Mont Saint-Aubin in Oisy (Nièvre, France): a Badegoulian manufacturing site for shell ornaments

The Badegoulian open air site of mont Saint-Aubin at Oisy (Nièvre) yielded 353 marine mollusc shell remains (gastropods, scaphopods and bivalves) which testify of on-site shell bead manufacturing activities. The large conchyliological spectrum (31 taxons) includes many fossils from the Parisian Basin and a few shells that must have been collected on the Atlantic coast, indicating a distance of several hundreds of kilometres between the shell sources and the production site. The shell assemblage is composed of unmodified raw material, waste products and finished beads with intense use wear traces and sometimes repaired suspension holes. The identified manufacturing processes (morphometrical choices, perforation and segmentation methods, and systems of attaching the beads) reveal that the finished ornamental displays must have been varied, playing with different bead morphologies and -sizes as well as with different ways of attaching the beads (string, braiding). Providing information on the ways and means of marine shell exploitation for beadwork (territories of procurement and circulation of shells, storage, craftsmanship, recycling) this study offers new insights on Badegoulian techno-economic behaviour.