In the last issue of BAR, Larry Stager described the unique dog cemetery discovered at Ashkelon in the Persian period.a Another unique aspect of the Persian period (538–332 B.C.) strata at the site is the quantity of worked animal bones—not only finished artifacts but also bones at various earlier stages in the manufacturing process including unfinished pieces, rough-cut blanks and carving wastes.
Actually, worked bone and ivory artifacts have been found as early as the Middle Bronze Age II (1800–1550 B.C.) at Ashkelon. At other sites, such artifacts have been found from the Chalcolithic period (4000–3200 B.C.) and even earlier, so the 5th century B.C. floruit of the bone industry at Ashkelon was heir to a long tradition. Two later periods at Ashkelon also produced large quantities of bone from various stages in the manufacturing process—the Byzantine period (324–640 A.D.) and the Islamic period (640–1260 A.D.).
The quantity and variety of these worked bone finds at Ashkelon is unprecedented for a site in the eastern Mediterranean. From materials at Ashkelon, especially from the Persian period, we can now trace in considerable detail the traditions of bone working and even reconstruct the manufacturing process.
As a raw material, bone has several advantages: It is readily available, and it is strong, yet light and easy to work. Accordingly, it was a widely used raw material in antiquity. Combs, hair pins and cosmetic accessories were commonly fashioned from bone. Small implements such as needles, pins and fasteners or hinges were made entirely of bone, while metal tools such as knives were often fitted with bone handles. Boxes, chests, couches and other kinds of furniture were decorated with bone attachments or inlays. Bone was also used to make such things as dice, game counters, amulets and tokens.
The consistently high standard of workmanship of the bone products at Ashkelon testifies to the consummate skill and professional status of their makers. Some of the finer pieces, such as a handle in the form of a fluted column and some carved plaques, rise to the level of minor art.
Bone occurs in two forms. Cortical bone consists of dense layers with no intervening spaces, except channels for small blood vessels. This type of bone forms the hard envelope surrounding the marrow. Cancellous bone, by contrast, is composed of tiny interwoven bony plates with a thin covering, giving it a porous structure and a soft texture. At the ends of long bones, cancellous bone provides points of attachment for sinews in the joints. Many bones, such as the radius (a bone in the lower fore limbs of mammals), are made up of both types of bone.
The dense structure of cortical bone is much more desirable for manufacturing purposes. In large decorative pieces, craftsmen took care that visible surfaces were not marred by unsightly sections of cancellous bone. Smaller pieces such as inlays required at least one side with no exposed porous surface (and a minimum of natural curvature). Bone used as handles for tools had to be sturdy enough to withstand the shock of repeated use. Overwhelmingly, the craftsmen at Ashkelon chose dense cortical bone over porous cancellous bone because of cortical bone’s superior strength and smoothness.
Almost all of the bone used in the manufacturing process at Ashkelon comes from a few species of large domesticated animals: cattle (Bos taurus), camels (Camelus sp., probably the dromedary) and donkeys (Equus asinus).
Only a few artifacts were fashioned from the bones of sheep (Ovis aries) or goats (Capra hircus). When sheep and goat bones were used, it was mostly for the manufacture of casual bone tools such as awls or points that were often made by the user, rather than by a large-scale professional manufacturer. Complete bones of sheep and goats, such as a metapodial, usually had to be employed because sheep and goat bones are too small to section into blanks.
No pig (Sus scrofa) bone was used even though pigs were very common in some periods and the males big enough to supply large bones. This may be due to the fact that many pig bones, such as those in the front and hind limbs, have much more torsion than bones of other domestic mammals. Most objects require straight sections of bone for which such pig bones are not suitable.1
Apparently cattle, camel and donkey bones were 056considered the most desirable, because they provided the greatest expanse of thick, relatively untwisted bone.
The high proportion of camel bone, however, is somewhat surprising. Domesticated camels are usually associated with desert nomadism rather than with settled urban life such as we find at Ashkelon. Yet camels must have been present in the city in sufficient numbers for their bones to have been regularly available to the bone carvers. The solution to the puzzle lies in the fact that Ashkelon served as both a crossroads and a terminus in the long distance trade in aromatics, such as incense, that originated in the Arabian peninsula.b Beginning in the Persian period, this trade was carried to a network of urban centers on Israel’s southern coastal plain by camel caravans. The volume of shipments and the size of caravans greatly increased through time. Many of the camels that reached the city in these caravans must also have been sold, slain and eaten there. As a consequence, bone carvers had at their disposal an additional excellent source of desirable raw material.
Many bone artifacts unearthed at Ashkelon were found not in their primary contexts (that is, where they were originally used in antiquity) but in refuse dumps where they had accumulated after having been broken, lost or discarded. Nor is every stage of the manufacturing process equally well represented in the archaeological record. And as yet we have no clear evidence for the location of a bone workers’ quarter or bone tool suq (market) in the city. Despite these gaps in the data, however, the basic outline of the bone manufacturing process is clear.
At least three stages were involved in the progressive reduction of whole bones: first, they were reduced into large workable segments, then into more or less standard blanks from which artifacts could be fashioned, and finally into finished products.
In the initial stage as much as possible of the undesirable cancellous bone was removed while the maximum amount of dense cortical bone was retained.
The large segments of workable bone thus produced were then cut into manufacturing blanks. Depending on the size and shape of the original bone, it was possible at this intermediate stage to produce a variety of more or less standardized forms: flat sheets; square and round rods of varying thicknesses; round and halfround tubes and rods of different diameters.
In the final stage, these blanks were modified in different ways to produce different finished objects. Blanks of specific shape were selected in accord with the intended final product: thick or thin flat sheets for plaques, pieced inlays, disks, beads and tokens; large or small tubes or rods for handles or furniture fittings; long square strips or wedges for needles and pins. Several finished products could be made from a single kind of prepared blank. For example, flat sheets used to make disks could also be cut into thin square rods for needles and pins.
Each stage in the reduction process generated characteristic offcuts related in size and shape to the particular kind of blank or artifact being made. While the 057type and source species of the discarded offcuts and workable segments produced in the early stages of the reduction process can often be determined, the bone of finished artifacts is so much modified that it is difficult to tell from which part of what animal’s skeleton the original raw material came. Fortunately, more than two-thirds of the bone artifacts from Ashkelon are unfinished, so it is possible in most cases to determine the source of the bone.
None of the bone carvers’ tools have yet come to light. But careful examination of blanks and carving wastes as well as of finished pieces permits identification of many of the tools in the bone carvers’ tool kit.
Each type of tool left behind distinctive marks, almost like fingerprints, on both artifacts and discarded wastes. While the exposed surfaces of finished objects were often smoothed to obliterate these marks, the underside of finished pieces and discarded waste retain traces of various tools used to work the bone.
The commonest tools were knives that could be used for shaving, scraping and smoothing as well as for carving. Delicate tasks such as slicing thin strips of bone from a prepared shaft could be accomplished with a double-handled draw knife. Numerous fine transverse parallel lines or “chatter marks” appear on bone smoothed by drawing a knife blade crosswise over the surface.
Initial shaping with coarse rasps and smooth finishing with fine files also left traces on the bone.
Various grades of saws, from fairly coarse to rather fine, were also employed, as is evident from tool marks on sawn sections of both artifacts and offcuts.
A center-bit scriber—a device with a cutting element set at a fixed radius from a center point—was almost certainly used to inscribe the “dot-and-ring” motif on the faces of dice. These designs are too perfectly symmetrical to have been incised freehand with a knife.
The lathe was certainly one of the most important tools used at Ashkelon. The early form of this tool was a modified bow drill, probably hand driven by the craftsman or an assistant. The piece to be worked was spun on this crude lathe. The regularity of the arcs the lathe produced is proof of its use. The telltale signs of these arced forms can be seen on completed objects and on waste pieces—on the end of solid rods and center indentations on flat surfaces where the worked piece had been fitted to the lathe stock. A diverse array of artifacts was produced on the lathe at Ashkelon: buttons and whorls, gaming pieces, decorative borders, finger rings, beads, hinges, pins and needles, furniture mounts, handles, small boxes and various circle-based decorative motifs.
The great quantity of worked bone excavated in Persian, Byzantine and early Islamic Ashkelon leaves little doubt about the enduring traditions of bone carving at the site. Even though new consumer fashions and evolving cultural mores may have dictated changes in finished products, underlying similarities in the shape of wastes, blanks and even some classes of artifacts over the span of a millennium and a half confirms the continuity of craft specialization. There are, after all, only so many ways to slice a bone in order to produce the required workable segments and manufacturing blanks (flat sheets, round, half-round and square rods) that formed the basis for the final products.
Interestingly, in the Hellenistic period (332–63 B.C.), Alexandria, Egypt, became the recognized leader in mass-produced bone carvings. What the situation was in the Persian period is difficult to tell. Perhaps Ashkelon was the leading center of that time.
In the last issue of BAR, Larry Stager described the unique dog cemetery discovered at Ashkelon in the Persian period.a Another unique aspect of the Persian period (538–332 B.C.) strata at the site is the quantity of worked animal bones—not only finished artifacts but also bones at various earlier stages in the manufacturing process including unfinished pieces, rough-cut blanks and carving wastes. Actually, worked bone and ivory artifacts have been found as early as the Middle Bronze Age II (1800–1550 B.C.) at Ashkelon. At other sites, such artifacts have been found from the Chalcolithic period (4000–3200 B.C.) and even […]
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Except for antler there is no worked wild animal bone, though unworked bone of hartebeast (Alcelaphus sp.), a large African antelope, have been recovered at the site. This is not surprising, since the manufacturing process needed a constant and reliable source of raw material that hunting could not supply. About 20 small sections of sawn antler indicate that it too was used as a raw material at Ashkelon, but so far no objects in antler have been found, nor have any bones of the Persian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) from which it came. The antler was probably obtained through trade since the fallow deer is not a regular inhabitant of the southern coastal plain. Antler is much stronger than bone and thus preferred for handles and other items that need to withstand hard use. The very small amount of worked antler compared to bone is probably due to its greater cost as an import, which outweighed its greater desirability as a raw material.
