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Becoming deer. Corporeal transformations at Star Carr

Chantal Conneller
Archaeological Dialogues / Volume 11 / Issue 01 / June 2004, pp 37 - 56
DOI: 10.1017/S1380203804001357, Published online: 08 December 2004

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1380203804001357

How to cite this article:
Chantal Conneller (2004). Becoming deer. Corporeal transformations at Star Carr. Archaeological
Dialogues, 11, pp 37-56 doi:10.1017/S1380203804001357
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C 2004 Cambridge University Press

Archaeological Dialogues 11 (1) 3756

DOI: 10:1017/S1380203804001357 Printed in the United Kingdom

Becoming deer. Corporeal transformations at Star Carr

Chantal Conneller
Abstract
This article examines the role of red deer antler masks recovered from the Early
Mesolithic site of Star Carr in northern England. It explores the agency of animals
and the type of agency attributable to objects made from parts of animals at the
site. When humans use or wear objects that are made from animal parts, I argue
that there are also important implications for the way in which the human body is
conceived. This article goes on to explore the types of body produced from the taking
on of objects made from animal remains and the implications that this has for the
ways both humans and animals were perceived during the Mesolithic.

Keywords
Star Carr; Mesolithic; animal agency; effects/affects; bodies

Between 1949 and 1951, 21 antler frontlets were recovered from excavations
at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire (Clark 1954). Each of these
objects, dating from the 10th millennium B.P., consists of the uppermost
part of the skull of a red deer, with the antlers still attached (Figure 1).
The antlers had been lightened through truncation and hollowing of the
beams and tines, the inside of the skull treated to smoothen or remove
protuberances, and two artificial perforations had been made through the
skull. These modifications are presumed to have facilitated their use as headgear.
The excavator of the site, Professor J.G.D. Clark, offered two interpretations of these unusual objects. Citing supportive ethnographic analogies in
both cases, he suggested they could have been used either as hunting aids,
to permit hunters to stalk animals at close range without being seen, or as
headgear in ritual dances (Clark 1954, 170). By offering both a functional
and a ritual analogy, Clark appeared to have covered all possibilities. And
since both hypotheses were based on a single ethnographic example, Clark
left no objective means for choosing between the two. As a result, Clarks
interpretations of the frontlets produced an impasse such that, with the
exception of syntheses that reiterate his views (Smith 1992, Prior 2003,
Mithen 2003), in the intervening 50 years they have been ignored. Though
various authors may instinctively prefer one or the other interpretation (e.g.
Mithen 2003, 137), due to the intransigence of the problem, they ultimately
recapitulate both possibilities.

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Figure 1 The Star Carr antler frontlets (photograph courtesy of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology).

This is a pity, for it has led to the frontlets and also certain other items
of material culture recovered from Star Carr, such as barbed antler points,
beads and axes, being neglected. Thus the numerous reinterpretations of the
site (see below) have continued in the structural-functionalist and economic
vein Clark established and focused on his preoccupations site function,
economy, seasonality of occupation and relationship with the surrounding
environment.
In this paper I would like to offer what I feel is a more productive
account of the frontlets, an account which, rather than adjudicating between
Clarks hypotheses, proceeds from a different perspective altogether. This

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39

account, inspired by recent work in anthropology, material culture studies

and queer theory, explores the relationship between the frontlets, the animals
from which they derive and the people that wore them. I want to examine
the relationship between bodies and objects and, more specifically, the
implications for the types of body produced from the connection between
humans and objects objects that themselves were once part of animal bodies.

Star Carr and the Early Mesolithic of the Vale of Pickering

Star Carr is one of a number of Early Mesolithic sites (dating in the main to
the second half of the 10th millennium B.P. uncal.) that are located in the
Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, near to the coastal town of Scarborough
(Figure 2). These sites were originally situated on the shore of a palaeolake,
Lake Flixton, and on islands in the middle of the lake (Figure 3). The lake
has long since gone, swamped by peat development, but the area remains
waterlogged, resulting in the preservation of organic material, a rare situation
in a British context. This is the factor that originally attracted Grahame Clark
to the area, since he was looking for a site with good organic preservation
on which to test the new economic theories he was developing at that time
(Clark 1952). Star Carr was excavated between 1949 and 1951 and yielded
a dazzling range of Early Mesolithic material culture: 21 antler frontlets,
191 barbed antler points, elk antler mattocks and various bone tools, a
wooden paddle, a wooden platform, beads, animal bones, stone tools and
manufacturing debris. There has been some debate about the nature of
the deposit from which these items were recovered (Chatterton 2003), as
the section drawings Clark published are rather inadequate. However, the
majority of the organic artefacts seem to have been recovered from detritus
muds that were possibly stabilized by a timber platform, and which would
have been, at least seasonally, under water.
Clark interpreted Star Carr as a residential base camp that had been
occupied in the winter months by four or five families. Since the excavation
publication the site has been the focus of numerous reinterpretations (e.g.
Clark 1972; Caulfield 1978; Jacobi 1978; Pitts 1979; Andresen et al. 1981;
Price 1982; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988; Carter 1997; Mellars and Dark
1998; Pollard 2000; Conneller 2003; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003;
Chatterton 2003). The main thrust of these new contributions has been to
revise the season of occupation to late spring/summer and to point out that
the representation of faunal parts would be unusual for a residential base
camp (Caulfield 1978; Jacobi 1978; Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988; Carter
1997). Legge and Rowley-Conwy (1988), comparing the Star Carr faunal
signature with patterns noted by Binford in his Nunamuit ethnoarchaeology
(1978), have suggested that the sites fauna is more indicative of a hunting
camp.
Further small-scale excavations at Star Carr during the mid- to late 1980s
suggested greater complexity than originally recognized. These excavations
indicated that Clark had only excavated a small portion of the original area of
occupation, while macroscopic charcoal evidence indicated that Star Carr had
been repeatedly occupied (Mellars and Dark 1998). This work suggests that
imposing a single explanation for the site is likely to be oversimplistic. More

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Figure 2 Location of Star Carr and the Vale of Pickering.

recent approaches have noted unusual patterns of deposition at Star Carr and
suggested a ritual component to actions undertaken at the site (Pollard 2000;
Conneller 2000; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003; Chatterton 2003).
Since 1976 further excavations have been undertaken around the edge of
Lake Flixton (Schadla-Hall 1987; 1988; 1989; Conneller and Schadla-Hall
2003; Lane and Schadla-Hall, forthcoming). These have revealed a number
of new Early Mesolithic sites (Figure 3) and for the first time permitted an
assessment of the local context and significance of Star Carr. One immediately
obvious contrast between Star Carr and neighbouring sites is in the range

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Figure 3 Location of Early Mesolithic sites in the Vale of Pickering. The contour in bold represents the
lake edge.

of material culture recovered. Many objects found at Star Carr are simply
not present elsewhere in the vale. During 25 years of excavation along the
shoreline of Lake Flixton we have found no more antler frontlets and no
more beads. Only one barbed point has been found in comparison with the
191 examples found at Star Carr and only two axes, compared to the 12
found in Clarks excavations and more recent fieldwalking in the area of
the site. Though organic preservation has deteriorated since Clark excavated
Star Carr due to modern intensive drainage practices, well-preserved faunal
remains have been recovered from many of the new sites, suggesting more
significant processes are operating. This difference between sites does not
appear to represent a cultural distinction since all sites contain Star Carrtype microliths (Radley and Mellars 1964; Reynier 1998) and utilize the
same flint sources.
Another difference between Star Carr and other Early Mesolithic sites is
in the scale and frequency of occupation. The newly excavated sites appear
to represent a series of fairly small-scale activity areas around the lake edge
(Conneller 2000; 2001; Conneller and Schadla-Hall 2003). These include
both generalized sites, where a variety of tools were manufactured and
used, and task-specific sites. These latter include a site where scrapers were
manufactured, a site where nodules were decorticated and cores prepared,
a site where microliths were manufactured and sites lacking manufacturing
debris entirely where previously prepared tools were used in various tasks.
These are all much smaller in size than Star Carr and, with the exception of
sites VPD and Flixton I (on Flixton Island), all have lower lithic densities.
Sites were rarely reoccupied and, on the few occasions they were, the focus of
activities seems to have changed. Seamer D, for example, was successively a
cache of raw material and a place were tools were used. This also represents

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a contrast with Star Carr, which the dating evidence suggests was repeatedly
occupied.
It is in the context of these patterns of activity that the antler frontlets must
be considered. To people in the area, the Vale of Pickering was a familiar
place that was repeatedly visited; a wide variety of tasks were undertaken
in the vale and several caches were left for later retrieval. Once abandoned,
old occupation sites tended to be avoided, with new activity taking place in
adjacent areas. In contrast, however, Star Carr was repeatedly occupied and
was the focus of deposition for a number of different objects, including the
frontlets, that are rare or absent from other sites in the vale. With this new
understanding of the local context of Star Carr, it is possible to re-examine
Clarks interpretation of the frontlets and offer a new understanding of their
role.

Humans, animals and things

Clark saw the antler frontlets as a disguise to conceal the true human body.
If the frontlets had acted as hunting aids, their role as a disguise was fairly
obvious concealing the wearer from animals stalked by the hunter: Deer
were frequently approached by the hunter covering himself with a deer hide
and putting on his own head a stuffed deer head (Kroeber 1925, 817, cited in
Clark 1972, 13). If they acted as props in ritual dances their role as a disguise
is less explicit; however, Clarks analysis still appears to retain this sense. He
refers, for example, to antlers worn in this context as masks (Clark 1954,
170), a word with very definite connotations of disguise. Rather than being
concealed from animals, in this scenario the wearers would be concealed from
a human audience. Though in this scenario the persons role or identity may
be momentarily altered, it is implicit in this formulation that the body of the
person wearing it is not fundamentally or corporeally changed. The mask,
here, brings about a social or symbolic change, not a biological one. In
both of Clarks interpretations the frontlets are therefore regarded as having
no fundamental effect upon the body of the wearer, so the only direction for
interpretation is determining the context in which they were worn hunting
or ritual. Instead I would like to proceed from a different approach, one that
sees the frontlets as revealing, rather than concealing, bodies.
Clarks vision of the antler frontlets as a disguise rested on a number of
more general dichotomies of Western thought: the division between humans
and animals, the separateness of humans and things and the stability and
immutability of bodies as a biological given. Working within this tradition
the frontlets could have no effect on the human body, other than concealing
it from an animal or human audience. This Western way of dividing up the
world is, of course, a culturally and historically particular one and it would
be a mistake to attribute it uncritically to the people who inhabited Star Carr
without first a rigorous investigation of the categories involved. As a point of
departure for this project, I wish to co-opt an analogy of my own.
Viveiros de Castro (1998) describes the perspective shared by various
Amerindian groups of the relationship between human and animal bodies
and the possibilities for transformation of these bodies. While Westerners
see the difference between humans and animals as primarily internal, in

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the presence of a soul, the mind or self-consciousness, for the Amerindians

the difference is external and located in the body. This is because, for the
Amerindians, humans, spirits, animals (or at least important animals) and
even certain objects are internally identical; each contains a common inner
essence a soul or spirit that is identical and immutable. In contrast to this
stable inner part, the outer form, the body of both humans and animals,
is seen as both mutable and relational; both human and animal bodies can
transform.
The combination of an identical soul or spirit and a mutable or relational
body means that amongst themselves, animals see fellow conspecifics as
humans and view such things as their beaks, claws, fur or feathers as bodily
decorations or cultural implements. This perspectivism also determines the
way a species will view another species, depending on their relationship with
them. So for prey animals like tapir, other tapir will look like humans and
humans will look like jaguar; for predators such as jaguar, humans will appear
as tapir or white-lipped peccaries.
Because human and animal souls are identical, the perspectivism that gives
each species its particular viewpoint, its particular way of acting in the world,
must be located in the body. Viveiros de Castro thus suggests that animal
bodies should be viewed as an assemblage of effects or ways of being that
constitute a habitus (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 478). So when particular
people in Amerindian societies take on aspects of animal bodies, they are not
doing so to disguise or conceal their own bodies; rather, taking on part of
an animals body allows for harnessing animal effects and for adopting the
animals perspective, which is located in its body. Thus people take on the
animal habitus in order to enter into a particular set of relationships with
the world. Viveiros de Castro gives the analogy of a diver donning a wet
suit. The wet suit is not worn because the diver wants to look like a fish, but
because the diver wants to act like a fish. So a sorcerer who transforms into
a bear does not do so as a disguise, but in order to harness bear effects in
order to undertake suitably bear-like activities.
Ingold (2000, 94), in an essay that explores similar themes, quotes an
Ojibwa story (taken from Bourgeois 1994, 69) of a man who sank to the
bottom of a lake when his boat capsized:
He thought of the beaver, whereupon the beaver came to him and gave him
his body. He swam towards the shore, but before he could reach it, he felt
himself losing his power to keep the shape of the beaver. So he thought of
the otter. Then the otter gave him his body, and in that form he reached
land.
There Ironmaker found himself naked in his own body. It was freezing
weather ... He would have died of cold but for the help of four other animals
which, one after the other, lent him their bodies to get home: First the bear,
in whose form he went a good way, then the lynx, then the raccoon and
after that the buffalo.

These examples are not presented as analogies of the events and processes
that might have been occurring at Star Carr. I do not view these accounts

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as sources of facts that can be relied on to shore up the less readily

interpretable archaeological evidence. As anthropologists are acutely aware,
these ethnographies are not objective representations of a truth that is out
there, they are interpretations, necessarily incorporating the subjectivity of
the author (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1998). Viveiros de Castros
account does not derive its power as a direct representation of Amerindian
perspectives on the world that can in turn offer an analogy of Mesolithic
peoples perspectives on animals; rather it is an interpretation of how the
categories of culture/nature, mind/body, can be re-articulated in the study of
another culture.
I presented Viveiros de Castros account for two reasons. First, it
rigorously examines the nature/culture, mind/body categories, retaining them
as analytical devices, but articulated in a very different manner in the
Amerindian context. It reveals different possibilities for the relation of these
categories. But rather than drawing upon this as an analogy, the context
of Star Carr and the patterned connections of the material evidence found
there must be intimately examined in order to attempt a re-articulation of
nature/culture specific to that place and time. A second reason for presenting
this account is that Viveiros de Castros interpretation of animal bodies as
an assemblage of effects and ways of being is theoretically useful beyond
the boundaries of his ethnography. The concept offers a new theoretical
perspective and so new ways to think about objects made from animal
remains and to begin to explore relationships between objects and bodies
at Star Carr. Animals come to be seen not as the recipients of a series of
Linnaean characteristics, but rather as an assemblage composed of a number
of ways of perceiving and acting in the world.
Viveiros de Castros term effect refers to the ways animals undertake
certain activities. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) employ a similar term: affects.
This has the somewhat broader meaning of both the active and passive affects
of which an animal or other agent is capable, the ability both to affect and
be affected. They give the example of a tick, which has the following affects:
attracted by light, it climbs a branch; smelling an animal, it lands on it; finally
it digs into the animals skin. However, in contrast to Viveiros de Castros
account, for Deleuze and Guattari the tick does not constitute, as an entity,
an assemblage of its affects (though at times it may do); rather one or more
of its affects appears as part of a broader assemblage, at various instances
composed of the ticks legs and a branch or the ticks snout and the blood and
skin of an animal on which it has landed. Viveiros de Castro, as a result of
his interpretation of a specific articulation of nature and culture common to
various Amerindian groups, breaks down bodies into assemblages of effects,
whereas Deleuze and Guattari, as part of their commitment to challenge
dichotomous thinking, argue on an ontological basis that the ticks various
affects are part of broader assemblages.
Both accounts emphasize the corporeality of the animal, yet do not see it
as a bounded, unchanging entity. Nor is the animal a series of passive traits.
The wolf, for example, is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain
number of characteristics; it is a wolfing (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 239).
In other words, the wolf is an assemblage of its wolfish actions. Both Viveiros

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de Castro and Deleuze and Guattari offer possibilities for the transformation
and breaking down of animal bodies. Seeing animals as an assemblage of
bodily effects, or as part of broader assemblages of affects, seeing their agency
distributed in their connections with other things, has important implications
for thinking about objects made from their remains: for in manufacturing
artefacts from them, animal bodies were broken down into their constituent
parts and were then reassembled with other things.

Animal effects
It has become an axiom of recent material culture studies that objects have
agency (e.g. Kopytoff 1986; Gell 1998; Knappett 2002). In contrast to earlier
symbolic approaches in which things were regarded as relatively passive
recipients of the meanings that people ascribe to them, this perspective has
stressed the extent to which things act back (as Lucas 2000 has it) on people,
changing the ways in which they act, think and perceive. In this view, action
is not simply something that people do to things. Rather it is something that
emerges in the dialectic between the two (e.g. Jones 2001), or, as Latour
(1999) has it, in a somewhat different way, it emerges through networks or
associations combining different people and things. But what if an object is
itself manufactured from part of a once-living organism? Does this change
the kinds of agency that can be attributed to it? This is an important question
for Star Carr, where a large proportion of the material culture recovered was
made from animal remains.
Barbed antler points, elk antler mattocks, various bone tools and red
deer tooth and bird bone beads were recovered in addition to the frontlets.
Furthermore, usewear on scrapers reveals that hideworking was a major task
at the site (Dumont 1988; 1989). Connections between two of these artefact
types the antler frontlets and barbed antler points suggest that some of
these items at least retained a strong sense of their animalness. Both of these
classes of object, though common at Star Carr, are rare elsewhere. Antler
frontlets have not been found on any other British Mesolithic site; the only
other examples known come from three sites in Germany (Reinbacher 1956;
Schuldt 1961; Street 1991; 1998). Though numerous barbed points were
recovered from Star Carr (Figure 4), as described earlier, more than 25 years
of excavation around the edge of the lake on which Star Carr was situated
have yielded only one additional barbed point. Furthermore, Jacobi (1978)
notes that only the initial stage of the manufacturing process of the barbed
antler points is represented at Star Carr. The points were finished elsewhere
and used in various parts of the landscape in the hunting of different animals,
including red deer themselves. However, the points were specially returned to
the site for deposition in the waterlogged part of the site. The task of barbed
point manufacture also appears to have been intimately connected to the
life history of the frontlets. As I described earlier, the Star Carr frontlets
have had some tines removed and beams hollowed. However, a similar
pair of antler frontlets, recovered from the German Early Mesolithic site
of Bedburg-Konigshoven,
are intact. Martin Street (1991) thus suggests tines

were removed from the Star Carr frontlets not to lighten them but because
they have been exploited as a source of raw material for the manufacture

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Figure 4 Bone and antler artefacts from Star Carr (no. 7 actual size, others half size). 1: elk antler
mattock head, 2 and 6: barbed points, 3: wooden paddle, 4: aurochs metapodial scraper, 5: elk
metapodial awl, 7: amber bead. (Reproduced with permission from Mellars and Dark 1998).

of barbed points. Many of the frontlets are also broken and could have
been broken up as a source of raw material, or exploited when no longer
used.
The barbed points and the frontlets are thus connected through their life
histories; though they were used in different ways and had different functions,
they originated from the same source and were reunited through deposition
in the same place. They are absent or near absent from the rest of the Vale
of Pickering since they were aggregated and specially deposited together in
the waterlogged part of the Star Carr site. Despite being different objects I
would argue that they were treated in the same way in deposition because

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of a lingering connection with the animal they originally derived from. This
reassembling of these different objects, after the death of the animal they
were once part of, implies that the people who occupied Star Carr retained
a conception of the animalness of both artefacts. Rather than viewing these
objects as passive recipients of meaning, as retaining some symbolic sense
of animal, these artefacts can be seen as incorporating elements of their
original animal agency or, more particularly, as animal effects. So taking on,
for instance, barbed points made of red deer antler would allow people to
harness antler effects in order to enter into particular relationships with the
world and in doing so to incorporate new perspectives on it. In a similar
fashion, Ingold, in a discussion of animistic societies, notes that very often
animal skins are tailored to cover corresponding parts of the human body,
so the skin of the head would be made into a hood, that of the legs into
trousers or boots (Ingold 2000, 124). In this fashion the person wearing the
skin would not simply make use of the functional qualities of the skin, but of
the effects and perspective of the animal-in-action.

Human bodies
Taking on parts of animal bodies that act as animal effects has important
implications for the human body. For Westerners, the human body has
traditionally been seen as natural, as a biological given, existing as a stable,
bounded entity prior to, and unalterable by, any cultural ornaments (such
as antler frontlets) it might later acquire. However, in the past two decades
feminists and queer theorists have problematized the idea of the body as a
natural biological entity, existing prior to cultural elaboration. Butler (1990;
1993), for example, has examined how what we consider to be naturally
sexed bodies are produced through repetitive acts of gender stylization, thus
bringing into question the idea of bodies as natural objects unaffected by
the social conditions of their generation. Others have problematized the idea
of bodies as bounded entities, describing the incorporation of objects within
the human body (Strathern 1991) or hybrid machineorganisms (Haraway
1991). If, then, humans are taking on and utilizing particular properties of
animals at Star Carr, how does this change the way in which we theorize the
body in this context?
At, or in the vicinity of, Star Carr, animal bodies were broken down and
reassembled with other things and agents. Antlers were partitioned from red
deer and transformed into the frontlets and also into barbed points. Elk antlers
were made into mattock heads (Figure 4). Elk and aurochs bones were used
for tools such as scrapers and awls. Red deer teeth and bird bones were used
as beads. As noted above, usewear reveals that hideworking was a major
task at Star Carr (Dumont 1988; 1989), while the recovery of faunal remains
indicates that flesh was also partitioned at the site. In all these ways, animal
effects extended the human body. People wore animal skins and beads of
animal teeth and bone, they ate animal flesh as food and used parts of animals
to extend their capacities in various tasks. These animals were intrinsic parts
of different human identities. So in this sense there is already, in mundane
daily activity, ambiguity about where human bodies end and animal bodies

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start. Parts of humans transform animals, who in turn alter and extend human
bodies.
In a Deleuzian sense, then, these humananimal connections can be viewed
as producing new assemblages assemblages composed of human hands and
animal antler objects, or human skin and animal skins. These assemblages
break down distinctions between humans and animals and challenge the
boundedness of bodies. But can it be argued, as Viveiros de Castro does in
his study of Amerindian understandings of animals, that these concepts had
some meaning for the people at Star Carr who used tools made of animal
remains? Did they see the animal tools as literally extending their bodies, in
a manner analogous to the canoes that Strathern argues extend the bodies of
the Gawan (Strathern 1991)? Were objects made from animal remains media
through which human bodies were explicitly transformed?

Becoming animal
The evidence from Star Carr indicates that the frontlets, or more particularly
objects made from antler, had more formal significance in the way people
thought about human and animal identities. The frontlets effects in
transforming the human body and rendering its boundaries ambiguous seem
to have been more explicit than the effects of some other animal tools. As I
argued earlier, the frontlets and the barbed points, linked through their rarity
and the special depositionary practices accorded them, retained a sense of their
animalness. The unusual depositionary practices at the site seem particularly
focused on objects made from the antlers of red deer. Antler also appears to
have had a special connection with the site. Though faunal remains suggest
the site was occupied in the late spring and summer, both shed and unshed
antler has been recovered from the site. This suggests that antler raw material
was collected at all times of the year and saved for use at Star Carr. Antler
objects, rather than other animal-derived materials, such as food or clothing,
appear to have been the most significant media through which people thought
about the relationship between humans and animals.
Consumption of food and the wearing of clothes often appear in
ethnographic accounts to be important ways in which these ideas are mediated
(e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1952). Though this could also have been the case at Star
Carr, there is no evidence to prove this. While food refuse and at least the
manufacturing implements associated with skin production are found at Star
Carr, these are also found on most sites in the vicinity. This is in stark contrast
to the paucity of frontlets and barbed points recovered from surrounding
sites. This suggests that though clothing and food could have been one way
people thought about the relationship between humans and animals, at Star
Carr they had at least less formal significance than the antler artefacts. So
the antlers, and possibly also the face of the animal, as the reconstruction
(Figure 5) shows, appear to have been the animal effect considered most
vital in its animalness. And so by taking on this deer-effect, by wearing
the frontlets, people at Star Carr explicitly drew attention to their bodies,
renegotiating their bodily boundaries and perspectives. The formal taking on
of parts of animals enabled the transformation of the human body. Similar
transformations are explored by Deleuze and Guattari, who offer what is in

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Figure 5 Reconstruction of the frontlets as headgear (drawing by P. Conneller).

effect a recipe (Grosz 1994) for becoming animal:

An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make sure your organism enters
into composition with something else in such a way, that the particles

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emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of

the relations of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which
they enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more
or less directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animals
natural food, or its exterior relations with other animals, or an apparatus
or prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal, or something that
does not have a localizable relation to the animal in question (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988, 274).

This is not to say that the person following this recipe will literally become a
dog. Becoming animal is not about moving between different bodies. Though
the animal is not literal, the transformation is. Parts of human bodies connect
with parts of animal bodies to produce a new assemblage of bodily effects,
one that is something else entirely, not human, not dog, that relates to the
world in a new way. Just as the animal part transforms the human body, so
the conjunction with human parts transforms the animal.
With these insights in mind, we can move beyond Clarks ritualfunctional
impasse. We can stop seeing the frontlets as a disguise, but rather explore
how humans and animal bodies were produced at Star Carr. As animal
effects, the frontlets facilitated a bodily transformation. This was not a literal
transformation into deer, but one that turned the human body into something
else, by taking on the effects of the animal. Taking on the frontlets also enabled
new ways of seeing. As Donna Haraway points out, viewpoints of the world
are not simply related to biologically discrete organisms or individuals, but
are materially mediated and are constructed and extended through the use
of tools and instruments. In this way, she talks of the need to learn to see
faithfully from others point of view even if the other is our own machine.
(Haraway 1988, 583). By machine she refers both to the human body and its
organs and to the machines and tools through which perceptual translations
are arrived at. Wearing the frontlets would be one such way of seeing from
anothers point of view, since it would facilitate engagement with the world
from a different perspective.
In light of this analysis, we can return to the question of agency. Having
examined the histories of objects made from animal parts at Star Carr, we
can see how different parts of animals change or extend the human body in
different ways. Armed with the idea of animal effects and mindful of recent
work in material culture studies, I have argued that in some way all animal
objects can be seen as agents. Animal tools affect things and people and extend
the human body. But I would also argue that the agency of certain animal
objects was seen as qualitatively different by the people who occupied Star
Carr. These objects appear to have been more formally significant in their
effects in transforming and extending the human body. I have argued that
the frontlets and barbed points were important because they retained a sense
of their animal agency and that antlers were particularly significant in the
red deer effect they rendered. It is thus not enough simply to think of objects
as agents. Certain agencies are qualitatively different from others in their
potency and the range of effects they render. All things have some degree of
agency, but it is the context that reveals the power of particular objects in the

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past. In this way, my account has attempted to move beyond the more general
debate about agency, to examine the specific ways in which different things
are seen to modify or extend the capacities of people in particular contexts.

Transformations at Star Carr

Star Carr was a place where bodily transformations were explicit. In this
context it is unlikely to be a coincidence that beads are the final artefact type
which are found in large numbers at Star Carr (e.g. Figure 4(7)), but rare
elsewhere (in Britain, only Nab Head, which appears to have been a bead
manufacturing site, has yielded more examples than Star Carr). Beads can
also play a role in producing particular types of body, indicating that Star
Carr was a place where the production and maintenance of particular kinds
of body were important.
A further striking factor of the site is the length of time these practices
appear to have persisted. This is a major contrast with other sites situated in
the Vale of Pickering, which, as described above, were either abandoned after
a single occupation or reoccupied for very different purposes (Conneller and
Schadla-Hall 2003). Clark, in the original monograph, also suggested two
main phases of occupation based on barbed-point seriation, during both of
which antler was worked (Clark 1954, 9). Recent palaeo-environmental work
has reinforced Clarks hypothesis. Dark has suggested two major phases of
repeated occupation of Star Carr: the first of 80 years, followed (after a hiatus
of a century) by a second occupation phase lasting about 130 years (Mellars
and Dark 1998). Housley, who recently reassessed the Vale of Pickering
radiocarbon dates, links the two phases of repeated occupation noted by
Dark with dates on worked antler, making a secure connection between
both the occupation phases and antler working and deposition (Housley,
forthcoming). This continuity of antler deposition suggests the practices
involving the barbed points and the frontlets were particularly long-lasting
and that the reiteration of the actions leading to the production of different
bodies was so fundamental to the people who inhabited Star Carr that these
practices had a locational stability that other practices did not.
This study has focused on the particular material practices of Star Carr and
the Vale of Pickering. However, there are indications that similar practices,
though articulated often in quite different ways in their particular local
context, took place in other parts of northern Europe during the Early
Mesolithic. Chatterton (2003) compares the depositionary practices at Star
Carr with those at the northern German Early Mesolithic sites of Friesack,
Hohen Viecheln and Bedburg-Konigshoven
and the Dutch Europoort area.

At all these sites combinations of one or more of large quantities of barbed

points, animal teeth beads and antler frontlets were recovered from aquatic
deposits. These sites suggest that Star Carr is part of broader depositionary
practices. Yet there are some differences: the barbed points on these sites
are made of bone, so there does not appear to have been the same focus on
antlers as seen at Star Carr. Strassburg (2000) describes patterns of deposition
focused on watery contexts in southern Scandinavian Maglemosian sites.
On these sites isolated human bones, as well as complete human skeletons
and complete animal carcasses, usually elk or aurochs, were deposited. So

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52

Note

although practices at Star Carr bear some similarities to other practices in

northern Europe, their particular articulation is more specific to Star Carr.
It should be noted that many of these practices have been described as
shamanic in nature (e.g. Strassburg 2000). This is part of a recent trend
in both Palaeolithic and Mesolithic archaeology to describe art, certain
objects, particular acts of deposition and burial practices as shamanic or
products of animistic societies (e.g. Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998; Schmidt
2000; Ahlback
2002). Though Strassburg (2000, 90) describes the Star Carr
frontlets as shamanic masks, I do not feel it is necessary to link the practices at
Star Carr with shamanism. To maintain Scandinavian Mesolithic practices as
shamanic, Strassburg needs a constant injection of ethnographic material so
that it is often difficult to detect where the analogy ends and his interpretation
begins. Analogies are often raised to the level of the near universal and
also are often unreferenced (e.g. Honey is widely regarded as a substance
of resurrection magic ... the mix of honey and menstrual blood occurs in
many magic potions as elixirs of life (Strassburg 2000, 145)). The effect
is to produce a dangerous elision of past and present. This effect is also
common to the Mesolithic school of direct historical analogy, which also
tends to interpret Mesolithic practices as shamanic. This methodology sees the
use of analogy from areas with similar geography and historical trajectories
as more appropriate for interpreting the Mesolithic (Jacobs 1995; Zvelebil
1993; 1997; Schmidt 2000; Jordan 2002). As a result the study of Mesolithic
shamanism only appears possible with heavy emphasis on, and frequently less
than rigorous use of, analogy. Despite Strassburgs plea for anti-essentialist
shamanic pluralities (2000, 78), the identification of shamanism imposes
certain parameters on the past. It necessitates the presence of ritual specialists
and, given the importance accorded to analogies derived from present-day
northern Eurasian groups, it can imply a set of particular political and gender
relations. This level of specificity is neither necessary nor often justified.
The material evidence demonstrates the importance of the practices taking
place at Star Carr without using analogy to close down the possibilities for
interpretation of the site through reference to a different time and place.

Conclusions
This paper has examined objects made from animal remains and the roles they
played in producing and transforming human bodies at the Early Mesolithic
site of Star Carr. I have argued that, rather than being passive, these objects
retained a sense of their animality and, following Viveiros de Castro (1998),
that they can be viewed as animal effects i.e. part of an assemblage of
acting in the world in a particular way. Working with these effects extended
the human body and bodily perspectives on the world and rendered the
boundaries between human and animal bodies ambiguous. At Star Carr
objects manufactured from red deer antlers appear to have been particularly
significant a fact suggested by the large number in which they were found
at the site, their rarity elsewhere and the unusual manner of their deposition.
I have argued that this special treatment was accorded to red deer antler
because the antlers were part of an explicit renegotiation of the boundaries of
the human body. The evidence suggests that the antlers in some way stood for

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Corporeal transformations at Star Carr

53

the deer, that they were the significant red deer effect (Deleuze and Guattaris
something else) that permitted a fundamental corporeal transformation. The
connection of the antler effects to the human body, which necessitated the
taking on of the animals bodily perspective, produced a new kind of body and
way of acting in the world. This was a particularly important transformation,
one which was repeated at Star Carr over many decades, even as other aspects
of Mesolithic occupation of the area changed.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lesley McFadyen, who encouraged me to collect these
thoughts and to give an early version of this paper in her 2001 TAG
session Construction sites. Thanks also to Thomas Yarrow and Duncan
Garrow for their helpful comments on various versions of this paper and to
the anonymous reviewers. Figure 2 is reproduced courtesy of Archaeology
international, Figure 3 was produced by Barry Taylor.

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