First evidence of human bone pendants from Late Mesolithic Northeast Europe

• Twelve out of 37 bone pendants from Late Mesolithic Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov studied by the method of Zoological Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) are made of human bone. • Three out of 177 graves have human bone pendants. • Our microwear study shows that the production of the human bone artefacts did not involve any other reshaping than grooves and planing/scraping before making grooves. • Raw material for some of the pendants was in a fresh or semi-fresh state. • Human and animal bone pendants were produced in the same way as animal tooth pendants. • Traces of wear indicate that the items were used prior to their deposition in graves. In this paper, we introduce the first evidence of the use of human bone for making pendants in Northeast Europe. Twelve of the 37 studied pendants made of long bone splinters turned out to be human bone. Here, we present the ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) identifications of artefacts and their traceological analysis, and we discuss their implications for the archaeology of Mesolithic burial practices. Our results indicate that the raw material for some of the items was in a fresh or semi-fresh state before making pendants. They were used before they were placed into the graves, and most likely in the same ways as animal bone pendants. This is the first study that has found the use of human bone as raw material in Russian Karelia and the first time that the ZooMS method has been applied to archaeological materials from this region. Together with previous human bone artefact finds from the European Mesolithic period, the bone pendants from Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov indicate that the tradition of using human bone as raw material may have been widespread.