Abstract Shamanic belief systems represent the first form of religious practice visible within the global archaeological record. Here we report on the earliest known evidence of shamanic costume: modified red deer crania headdresses from the Early Holocene site of Star Carr (c. 11 kya). More than 90% of the examples from prehistoric Europe come from this one site, establishing it as a place of outstanding shamanistic/cosmological significance. Our work, involving a programme of experimental replication, analysis of macroscopic traces, organic residue analysis and 3D image acquisition, metrology and visualisation, represents the first attempt to understand the manufacturing processes used to create these artefacts. The results produced were unexpected—rather than being carefully crafted objects, elements of their production can only be described as expedient.

Citation: Little A, Elliott B, Conneller C, Pomstra D, Evans AA, Fitton LC, et al. (2016) Technological Analysis of the World’s Earliest Shamanic Costume: A Multi-Scalar, Experimental Study of a Red Deer Headdress from the Early Holocene Site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire, UK. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0152136. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152136 Editor: Michael D. Petraglia, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM Received: December 23, 2015; Accepted: March 8, 2016; Published: April 13, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Little et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper. Funding: European Research Council funded the POSTGLACIAL Project, No. 283938. NM received the funding. English Heritage funded part of this research, grant numbers 6793 and 6796. NM received the funding. The funders supported the excavation of the site of Star Carr which led to the discovery of the headdress, its analysis, and the preparation of this manuscript. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the 'Fragmented Heritage' Research Project (AH/L00688X/1), under which aspects of the acquisition and metrology of 3D data presented by this research took place. ASW and AAE received this funding. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction Shamanic belief systems, the earliest form of religious practice, emerged during the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods [1–3] and are still common today amongst hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural communities [4–6]. Archaeologically, shamanism is typically identified via rock art and specific types of burial practices; rich burials suggest that shamans enjoyed a high status amongst these groups, similar to that of social leaders [1, 2]. While shamanic burials have been identified from the mid-Upper Palaeolithic onwards [2, 3], none of the burials that predate the Mesolithic have preserved evidence of any form of shamanic costume. The one mooted exception to this is the unusual burial of Brno II (c. 28 kya) [3], where stone and bone roundels found with the body have been compared to discs worn by Siberian shamans. This, however, is problematic: only one of the 14 roundels is perforated, so these are unlikely to have been worn. Furthermore the burial was discovered by workmen in 1891, and the excavations lack the levels of recording required to establish a stratigraphic relationship between the artefacts and the burial itself. As a result we have little understanding of early ritual costumes, which in accounts of more recent shamanic practices seem to have played a key role in shamanic power. Antler headdresses are an element of shamanic dress in Siberian reindeer cultures and feature in iconography from the Pleistocene, where they have also been linked to shamanic practices. At Star Carr, North Yorkshire, UK, a total of 24 red deer headdresses have been found. These headdresses date to c.11 kyr, representing c. 90% of all such known artefacts across early prehistoric Europe. Located on the edge of a paleo-lake, with good preservation of organic remains, Star Carr is one of the best known sites in Europe, and has become synonymous with our understanding of Early Mesolithic lifeways. The headdresses recovered from the site are formed from the upper part of a male red deer skull with the antlers attached—the lower jaw and cranial bones having been removed and the parietal (and occasionally frontal) bones perforated. The perforations and traces of smoothing observed on the anterior of the parietal are taken as indication of their use as headdresses [4]. In this paper we report, for the first time, detailed analysis of the method of manufacture of these earliest shamanic costumes. Initial interpretations of the function of the Star Carr headdresses were split between use as deer disguises for hunting and shamanic costumes [5]. The former has been supported through the use of ethnographic analogies with North American groups [6–11]. However, in more recent years archaeologists have highlighted the potential for historical continuity between the inhabitants of Mesolithic Northern Europe and the more recent hunter-gatherer and pastoral groups of circumpolar Eurasia [12, 13]. Evidence for the use of deer hunting disguises within these historically documented groups is conspicuous in its absence, whilst examples of shamanic costumes featuring antlers are numerous [14]. As such, more recent discussions of the Star Carr headdresses have stressed their cosmological significance, their general role as ritualised headgear, and the lack of distinction between these supposedly separate functions within analogous ethnographic groups [15–19]. In fact, since their discovery in the 1940’s, the headdresses (along with key depictions from Upper Palaeolithic art, such as an antlered individual in the cave of Les Trois Freres, Arierge, France) have been widely used as the basis for accounts of the origin of shamanic belief systems in the European Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic [20,21,22]. Due to their rarity and socio-religious significance, in particular their connection to shamanic practices, the Star Carr headdresses have captured the imagination of scholars since their initial discovery nearly seventy years ago [23]. Shamans can be defined as religious specialists and therapists, who mediate cosmological, social and political discourses both within and between oral cultures [24]. Ethnohistorical accounts describe how shamans enter a trance state to communicate with animal spirits, often experienced as a physical transformation into the animal in question [16, 25]. During ritual ceremonies this typically involves the wearing of a costume that integrates animal references and identifies the shaman with their animal spirit [26, 27]. Costumes vary, but the wearing of a symbolic headdress representing the head of the shaman’s animal spirit is not uncommon. In the case of the South Siberian (Eveny) and Mongolian (Evenki) peoples, a deer skull cap with antlers was worn, closely resembling that of the Star Carr headdresses (Fig 1). In other instances the skins, skulls and bones are retained by, for example, the Khanty (see Fig 5.11 in [24]) or reapplied; the latter sometimes involving a ‘collaging’ of various animal pelts [28]. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Depiction of an Evenki shaman wearing antler headdress (after Witsen 1785, 655). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152136.g001 Recent excavations at Star Carr in 2013 uncovered three new headdresses. The most complete (find no. 103625) is represented by the frontal and parietal bones of a male Cervus elaphus (red deer), with pedicles and associated antler beams and tines intact. Although lacking dentition, the size and robustness of the skull combined with the development of the antlers indicates that this was a mature adult. Comparison of this specimen with examples of 20th century deer skulls from Scotland confirmed this animal to be at least 50% larger than modern counterparts.

Results, Discussion and Conclusion The overall manufacturing sequence of this headdress can be summarised as follows: a mature red deer male was killed in autumn or winter before the antlers were shed. The head was removed, probably superficially cleaned, before work commenced on producing the headdress. The first stage of the process may have been focused on the beams to remove a large amount of antler, some of which may have formed ‘blanks’ for the production of barbed projectile tips which were then used to hunt and fish. However, it is also possible that in some cases antler blank removal happened much later after the headdress had been used; in which case the process functioned either as a form of decommissioning of the headdress and/or the recycling of antler. Given the amount of worked antler present at the site, including over 200 barbed projectile tips, this latter theory is not implausible. The skull itself was first worked in an ad hoc manner with a core tool. Emphasis was placed on achieving a desired form rather than labouring over refinement of edges/surfaces. At this point there are two diverging hypotheses: a tool was used to chop through the skin, initiating the de-skinning process; or the skin was left on, the upper half of the cranium covered with damp clay, before being placed into the embers of a fire. The skull was subsequently retrieved, and the charred bone removed using a small hammerstone. After removing the clay, the skin (if remaining) was peeled away from the frontal and parietal bones. The cranium was defleshed with muscle attachments below the pedicle being chopped with a core tool, and the brain, which experiments show was cooked to perfection for consumption with this method, then removed with a flint blade. Perforations on each side of the cranium were made using a hand-held flint core tool (possibly the same pointed tranchet adze used for initiating de-skinning and detaching muscle). Our work raises new questions regarding the precise form of the headdress when worn in a shamanic context. It has been impossible to determine the exact point at which the antlers were reduced into the shape observed on the recovered artefacts. If reduction occurred prior to the modification of the cranial bones it can be variously argued that this was a functional solution to minimising the total weight of the object, a way of controlling and defining the intended form of the headdress, as well as providing raw material which could be used to create other forms of antler artefacts such as projectile points. It is, however, possible that the other factors influenced the decision to reduce the antlers in the manner observed on headdress 103625. Evenki shaman are known to enhance the sharpness of antlers in order to make them more ‘spear-like’ as they take soul-flights to negotiate, and if need be, fight with spirits encountered on different levels of the sky when in a trance state [28]. In either case, if the antlers were reduced post-cranial modification, and potentially post-use, then this implies that the antlers were intact when the headdress was worn. In this scenario, the form of excavated examples is not as representative of the shaman’s headdress as previously believed, but instead represents later recycling of antler. In the case of headdress 103625, antler was removed in a way which allowed both for the creation of other antler objects, and the retention of specific aspects of the antlers’ original form. The possible recycling of raw material for tool production from a shaman’s headdress would suggest a strong physical and symbolic act of decommissioning was at play. The analysis presented here represents the first scientific study of the oldest known evidence of a shamanic costume, and as such forms a major contribution to the understanding of some of the earliest religious artefacts in the world. We have demonstrated the techniques and methods used by hunter-gatherers to transform red deer heads into bone and antler headdresses 11 000 years ago in North Western Europe. Whilst new questions arise from this work, this research challenges previously held assumptions over the care and time invested in the modification of the animal’s “skull cap” in order to create these ritualistic artefacts, and instead suggests that this was achieved through expedient manufacturing techniques that incorporated the use of pyrotechnology.

Acknowledgments We thank the landowners, English Heritage and Natural England for allowing excavations on the site and the support from the Vale of Pickering Research Trust. Further thanks to the British Deer Society for providing the deer skull. This manuscript benefited from the anonymous reviewers’ comments, to who we are grateful.

Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: AL BE DP CC NM. Performed the experiments: AL BE DP ACC OEC AJAL. Analyzed the data: AL BE DP CC TO ACC OEC AJAL BK NM. Wrote the paper: AL BE CC AAE ASW PJ MJC OEC NM. Directed fieldwork and oversaw the recovery of the artefact: NM CC BT. Collected and processed scanning and photographic data: AAE LCF AH RD RK SO TS ASW.