Bradford research finds mussel shells material of choice for cavemen

Thursday, 9 May 2019 16:00

A new study suggests that 6000-years-ago people across Europe shared a cultural tradition of using freshwater mussel shells to craft ornaments.

An international team of researchers, including academics from the Universities of York and Bradford, extracted ancient proteins from prehistoric shell ornaments - which look remarkably similar despite being found at distant locations in Denmark, Romania and Germany - and discovered they were all made using the mother-of-pearl of freshwater mussels.

The ornaments were made between 4200 and 3800 BC and were even found in areas on the coast where plenty of other shells would have been available.

Archaeological evidence suggests the ornaments, known as "double buttons", may have been pressed into leather to decorate armbands or belts.

Dr Hannah Koon, Director of the Light Stable Isotope facility at Bradford and co-author on the paper said: "Tracing the geographical origin of the raw material used to make archaeological shell ornaments is challenging; however, stable isotopes can be used to provide important palaeoenvironmental information. This is because the isotopic composition of the mineral component of shells records the environmental conditions, including temperature and salinity, at the time when the organisms were growing.

“The stable isotope values of carbon and oxygen, indicated that the shells analysed in this study were formed in freshwater environments, and δ18O values in the shell mineral yielded the average annual δ18O values typical of local precipitations indicating the shells were locally sourced."

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