Residue analysis and ornament suspension techniques in prehistory. Cyprinid pharyngeal teeth beads from Late Mesolithic burials at Vlasac (Serbia)

The authors discuss Late Mesolithic ornament suspension techniques on the basis of their analysis of 288 cyprinid fish pharyngeal teeth appliqués found in an infant burial at the site of Vlasac in the Danube Gorges region of the north-central Balkans. Our interdisciplinary approach includes archaeozoological and taphonomic analyses of archaeological cyprinid teeth ornaments, experiments on modern reference specimens, and the identification of use-wear traces and morphological and physicochemical signatures of residues on archaeological as well as comparative ethnographic ornaments from a selection of traditional hunter-gatherer societies worldwide. While focusing on one particular case study, the paper aims to provide an analytical and methodological framework for archaeological cases dealing with the reconstruction of materials and techniques used in prehistoric systems of ornamentation. Finally, our findings are compared to a strikingly similar set of cyprinid pharyngeal teeth ornaments from broadly contemporaneous Mesolithic sites found in the Upper Danube region, and a discussion is provided that attempts to account for this similarity.