Contour Cut-out
Personal ornament element
Isturitz type, Pyrénées-Atlantiques
Magdalenian
21 000 to 14 000 years
Animal head cut from flat bone, most often a horse hyoid bone
Y. Taborin, S. Thiébault, A. Leroi-Gourhan, Dictionnaire de la Préhistoire, P.U.F, Paris, 1988
Commentary :
Most contour cut-outs, or contours découpés, are made from the flat hyoid bone, found under the lower part of a horse’s tongue.
Only the wide, triangular part of this bone, which is shaped like a horse head, is used.
One or two pierced holes suggest they served as pendants, necklaces or ornaments on clothing.
During the Middle Magdalenian, contour cut-outs were remarkably standardized throughout the Pyrenees.
This uniformity reflects the existence of numerous exchanges of objects, and ideas, between distant hunter-gatherer groups.