Robin Skeates

The art of memory: personal ornaments in Copper Age South-East Italy

in «Material Mnemonics - Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe», Oxford, 2010, pp. 73-84

This chapter explores how body ornaments might have been involved in a social process of constructing and transforming memories during the fourth and third millennia BC in South-East Italy: a time of growing socio-economic instability and competition in which appearances and memories mattered. It is argued that ornaments may have served as thought-provoking ‘mnemonic devices’, whose appearance and feel stimulated memories and facilitated their reinvention. Various strategies may have been employed in this process, including: reproduction and citation; association and displacement; selection, collection and ordering; display, inspection and representation; and distancing.

Introduction: ornaments and memory

Body ornaments are emotive and memorable cultural forms, which are often regarded as symbolically and socially signifi cant. Combining a biographical approach to prehistoric artefacts with recent thinking about objects and memory (e.g. Appadurai ed. 1986; Hoskins 1998; Kavanagh 2000; Radley 1990), this paper aims to explore how such ornaments may have been involved in a social process of constructing and transforming memories in Copper Age South-East Italy.

From the Upper Palaeolithic onwards, people used a variety of ornaments in this region. Most seem ordinary, made of accessible raw materials, such as seashells, animal teeth and bones, whose physical properties were enhanced by makers using relatively simple techniques, such as perforation, carving and incision. In the Neolithic burial cave of Grotta Scaloria Alta in northern Puglia, for example, a large collection of naturally shiny and perforated tubular seashells was found in association with a human skull (Winn and Shimabuku 1980: 8–9). h is may have been attached to a skull-cap, like to those found with Gravettian burials in this and other parts of Italy (Mussi 2001: 255–256).

Other ornaments, however, seem more valuable, both in terms of the more restricted, exotic and visually distinctive materials used, such as greenstone and copper imported from neighbouring and more distant places and peoples, and in terms of the degree of their physical modifi cation, using more innovative styles and laborious techniques such as polishing and drilling, to create more regular forms such as beads, rings and bracelets (cf. Perlès 2001: 221–226). h ey could be singular, particularly when used as personal ornaments, as in the case of the Iceman’s polished white marble bead attached to a tassel of fur (Spindler 1995: 116–117). But, over time and space, these durable ornaments also accumulated dynamic and diverse associations and values, particularly during the course of their circulation through extended social networks of exchange and obligation, in which, like kula shells, they were displayed, evaluated, kept and given (cf. Campbell 1983; Malinowski 1922; Weiner 1992). During this process, they were sometimes collected and combined in sets and ultimately sacrifi ced in that form in burials. For example, a necklace of 62 steatite beads was found in the Copper Age burial cave of Grotta Cappuccini near Galatone (Cremonesi 1985: 58). h is was probably imported, indirectly, from northern Italy, where steatite beads were manufactured at Copper Age sites such as Pianaccia di Suvero in Liguria and also circulated via exchange networks (Barfi eld 1981: 44; Tiscornia 1987). But at other times groups of ornaments were deliberately displaced, refashioned, refi ned, recombined and re-ordered, or accidentally lost or stolen. Traces of these transformations are occasionally refl ected in the signs of modifi cation, wear, patina and ageing surviving on the surface of the ornaments, although the cumulative eff ect of these processes generally erased earlier signs. Miniature greenstone axe blades, for example, found at Neolithic sites such as Passo di Corvo and Via Galliani in northern Puglia, were welltravelled exotic objects that were locally transformed by being perforated and polished, perhaps to be recycled as amulets, having become too small to use as tools but too valuable to discard (Skeates 1995: 291–292)... leggi tutto