Set of harpoon heads dating to the Magdalenian period (17,000-11,000 years B.P.). These weapons employed in the hunt are often decorated with geometrical designs or with highly schematized animal figures. It is moreover relatively frequent to observe spear heads transformed into decorative pendants, a fact that suggests the symbolical import of these artefacts. In the Upper Palaeolithic most of the decorative pendants were inspired by sexual symbolism. Therefore, Leroi-Gourhan has interpreted the spears and harpoons as analogous to male sexual symbols. According to this author, the cave paintings and engravings are dominated by sexual symbolism: the harpoons, as phallic representations, are set against the images of wounds, sometimes observed on animal pictures, which are attributable to symbolic associations with the female world (Leroi-Gourhan 1981). If this interpretation is correct, such symbolic connections reveal a world interpretation founded on the cyclical alternation of life and death, into which the killing of the game, the rebirth of the animals, and the fecundity of women are regarded as moments of a single vital flow.

[Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harpons.jpg]