assessing if social differentiations were present and what those would entail.

Reference:

D'Errico, F. and M. Vanhaeren. 2002. Criteria for identifying red deer (Cervus elaphus) age and sex from their canines. Application to the study of Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic ornaments, Journal of Archaeological Science 29:211-232