Beads: Ritual and Ornamentation – What Africa's Khoe-San were wearing 77,000 years ago
It’s like Tiffany’s for the Stone Age. Inside a glass case, a dozen examples of Nassarius kraussianus are arranged in a circle, a necklace without a string. These tiny white shells, all pierced near the lip, are prehistoric beads, dated at around 77,000 years old.
“Before the Blombos beads were found, it was thought that the earliest beads date to about 40,000 years ago, and that they are only found in Europe,” says Dr Sarah Wurz, curator of pre-colonial archaeology in the Social History Collections Department of Iziko Museums of Cape Town.
“Then Blombos site came along, and a whole group of symbolic artefacts were found together, very early, over 70,000 years ago. Subsequently they have found other shell beads in other sites all over the world, because now of course they have started looking for it.”
When the beads were found in Blombos Cave in South Africa they represented a giant leap for the study of mankind. As proof of prehistoric ornamentation – likely worn by Khoe-San hunter-gatherers and fashioned into Stone Age bling with the aid of bone points – the beads added fuel to the contentious “When and where did modern human behaviour begin?” debate.
For example, shell beads more than 100,000 years old have been found in North Africa, she says. “Therefore the date for beads moved back, but these were at some stage the earliest beads and it really changed our conception of when beads have been found.”
Stringing Together an Exhibition
Wurz has curated the Beads: Ritual and Ornamentation exhibition in Cape Town’s South African Museum, where the shells are on display until the end of 2009.
It provides a broad look at beads through the ages, from prehistoric strings to colourful 20th-century Xhosa beadwork. The exhibition features beads used in life – to brighten up tortoise shells, aka San cosmetic containers – and death, with a portion of photograph of an infant buried about 3000 years ago showing a rich assortment of shell beads as grave goods.
“What we just wanted to establish is an appreciation for the fact that beads occur for a really long period in different contexts and that the common theme there was divination or ritual,” Wurz says.
Beads: Ritual and Ornamentation is tiny, occupying a few glass cases in a hallway and will probably be overlooked by the hordes of schoolchildren that rush through to get to the central atrium, the Whale Well, where skeletons of ocean giants swim through the air. But this small exhibition, like the tiny shells in it, contains big ideas.
Why so Remarkable?
The N. kraussianus beads – commonly known as tick shells and once inhabited by a tiny mollusk – tell archaeologists something fascinating about the Middle Stone Agers who wore them – they were our kind of people, Wurz believes.
“It tells us that society was probably just like we are. Because we are the only group of primates that wear ornaments. No apes do that. So we always want to see back in the archaeological records, when did people start wearing ornaments? And it’s very telling that people at 77,000 years ago already wore ornaments. That shows us that they thought in modern ways, just the way that we are thinking, probably using symbolic concepts.”
Even if the beads were simply worn as decoration, that’s still important, she says, as the concept of “purely decorative” is unique to humans. “Apes probably don’t think of a twig as being purely decorative, if you see what I mean.”
The tick shells were found with touches of ochre. “It’s quite significant, because we know from recent times that ochre is used as a special substance to put on the body, it’s got ritual significance,” Wurz says. That ochre was used in conjunction with ornamentation shows the beads may have a ritual connotation.
The Debate
Men and women wearing ornaments is evidence of symbolism commonly equated with modern human behaviour. The beads were a strike for Africa in the ongoing debate that – broadly speaking – pits those who believe modern human behaviour emerged in Eurasia about 50-40,000 years ago against those who believe such traits developed in Africa between 250,000 and 50,000 years ago.
It's hard enough to establish the origins of anatomically modern man, but when modern behaviour evolved is even trickier to pinpoint. Partly because scientists first have to define exactly what “modern behaviour” is – another debate all of its own.
Dating the Shells
A casual observer might be forgiven for confusing the Stone Age baubles with a few random shells with holes in them. But scientists know they’re not, Wurz says. “They looked very closely at these beads under the microscope and there they found that number one, there are wear facets, exactly similar to the wear that you find when something with a hole in it is worn on a piece of string.”
Middle Stone Age sites over 40,000 years old are difficult to date as they are beyond the scope of radiocarbon dating. In this case, Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) was used. “Scientists developed a way to measure the light that’s trapped in sand grains, so the sand grains that surround the beads and the ochre and the other artefacts were dated in a lab,” Wurz explains.
Inside Blombos Cave
The N. kraussianus shell beads – South Africa’s earliest – were recovered from the Middle Stone Age levels of Blombos Cave between 1992 and 2002 by Professor Christopher Henshilwood, who is affiliated with Norway’s University of Bergen and South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand.
Blombos Cave, discovered by Henshilwood in 1991, lies near Still Bay, about 300km east of Cape Town, and is about 100m from the coast and 35m above sea level. Excavating its layers has yielded a treasure trove of artefacts from the Later and Middle Stone Age and the work has proved critical in the debate about the origins of modern human behaviour.
The layer containing the shell beads also had bone points and bifacial stone tools. There were 41 tick shells, which would normally have been found clinging to grass at a river mouth.
People of the Shell Jewels
The people who collected and then wore them were probably Khoe-San hunter-gatherers, the only people found in South Africa until about 2000 years ago when Bantu people migrated south. “We think they were Khoe-San-like people, they were definitely modern people like us, because we know that modern people like us evolved 200,000 years ago in Africa,” Wurz says.
Archaeologists are confident the shells were collected specifically as ornaments – they wouldn’t have naturally occurred within Blombos Cave and the nearest estuary was 20km away, so they didn’t blow in by accident. And they’re unlikely to have been harvested as food, as they’re too small to be worth the trouble.
The hunter-gatherers would have made a hole in them, probably using a bone point, then strung them together and worn them around the neck or body. It would have taken some skill to pierce the shells – you’d have to exert exactly the right amount of pressure — but it’s not in the realm of making stone tools, Wurz says. “Associated with these beads are bifacial stone tools, and you need quite a lot of skill, you need modern-type skills to make those stone tools.”
Fashion Through the Ages
Also in the Beads: Ritual and Ornamentation exhibition are slightly more recent wares from the Stone Age Tiffany’s. About 40,000 years ago, the Khoe-San started making beads from ostrich eggshells, a change that could be attributed to something as quintessentially human as personal style. Beautiful examples are strings threaded with dozens of circular ostrich shell beads.
“There are different cultural preferences over time,” Wurz says. “That in itself is an indication of modern ways of thinking because we choose different media to express ourselves symbolically.” It could be compared to modern fads of fashion, she agrees, laughing.
Back then, however, it took a lot longer for word to get around.
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