The ostrich egg trade

This prompted by skimming the paper at reference 1.

Necklaces and other body ornaments have been made with beads made from ostrich shells for a very long time in Africa, perhaps for as long as 50,000 years. In historical time they were often used for ceremonial exchange, an exchange of goods which did not support life in a direct way, but an exchange which still served to create or maintain social bonds, in something of the same way as exchanges of meals, drinks and things from gift shops and souvenir shops still do today. And it seems quite likely that such beads were used in this way in prehistorical times. Lévi-Strauss wrote quite a lot about all this at reference 2.

Such beads have the present advantage that they are very durable, and can last for tens of thousands of years.

It also seems that one can measure the ratio of two isotopes of Strontium occurring in matter. If the matter is surface rock, we can draw contour maps of the ratio. If the matter is organic, the composition of that matter will reflect where the organ in question once lived and we can try to map the ratio onto our contour map.

It so happens that the Lesotho highlands, embedded inside what is now South Africa, where numbers of ancient ostrich egg beads have been found, some around 30,000 years old, are in the middle of concentric rings of such contour maps. Another clue is the distribution of ostriches, not thought to have changed much over the period. From which the authors of the present paper deduce that the beads found in Lesotho look to have travelled south between 100km and 300km from their place of origin. A fair distance for hunter gatherer bands in the middle stone age, suggesting trading or exchange links between bands which are strong enough to end up spanning such distances.

The authors go on to speculate about how exactly this might have come about. Brave men and woman!

The illustration is of an ostrich egg shell necklace trimmed with blue faience, perhaps 3,500-4,000 years old, from Egypt, now in the Royal Ontario Museum Of Archaeology at Toronto. Turned up by the Digital Public Library of America at reference 3.

Reference 1: Ostrich eggshell bead strontium isotopes reveal persistent macroscale social networking across late Quaternary southern Africa - Brian A. Stewart, Yuchao Zhao, Peter J. Mitchell, Genevieve Dewar, James D. Gleason, and Joel D. Blum – 2020.

Reference 2: The Elementary Structures of Kinship – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1947.

Reference 3: https://dp.la/.