Man, Deer, and Everything In Between Transformations of a Mesolithic Organic Object

From Deer Antler to Human Headdress (Star Carr, 8500 BCE)

In the late 1940s, an unassuming piece of farmland in the Vale of Pickering, on the east coast of England, emerged as a discovery site for a plethora of artifacts from the British Mesolithic Age.1 Trenches cut through the peat along the former shoreline of Palaeolake Flixton revealed what six to ten generations of hunter-gatherers had left behind 11.000 years ago. Although only approximately five percent of the vast area, known as Star Carr, has been excavated to date, both the quantity and significance of the archaeological findings are extraordinary.2

The sizeable unearthed assemblages consist of lithic tools and an “unexpected range of organic material culture”,3 including wooden and faunal artifacts, animal bones, and processed carcasses representing sixteen different species (fig. 1). Similar to other Mesolithic sites, Star Carr illustrates the distinct role of animal materials, and a need for optimizing the utilization of natural resources.4 Particularly the large amounts of worked deer antler stand out among the discoveries. As one of the first documented instances of sourcing antler in the Upper Paleolithic, Star Carr sheds light on the early history of raw materials. Antler grew increasingly more common in the Middle and Late Mesolithic and became widely extracted, worked, utilized and exchanged by prehistoric societies.5 It was significant for early human technology and every-day life: Blank antler pieces made barbed projectile points for hunting and fishing; antler tools were assigned a variety of tasks in the processing and re-working of bodies and other materials; antler adorned and disguised the body in the form of beads or masks.

1 Cf. Clark 1954 on the paleo-environmental analysis of the first excavations between 1949–1951.

2 See Sieveking/Longworth/Wilson 1976 on how the Star Carr excavations have impacted modern archaeological research and conservation practices.

3 Taylor/Elliott/Conneller et al. 2017, p. 23.

4 Cf. Elliott 2012, pp. 15.

5 See MacGregor 1985 on the material histories of bone, antler and wood.

At Star Carr, neither the deers’ age or sex nor its organs’ development or manner of harvesting seem to have been decisive for selecting the material. Instead, antler was both foraged after the shed and appropriated from hunted or trapped male and female animals.6 Recent research has pointed out that the Star Carr community depended on its unique materiality to survive in periods of environmental and climate change. Evidence for deteriorating living conditions and rising water levels of Lake Flixton suggest that wildlife and food stability came under threat – antler must therefore be considered essential in several ways.7 Not only did it supply resilient tools and weapons, but it was also transformed into cervid artifacts (fig. 2). These extensively re-worked deer skulls

6 Cf. Milner/Conneller/Taylor 2018, p. 253.

7 Recent research highlights the impact of changing environmental conditions on depositional contexts and practices at Star Carr, discussing anew whether the assemblages can be considered refuse, the remains of a seasonal settlement such as a hunting camp or resulting of craft activities or ritualized events. Cf. Milner/Conneller/Taylor 2018.

2 Red-deer frontlet, mesolithic, excavated at Star Carr in 1953, Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology without facial bones and lower jaw, their pedicles and internal braincase structures abraded, preserve the osseous material in a semi-natural state.8 Occasionally, the skulls’ parietal bone has been perforated, possibly to attach straps or webbing. Thus, the frontlets may have been intended for corporeal transformation, likely as headdresses, hunting disguises or another type of mask (fig. 3).9

Organic materials like antler add a significant surplus to the products of human intentionality and creativity they are part of. Unlike wood or stone, antler demands familiarity with its material properties, as well as sufficient knowledge of the lifeways and habitats of deer.10 In fact, the intricate ways in which antler is appropriated by the Mesolithic community bring to the fore a unique fluidity between organism and object.

8 See for the faunal material recorded during the first excavation Elliott/Taylor/Knight et al. 2019, p. 5: “[…] 191 uniserial barbed points made of red deer antler, 102 red deer antlers (94 of which showed signs of working), 115 removed red deer tines, five red deer antler ‘blank’ splinters, a socketed red deer beam, […] and 21 red deer antler frontlets.” The 2004–2015 excavations added a further 12 modified red deer frontlets along with 33 red deer antler barbed points, 108 pieces of worked red deer antler, 47 removed red deer antlers tines and several deer tooth beads, cf. ibid. p. 6.

9 Cf. ibid., p. 254. See also Elliott/Taylor/Knight et al. 2019, pp. 10 for possible purposes; Little/ Elliott/Conneller et al. 2016 discuss shamanic uses.

10 The organs offer specific seasonal and personal information to those who spend large amounts of time with these animals; cf. Milner/Conneller/Taylor 2018, p. 250: The relation between animal and hunter at Star Carr required “an understanding of animal behaviour and appreciation of animals as living, thoughtful entities with which people interact.”

Indeed, the animal organ undergoes a series of significant material changes throughout its yearly development. It accumulates properties of both the living organism and manipulable object throughout its naturally occurring formation. With one of the fastest rates of organogenesis in the animal kingdom, antler tissue grows with a speed of up to ten centimetres per day from the pedicles.11 This annual cycle brings a gradual, but substantial change with it: While the outer layer of blood suffused, soft velvet nourishes growth, seasonally activated hormonal changes finally restrict the blood flow to the coronet and the outer tissue is ligated. After the animal rids itself of the irritating velvet, only the osseous antler structure remains. Fully developed, the antlers signal health and strength to potential mates, predators and contestants of the rutting season. Even though it remains rudimentarily connected to and fed from the pedicles, this tissue is insensitive to pain and shed easily. Once the deer has cast off the antler, its pedicles immediately begin regrowing tissue for the next season.

Over the span of its yearly cycle, the antler thus transforms from a growing and self-organizing organ into a ‘living bone’. At its apex, the deer is in possession of a detachable, unfeeling and efficient tool. Its hybrid materiality, flexible yet hard, combines essential properties of both the organism and the object for superior impact-absorption powers. In this sense, the organ transforms into an object-like material – a process that can described as a natural reification. The antlers’ object-like self-referentiality comes out of latency once the organ is isolated from its original matrix, re-worked and re-mobilized via another body (fig. 4). Likely inserted into a new context of movement and activity, the frontlets destabilize human agency and physical distinctiveness by hiding and controlling its wearer.12 Overall, the faunal masks suggest that the Mesolithic development from stone to antler technology encompasses navigating the residual life of organic materials. On the one hand, this hinges on the antlers’ object-hood, their Zuhandensein (being-at-hand), on the other hand, the human actor activates and amplifies the organs’ pre-existing traces of aliveness. The faunal assemblage therefore indicates a heightened engagement with the excessive life of organic prosthesis.

To conceptualize objects and organisms as dichotomies falls short of understanding these processes. Rather, what can be observed are the intertwinining reification and vivification processes and their mediating influence on organic life and inert materials. Early human technology resorts to naturally recurring chaine operatoires, and the reified animal organ that is being produced. However, the artifact can still be temporarily reanimated via interaction with another actor. Hence, the prehistoric artifact is neither an inanimate instrument of human agency nor a living organ. Instead, its properties associate both ‘dead’ and ‘alive’, ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’, ‘inert’ and ‚animated’ stages of matter, which can be selectively activated in combination with other materials and bodies. The antler frontlets therefore address questions and issues that are traced throughout this volume’s contributions: Which practical and symbolical functions do hybrid materialities fulfil for cultural practices, technology and the production of knowledge? To what extent does transformative materialities infer conditions for attributing life and agency? How do interrelations between objects and organisms manifest on technical, artistic and narrative levels, and what do these reflections say about cultural attitudes towards each of the two?

11 Cf. Kierdorf/Li/Price 2009. Natural regeneration of a lost organ – let alone anything as large and complex as an antler – is impossible for most mammals. However, a 200-kilogram adult red deer grows antlers weighing as much as 30 kilograms in the span of three months, cf. Price/Allen/ Facheaux et al. 2005, p. 603.

12 Cf. Conneller 2004, p. 50.

In the case of Star Carr, the organic artifacts condense a memory of human life, culture and technology, one that is deeply intertwined with animals. Given the complete lack of human remains from the site, it is clear that, after death, man and deer were kept apart. The frontlets, however, offer glimpses into how the two species were understood to be interlocking parts of the same environment – an argument perhaps for understanding the environment in a way that goes beyond appropriation and manipulation, one that is nourished by cyclical adaptation processes equally involving man, animal, and material.

The Permeable Status of Objects and Organisms

In order to make the multiform processes of reification and vivification tangible, this volume employs the conceptual-terminological pairing of ‘object’ and ‘organism’ with an emphasis on the ways in which each is receptive to the properties of the other. Considering their history and etymology brings these permeabilities into focus. Despite century-long efforts to define the term ‘organism’, it has remained a highly ambivalent “magic word”.13 The nature and characteristics of the organism lie at the centre of the discipline of biology, as Georg Toepfer has detailed.14 In the Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie (2011), he defines it as follows:

“An organism is a material system of interdependent parts and processes, forming an integrated whole in physical and functional terms. It features distinctive functions and actions (such as nutrition, protection from disorders and receptivity to environmental events). The physical unity of an organism consists in its material constitution in a continuously existing, coherent body whose substances and form, however, may be subject to change (through metabolism and metamorphosis).”15

13 “Zauberwort”: Hennig 1968, p. 376. Toepfer points out that ‘organism’ is an open, “warm” concept and not exclusively a technical one. Cf. Toepfer 2016, p. 11.

14 Toepfer’s comprehensive introduction to the volume Organismus is foundational for the subsequent history of the concept. See also his doctoral thesis Zweckbegriff und Organismus. Cf. Toepfer 2004 and Toepfer 2016.

15 “Ein Organismus ist ein materielles System aus wechselseitig voneinander abhängigen Teilen und Prozessen, das in physischer und funktionaler Hinsicht eine integrierte Einheit bildet und charakteristische Funktionen und Aktivitäten (wie Ernährung, Schutz vor Störungen und Rezeption von Umweltereignissen) aufweist. Die physische Einheit eines Organismus besteht in seiner materiellen Verfasstheit in einem kontinuierlich bestehenden kohärenten Körper, dessen Stoffe und Form jedoch einem Wechsel unterliegen können (durch Metabolismus und Metamorphose).” Toepfer 2011, p. 777. All translations from German are the authors’ own.

As such, the organism has implications far beyond the realm of biology. The natural scientist and proponent of vitalism Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734) made decisive contributions in his writings on the subject in a biological context, published as early as 1684. Thereafter, the notion of an organized, living system made its way into the natural-philosophical writings of Buffon and Linnaeus, Diderot, Voltaire, as well as Kant and his successors.16 The organism belonged to a new model of thought that no longer privileged the soul as an explanation of living phenomena, but also did not fully endorse a purely mechanistic view. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the organism was largely considered the very epitome of life, although the question remained as to what factors constituted aliveness. Organisms came increasingly to be perceived as assemblies of different, functionally oriented ‘organs’ and as individual units of an overarching organic ‘environment’. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of evolution allowed for an understanding of individual organisms not foremost as independent actors but as rather passive products within long-term, multigenerational life cycles.17 Seen from this perspective, namely as subject to larger developments outside its own sphere of action, the organism draws closer to the inanimate.

The living organism’s relationship to the inanimate world is latent in the etymology of the word ‘organism’, which, like most scientific terms of Greek antiquity, is drawn from everyday language. ‘Organon’ (ὄργανον) could denote an exquisitely crafted artifact, before its meaning narrowed to ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’.18 Empedocles implemented the term in a medical framework, and later Aristotle placed the “body endowed with organs” (σῶμα ὀργανικόν) at the centre of his biology, subdividing living beings into individual components that fulfil assigned purposes in a ‘tool-like’ and integrative manner.19 This Aristotelian notion complemented earlier definitions of aliveness as a pure antithesis to deadness.20 Humans were not excluded from Aristotle’s mechanistic approach; now, the human body could be described and reified in similar terms as an object of use, namely as an instrument of the soul.21 The inextricability of organism and object was repeatedly reaffirmed thereafter. In the oldest surviving Latin translations of biblical texts from the second to the fourth century CE, playing an instrument is expressed using the verb ‘organizare’. In the Codex Marcianus Graecus, a corpus of antique alchemical texts compiled in the late tenth or early eleventh century, ‘organism’ (ὄργανισμός ) is used to describe an apparatus for distilling liquids.22 The modern biological concept of organism stems from the mechanistic rhetoric of the seventeenth century: Descartes, for example, resorted to the metaphor of the clock to visualize life processes as integrated interactions among the components of an apparatus.23

16 Cf. Toepfer 2016, p. 12. In his Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire writes on this topic, strikingly: “La vie est organisation avec capacité de sentir.” Voltaire 1878, p. 577.

17 Cf. Toepfer 2016, p. 15.

18 Meyer finds that the term once also referred to a golden vessel. Cf. ibid., p. 39.

19 Cf. on the early history of the expression ὄργανον Meyer 2016, pp. 39–44.

20 For example, in the second part of On the Soul, he writes of plants: “In plants also the parts are their organs, very simple ones, such as the leaf which covers the pod, and the pod which covers the seed; but the roots are analogous to the mouth, for both these absorb food.” Aristotle 1932, p. 69.

21 Cf. Heinemann 2016.

From a historical point of view, the semantics of ‘organ’ and ‘organism’ – whether as an object of value, a tool, a musical instrument or an automaton – have only relatively recently been distinguished from the inanimate and ‘inorganic’. While, early on, notions of functionality and utility had to be introduced into the relevant biological discourse, they are now inextricable from our sense of the organism. And more recently, it has become clear that the organic can also refer to artificial systems, for example, in the field of organic computing, where self-organizing, inanimate systems are created artificially.24

From this overview, the deep entanglement between objects and organisms becomes apparent. Organisms can be inanimate. And likewise, objects can be receptive to the vitality of the animate world in many productive ways. Here, too, special attention must be paid to etymology. As has already been pointed out in the larger publication series Object Studies in Art History, objects are not always impermeable to any form of agency and liveliness. The opposition between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ was not familiar to the scholastic philosophers who introduced these terms in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did ‘object’ come to refer to a spatially limited and functionally determined material thing, and even still it is common for inanimate objects to be associated with properties associated with animated beings.25 For instance, in the Romance and Germanic languages, hand-operated tools are often named after animals or animal parts. Take, for instance, the German ‘Fuchsschwanz’: due to its shape and manoeuvrability, the ripsaw (fig. 5) is named literally the ‘foxtail’, the agility of the fox leading to a conflation of its sharp teeth and moving tail. This points to a broader notion of the manipulated tool as animal-like. The ‘bestiaire de l’outillage’ (bestiary of tools), as François Poplin summarized this phenomenon,26 is complementary to the mechanistic connotation of the organism: both can be traced back to the etymological coincidence of tool and body in ‘organon’. It can be concluded that such attributions are not unidirectional – extending from organism to object – but rather operate in both directions (think of the sawfish).

22 Marcianus Graecus Z. 299 (= 584), f. 116v. In his description of the process, the anonymous author refers to the Greek-Egyptian alchemist Zosimus, who lived in the third or fourth century. Cf. Cheung 2010, p. 157 for an English translation of the paragraph and Toepfer 2011, p. 777.

23 Descartes 1680, p. 72f. Cf. also Toepfer 2011, p. 781.

24 Cf. Krohs 2016. In the same volume, Hans Werner Ingensiep shows that, according to Kant, life and organism cannot be brought into congruence. For him, plants, lacking their own will and desire, are not living beings but organisms. Cf. Ingensiep 2016.

25 Cf. Wöller 2018; Cordez [2014] 2018; Cordez et al. 2018. On object studies from an art-historical perspective, see also Seidl 2013 and, from a more general perspective, the anthology Candlin/ Guins 2009.

26 Cf. Poplin 2012, pp. 23–24 and 28.

As a pair, the categories of object and organism offer a decisive advantage over strict dichotomies such as the inanimate and the animate. Their permeability demands that processuality be taken into account: evolving historical situations and diversely motivated interventions can alter the properties of objects and organisms. The vast associative space in which objects reside often allows only approximate and provisional designations, with the vague attributions of ‘inanimate’ and ‘living’ orbiting objects and organisms in an ever-changing process. External factors can impact the position of an entity on this scale, whether a reification towards the ‘inanimate’ or a vivification towards the ‘animate’. Such movements can take place gradually; they can also occur temporarily and dynamically, as in the case of the Mesolithic deer frontlet where we observe a repeated oscillation – in no way permanent or irreversible – between the two. The frontlet’s permeability between object and organism mirrors its state of productive suspension between object of use and body part and between headgear and prosthesis. The unfolding processes of reification and vivification can, in turn, alter one’s perception of the antlers as either ‘object’ or ‘organism’. The essays in this volume explore objects and organisms within such processes of transformation.