Just Beauty or Magic Too? Flint figurines and Their Place in Prehistoric Culture of the North

Based on the generalization and systematization of information about flint figurines from sites in the Far Northeast of Europe (Komi Republic, Nenets Autonomous Area, and Perm Territory) the author tries to determine their place in the prehistoric culture of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age. The main question is what were those flint implements for the people of that time: “a beauty in itself” or an expression of ideas of the supernatural? To find the answer, data on the shapes and traces of flint items, their contexts, cultural attribution, and chronology were analyzed. Two main periods of distribution among bifacial cultures have been identified: the Lyalovo culture, the 1st half of the 5th m. BC and the Garino culture, 3rd — 1st half of the 2nd m. BC The evidence of special properties of figurines and/or pendants in comparison with other artifacts have not been found yet. They accompanied the everyday life of people, went out of use on settlements together with households and workshop assemblages. Some of them show traces of long-term wear in containers or on the body/clothes, while others have been made at an abandoned site. Some are former tools, and evidence of the irrational in them may be associated with personal stories. This information and other research data suggest that flint figurines are mainly an expression of prehistoric aesthetics. Their possible magic may have been purely personal and we will probably never find evidence of it

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Beauty · Bronze · Bronze Age · Chalcolithic · Clothing · Geography · Prehistory · Sociology · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Anthropology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology