Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is defined as ‘a change of physical form, structure, or substance especially by supernatural means’ (Merriam-Webster 2021). This is not a traditional subject for Mesolithic studies; indeed, what forms of transformation Mesolithic people regarded as significant, or supernatural, is difficult to understand from this great remove in time. Mesolithic worlds were undoubtedly characterized by a variety of changes in physical forms: seasonal cycles of growth and decay; the transformation of animals into food, clothing, and tools; and the growth and transformation of human bodies through ontogenesis, illness, pregnancy, childbirth, or death. Metamorphosis, though, very much carries with it a sense of radical or supernatural transformation, often retaining its Kafkaesque sense of transformation into an animal. The limited Mesolithic literature on the subject has followed this lead, exploring how red deer antler frontlets might facilitate transformations from human to animal (Conneller 2004) or how sculptures at Lepenski Vir might represent the metamorphosis of the dead into migratory fish (Borić 2005). In this chapter, we will explore these metamorphoses, but also investigate other transformations that Mesolithic people seem to have seen as significant: transformations of living individuals into the dead; animals into people; or people into material culture.
This contribution will mainly focus on what we might term ‘technologies of metamorphosis’. Chief amongst these are masks (defined here as objects that fully or partially cover the face), but this term might also encompass clothing of particular sorts, as well as artworks or tools that effect particular transformations. Understandings of these as media for metamorphosis depend, by necessity, on ethnographic analogy. While not wanting to posit the kind of universal hunter-gather ontology that has been a feature of some recent anthropological accounts (e.g. Descola 1992), the ethnographic literature indicates a widespread understanding that masks transform rather than disguise the human body, linked to broader ideas that emphasize the potential mutability of both human and animal bodies (Ingold 2000).