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Abstract
Research of the oldest forms of Prehistory portable art of the Ice Age in Siberia allows to distinguish three groups of objects: personal jewellery, objects of prestigious character (objects of exchange including), collection of volumetric sculpture (anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images). Hypotheses that were previously proposed by researchers about the aesthetic, household, magic-ritual, etc. functions of the Prehistory portable art (artifacts with signs of artistic creativity) continue to develop on the basis of new instrumental and cognitive capabilities. The paper proposes a hypothesis of understanding personal objects (personal ornamentation, or “decoration”) as a way of self-identification or self-description of a person and a community. The research is based on the results of technical-morphological, typological, microscopic analysis of objects, and subsequent cross-cultural analogies. Multidisciplinary studies of the mobile plastics of Prehistory art from the archaeological and ethnographic museum collections of Siberia and the Far East present the possibility of reconstructing such forms of creativity as evidence of self-identification (gender, social, ethno-cultural).
Acknowledgments
The research was supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 23-28-00140 “Man in the archaic art of Northern Eurasia: a paradigm shift” https://rscf.ru/project/23-28-00140/
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