Artefacts made out of bone and related materials: raw material, manufacture, typology and use

From the Palaeolithic to the Pre-Modern Era, artefacts made out of materials of animal origin (bone, ivory, horn, antler, mollusc, shell, etc.) are commonly encountered on excavations in Southwest Asia. While some groups of osseous artefacts, such as ivory carvings (Adler 1996; Gachet-Bizollon 2007; Loud 1939), bone inlays (Liebowitz 1977; Scandone Matthiae 2002), incised bone tubes (Genz 2003; Zarzecki-Peleg 1993), bone and ivory bull's heads (Miroschedji 1993), and Tridacna shells (e.g., Reese and Sease 1993) have received considerable attention, mainly because of their artistic significance, the more mundane, yet more abundant simple implements and everyday ornaments, have generally been neglected. This is especially true for osseous artefacts from post-Neolithic contexts; their ubiquity and importance does not appear to cease in the Bronze Age, according to our observations, despite the growing importance of metal.

Despite being widely neglected, ‘simple’ artefacts can convey important information concerning the procurement and use of raw materials, manufacture styles and cultures, daily life practices, ritual activities, and socio-economic transactions. However, when osseous artefacts are published from post-Neolithic contexts, more often than not, they are just presented in surprisingly low numbers, and in catalogue form without any analysis of their context or function. While it is impossible to give a full account of all osseous assemblages from the Ancient Near East here, a few case studies may serve to illustrate the statement above. All case studies discussed below refer to the Early Bronze Age. For Tell Munbaqa on the Euphrates 21 bone objects have been published, among them five incised bone tubes and ten beads (Werner 1998: 103–05, 123, 145 and 350–51). Tell Halawa A has provided 33 bone or antler objects, but only 7 can be attributed to the Early Bronze Age (Heinz 1994). While Tell Selenkahiyye, in the same region, has provided a larger number of beads made out of shell or bone (van Loon 2001b), other objects made out of these materials are rather negligible in quantity (van Loon 2001a). In the southern Levant, a decorated bone tube is the only published example of a bone implement from Tel Dan (Greenberg 1996: 139), while for Tel Yarmuth the seasons of 1980 to 1982 have produced a grand total of eight objects, among them a bone bulls head, two fragments of an incised bone tube, one bead and four awls (Miroschedji 1988: 86–87). Only Arad with 397 objects appears to have produced a considerable number, of these yet 291 were shell beads found in a single hoard in Stratum I (Amiran et al. 1978: 54–56).

As one of us (Genz) demonstrates in this special section, we believe that the low numbers do not reflect a decrease in the importance of osseous artefacts in past practices, or their prevalence in the archaeological record, but rather, in most cases, shortcomings in excavation and post-excavation methods of analysis, including a lack of effective and systematic communication between zooarchaeologists and other parties interested in such materials.

As a step towards re-dressing this situation, we organized a workshop focusing on artefacts made of bone and related materials from the Ancient Near East from the Neolithic to the Islamic Period at the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Near East (ICAANE) in Basel in 2014. We wanted the discussion to focus on the identification of raw materials and manufacturing methods (including possible workshop remains), exchange of raw materials or finished items (ivory, shells), typology and chronology of specific artefact categories, functional analysis, and contextual analysis, as well as methodological issues such as retrieval practices during excavation.

Six papers were presented in the workshop, four of which, following peer review, are published in this Special Section of Levant. Professor Dirk Wicke, while unable to present at the session, was present in the audience, and when he proposed a paper on the bone and ivory workshop of Assur for this issue, his proposal was welcomed with enthusiasm.

The papers presented here are diverse thematically, methodologically, and geographically. Together, they deal with a large area of Southwest Asia, arguably extending towards the Aegean as well as India (Çakırlar and Ikram; Wicke). The chronological span of the section is focused mainly upon the Bronze and early Iron Ages. While Çakırlar and Ikram have produced a detailed account of the life history of one type of raw material, namely the Syrian elephant, for ivory artefacts in the greater Levant region, in other papers the discussion of raw material is, where possible, more typically limited to species and element determinations. The contribution of the anatomist-morphologist zooarchaeologists in the latter is enormous as always. Contextual analysis plays a role in the papers by Genz and Peyronel.

Several archaeological assemblages are discussed for the first time in this Section, including the Early Bronze Age assemblage from Tell Fadous-Kfarabida (Genz), the elephant remains from Kinet Höyük and Tell Atchana in the Hatay region of Turkey (Çakırlar and Ikram), and the remains from Ebla (Peyronel). Contributors deal with these assemblages in different ways. Genz emphasizes the importance of careful excavation, retrieval and post-excavation methods to attain more complete assemblages, while Peyronel discusses the Ebla assemblage from a diachronic perspective in the context of social and political changes. These are significant studies not only because it may be some time before the full data is available in accessible formats (such as digitized archives), but also because the assemblages stem from important regions and time periods, such as the coastal Lebanon (Genz), that are otherwise poorly represented in archaeological discussions. Wicke, in contrast, presents a discussion based on the re-study of an old assemblage from the pre-World War I excavations in Assur, now located in Berlin. He uses this ‘legacy’ dataset to undermine common notions of Bronze Age ivory production and exchange across the entire Eastern Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, by clearly demonstrating the existence of local workshops in Assur itself.

We do not claim to have achieved a huge leap forward in the study of osseous artefact production and use in ancient Southwest Asia, however, by demonstrating what can be achieved with better retrieval techniques, multi-disciplinary approaches, and more co-operation between excavators, generalists, theorists, and zooarchaeologists (if these should be considered mutually exclusive categories) we believe that we have contributed. We would also argue that larger and fully-published primary datasets, alongside more extensive instrumental analysis will be required to reach the full potential of these artefacts in explaining the past.

ORCiD

Canan Çakırlar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7994-0091