Organic technology in the Pastoral Neolithic: osseous and eggshell artefacts from Luxmanda, Tanzania

Abstract

Hard animal materials were key components of prehistoric daily life, with many such raw materials shaped into diverse tool types and personal ornaments. With few exceptions, outside of the far south and north of Africa, osseous artefacts have been largely understudied on the continent, with this situation particularly applying to pastoralist contexts. Well-documented worked bone, ivory, or ostrich eggshell (OES) assemblages tend to be associated with hunter-gatherers and are generally interpreted with reference to contemporary hunter-gatherer toolkits. Study of osseous and OES technologies used by ancient or modern pastoralist populations, on the other hand, remains in its infancy. In this paper, we present an analysis of 14 worked bone, ivory, and OES artefacts from the Pastoral Neolithic site of Luxmanda located in north-central Tanzania. We apply technological trace analysis to understand histories of manufacture, use, and discard and compare our findings against the corpus of osseous and eggshell technologies recovered from terminal Pleistocene through Holocene sites of eastern Africa, providing a synthesis of this region for the first time. Finally, we explore the limited record for comparable technologies in recent pastoralist communities and argue that forager/food producer distinctions based on organic technologies are neither present nor meaningful based on current evidence.