The elephant in the room: the use of mammoth bones for the manufacture of objects in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwest France
Résumé
In the Upper Paleolithic of Western Europe, the use of mammoth ivory for the manufacture of tools, portable art and ornaments is widely documented. Conversely, the use of mammoth bone in that archeological context has rarely been identified, apart from a few Gravettian cases. Here we report six worked objects (including weapons) made of mammoth bone, from five sites in southwest France, identified with the ZooMS method. They were radiocarbon dated and their chronological distribution spans the Upper Paleolithic, from the Aurignacian (Sous-le-Roc) to the Magdalenian (Laugerie-Haute, La Madeleine) through the Gravettian (Brassempouy) and perhaps the Solutrean (Lespugue). Additionally, a technical use of unworked flakes from mammoth bones was identified at another site (Isturitz). The worked objects are too modified to be taxonomically identified and would not have been attributed to mammoth on a visual basis. Meanwhile, the unworked flakes used as tools would have been identified as mammoth but not necessarily classified in the bone industry. We argue that, in the Upper Paleolithic of Western Europe, the use of mammoth bone, while not very frequent, is more common than previously documented, and that identification biases account for its underrecognition. More systematic research is necessary to assess the extent of this phenomenon.
