Modeling identities among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay personal ornaments in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia

Ornamental practices are essential for understanding socioeconomic structures and technosymbolic dynamics of prehistoric societies. However, our perception of these practices remains limited and biased, due to preservation issues, e.g., perishable materials, which are known only through indirect evidence or rare conservation contexts. Such is the use of unbaked clay for ornamentation, a practice that became widespread across Eurasia in the Neolithic, sporadically documented earlier in Upper Paleolithic Europe. Focusing on the Levantine "revolution of symbols," we report the earliest known clay ornamental tradition outside of Europe: 142 personal ornaments from five Natufian (Late Epipaleolithic, 15,000 to 11,650 calibrated years before the present) sites in Israel. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we show that both children and adults participated in crafting these items, which reflect newly emerging symbolic expressions, some inspired by plant forms. These findings offer original insights into the social organization of craft production and the rise of symbolic practices at the dawn of sedentism, which ultimately shaped the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia.