Seeing red

The beads are stained red from rubbing against an ochred surface, just as was seen in Morocco 50,000 years earlier.

A few years ago, Sarah Paris – then a graduate student at Cambridge University – asked if she could access the human skeletons from Khok Phanom Di in order to study the mortuary use of red ochre. I excavated this great Neolithic site in 1985, and I willingly agreed. Last year, she completed her doctoral dissertation and at the last Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, she won the prize for the best presentation by a graduate student. I must admit that red ochre was never a topic that attracted my attention, although I well remember that when we uncovered the skull of Burial 15 at Khok Phanom Di, it was blood red, as was the rest of this woman’s skeleton. However, this year has been a learning curve for me, because Sarah asked me to join her in authoring a paper on this site and several others I have been lucky enough to excavate. So, when she sent me a draft of the publication, I delved further into the prehistory of this substance.

It all began in Africa. An early interest in red ochre has been identified 300,000 years ago at Olorgesailie in Kenya. The Cave of Pigeons in Morocco was occupied at least 82,000 years ago, when the habitat was semi-arid and the group that lived there hunted horses and hares. Their shell beads came from the seashore at least 40km away. Did the owners of these shells travel to the beach, or were those precious shells exchanged between different social groups of hunter-gatherers? Whichever the case, the beads were special. They still have red ochre adhering to them, suggesting that, when worn, they rubbed against decorated clothing or skin. Blombos Cave lies 8,000km to the south, on the South African coast. There, between 100,000-70,000 years ago, anatomically modern hunters and gatherers took up residence and hunted the local ostriches, eland, and steenboks. Being so close to the seashore, they collected shellfish and also brought back a lot of tortoises to their base. They, too, wore shell-bead ornaments that appear to have been strung into necklaces, and they processed red ochre. One block of ochre at Blombos had been decorated with hatched lines.