Even before the tools were made easily with metal, one red-deer antler-piece contained the engineering decisions of a community in its marks: its scars flattened, ornamented, and finally discarded where they could not be recovered. That last step, to put it in waterlogged soil, made a banal substance into a permanent document of how Stone Age craft produced a synthesis of purpose and meaning.
An unusually elaborate fragment of an antler was found in a thick deposit of worked bone, stone and human remains in a Late Mesolithic settlement at Strandvegen in Motala, located along a water route that linked inland Sweden to the Baltic. The object is distinctive as it does not look like the tool that was discarded. It is a series, a life history painted on surfaces that had been smoothed and then erased and then smoothed, and then carved, and then erased, and then carved.
The piece that was cut on an antler of a red deer antler was dated to approximately 5500 BCE. But the fragment which was preserved is only 10.7 cm long–just big enough to be held in the hand, just big enough to keep choices in mind long enough. Microscopic observation reveals that a shallow decorative pattern of early scheme was worn down and a deeper one was created. The subsequent pattern is triangular and diagonal hatching, in which grooves filled by a sort of tar-like substance, which would have made a greater effect on pale antler. “They catch the eye as they are clearly different from other motifs,” Lars Larsson said. “The motifs certainly attract one’s eye.”
Such visual attraction was important since the antler probably started as a handle of an axe–it may have been ceremonial, or it may have been meant to be observed as much as it was used. The marks of wear and breakage indicate hits that could only have been made with an axe, and the wear and tear were an invitation and not a stop. At the moment the handle splintered, it was reworked: edges were changed and the fragment seems to have been a component of another implement, probably a harpoon. The change is rational in real life. Antler is hard, springy and cuttable with stone; a broken piece was still rolled into a barbed or gripping part. The cultural aspect of the shift is also logical. A device already imbibing labor and attention, and particularly communal attention, might be value-bearing even after the initial employment was a failure.
The second story of the re-carving is this: hands changed. “The degrees of precision shown, manners of execution, and motif selection in the later set of decorations suggest that more than one person carried it out,” according to Larsson, that it was not done by a single individual. The patterning is symmetrical and regulated on one side; less regular on another, as though more than one maker had a hand at various times, or a maker had been subject to varying conditions. In any case, the surface is like collaboration.
Its last context accentuates its point. The antler was found out of over 1,400 artifacts on a stone platform in a wetland area adjacent to the settlement shoreline, which also contained objects of decoration and human skeletal remains including skull fragments. A local excavation at the Kanaljorden site of Motala has also recorded skulls in stakes in a Mesolithic ritual deposit, confirming skulls in waterways in this area were placed on platforms and not lost.
The antler was already an axe and a harpoon, and had been made aesthetically rebuilt at least once, before the time when it was laid aside. The rest was done by water and peat, making a record of recycling: not simply the regeneration of material, but the regeneration of the role of an object in the social world in which it was created in the social life.
