Stone artefacts (Archaeology)

What we know about bronze age metalworking basically relies on finished artifacts and on stone, clay or bronze implements involved in the process of manufacturing (tuyères, crucibles, moulds, hammers, chisels, etc.).
Moreover, evidences of structures for casting are extremely poor, at least in Italy, likely because of a lack of extensive excavations and the difficulty to clearly distinguish them from other kinds of firing structures, in absence of metalworking residuals.
The reconstruction of the whole technology of production therefore requires a strong effort of making and testing hypothesis, referring not only on autoptic observations on archaeological finds, but also on archaeometrical analysis and study of landscape, in order to identify possible sources of supply of raw materials.
In this work our aim is to deepen some aspects concerning archaeologically “visible” (stone mould production and casting), and “invisible” techniques (sword production) of metalworking in bronze age Italy, focussing on terramare area.

The complex detailed analysis and publication of archaeological and anthropological data and the results of numerous science analyses of archaeological and anthropological material (palaeopathology, epigenetics, isotope analysis, 14C, analyses of metal, amber, stone tools, Sr, O, C and N isotopy etc.) form an essential foundation of the first-rate, comprehensively-conceived research of prehistoric populations. The complex analysis of all skeletons using a broad spectrum of scientific analyses and the possibility of comparison with the results of analyses of material culture are extraordinary in the European context. This enables us, for example, to identify groups of graves/skeletons at the cemetery with similar qualities that could indicate the existence of groups of buried individuals with closer ties (family, interest groups, etc.), while also allowing us to study the manifestations of their behaviour, personal and group relations, health condition and dietary habits etc.

Résumé

La paragonite est un minéral sodique du groupe des micas blancs. En France et en Italie, les gîtes de paragonite massive sont situés entre 2000 et 2700 m d’altitude dans les Alpes internes et en Queyras ; récoltée sous la forme de petits nodules ou de plaquettes, la paragonite a été exploitée dès la fin du VIe millénaire. Cette matière première rare a été utilisée pour la fabrication d’anneaux-disques, de pendeloques et de perles, qui ont circulé sur 650 km à vol d'oiseau jusqu’à la fin du IVe millénaire, mais en faible nombre.

Deux nouvelles perles en paragonite ont été identifiées à l'oeil nu dans les collections de la Cité de la Préhistoire, puis analysées par spectroradiométrie en réflectance diffuse et comparées à notre référentiel des paragonites alpines. La perle bipointe de Bourg-Saint-Andéol (Ardèche) est d'un modèle inconnu jusqu'ici ; elle appartient vraisemblablement à la transition IVe-IIIe millénaires. Quant à la perle-tonnelet de la grotte des Fées à Tharaux (Gard), elle pourrait alors être le premier témoin attribuable à la fin de l’âge du Bronze ancien, ce qui porterait à plus de 3000 ans la durée d'exploitation de ce minéral très caractéristique, mais que préhistoriens et géologues peinent encore à reconnaître dans les collections archéologiques.

Mots clefs

Néolithique, âge du Bronze, parure, paragonite, origine, diffusion

Summary

Paragonite is a sodic mineral of the white mica group. In France and Italy, massive paragonite deposits are located between 2000 and 2700 m altitude in the internal Alps and in Queyras; collected in the form of small nodules or platelets, paragonite has been exploited since the end of the 6th millennium. This rare raw material was used to make disc-rings, pendants and beads, which circulated over 650 km as the crow flies until the end of the 4th millennium, but in small numbers.

Two new paragonite beads were identified with the naked eye in the collections of the Cité de la Préhistoire, then analysed by diffuse reflectance spectroradiometry and compared to our reference of alpine paragonite samples. The Bourg-Saint-Andéol (Ardèche) bipointe bead is of a hitherto unknown type; it probably belongs to the 4th-3rd millennium transition. As for the barrel shaped bead from la grotte des Fées in Tharaux (Gard), it could be the first artefact dated to the end of the Early Bronze Age, which would bring to more than 3000 years the duration of exploitation of this very characteristic mineral, but which prehistorians and geologists still meet difficulties to recognize in archaeological collections.

Key words

Neolithic, Bronze Age, personal adornment, paragonite, sourcing, diffusion

The ‘Movius Line’ is the putative technological demarcation
line mapping the easternmost geographical distribution
of Acheulean bifacial tools. It is traditionally argued by
proponents of the Movius Line that ‘true’ Acheulean bifaces,
especially handaxes, are only found in abundance in Africa
and western Eurasia, whereas in eastern Asia, in front of the
‘line’, these implements are rare or absent altogether. Here
we argue, however, that the Movius Line relies on classifying
undated surface bifaces as Acheulean on typological grounds
alone, a long-standing and widely accepted practice in Africa
and western Eurasia, but one that is not seen as legitimate in
eastern Asian contexts. A review of the literature shows that
bifaces are relatively common as surface finds in Southeast
Asia and on this basis we argue that the Movius Line is in
need of reassessment.

Stone tools are poorly recognized during the Iron Age, and this paper aims at showing their importance. The few Armorican series presented here show that these tools can provide valuable information about craft industry and the exploitation of the environment. The first three examples describe the situation on the continent, where many varied stone tools are found. Beside older-type tools, a whole range of new stone implements is produced. They are used in metallurgical, textile and pottery productions. A different pattern of management appears in the coastal environment, as, for example, in the case of island sites: stone is more extensively used on such sites, and the stone tools contribute as much to the exploitation of marine resources as craft productions. This overview is supplemented by the analysis of a particular type of tool, linked to salt production by evaporation of sea water. Numerous stone tools are still used during the Iron Age, and this practice is not an archaism. The continuing use of this material is explained for technical and practical reasons, and the repertoire of stone tools is well adapted to the new needs of an economy becoming more and more complex.

Owing to its position at the heart of Dalmatia the island of Brač has always been settled, but also lacked a bigger town centre of any strategic and commercial importance that could match other island centres in the eastern Adriatic. Still, while there is no evidence of an ancient town ever existing on it, the stone of Brač was used, paradoxically enough, in the construction of many ancient buildings in the larger centres of the Empire. Such is the case with the Late-Antique Diocletian’s Palace, built almost entirely with stone from the Brač quarries.
Stonecutting and stone dressing  in the eastern Adriatic are a deeply rooted tradition ever since prehistoric times. Carving in stone has played a special role in the art and architecture of Brač and Dalmatia. On Brač, there are nearly a hundred known quarries today, be it in operation or abandoned.
The aim of this exhibition is to give a methodical and multimedia insight into how stone was quarried in the Antiquity and to show how the notion of stone has changed over time. Even if stone exploitation and the method of work in Antique quarries have been discussed thoroughly, there are still many uncertainties surrounding the matter. It is our firm belief that the solution to these quandaries lie in these little-researched Antique quarries (Plate, Stražišće and Rasohe). Systematic research, or at least a field survey, would surely lead to new discoveries about the artefacts or fragments of carved stone from Late Antiquity, or signatures of quarry workers – which would complement what is already known about the life of stonemasons in the past.

Povoljan položaj otoka Brača uvjetovao je njegov naseobinski kontinuitet, iako na njemu nikada nije postojao veći grad strateškog i trgovačkog značaja kao na nekim drugim istočno jadranskim otocima. Paradoks je da, iako na njemu zasada nema dokaza o postojanju antičkog grada, njegovim kamenom izgrađene su mnoge antičke građevine u većim centrima. Kasnoantička palača cara Dioklecijana u Splitu, tako je gotovo u cijelosti izgrađena od kamena koji se vadio iz bračkih kamenoloma.
Tradicija obrade kamena prisutna je na području čitavog istočnog Jadrana od prapovijesnih vremena do današnjih dana. Oblikovanje u kamenu bitno je obilježje kako bračke, tako i čitave dalmatinske umjetnosti i graditeljstva. Na cijelom području bračkog kopna danas ima skoro stotinjak živih i ugaslih kamenoloma.
Cilj ove izložbe je multimedijalno i didaktički predočiti način vađenja kamena u antici, kao i kontinuitet putovanja jedne kamene ideje kroz vrijeme. Premda je mnogo toga rečeno o eksploataciji kamena i načinu rada antičkih kamenoloma, mnogo toga je još uvijek  nepoznanica. Odgovore na nedoumice, vjerujemo, kriju antički kamenolomi (Plate, Stražišće i Rasohe), nažalosti i do danas neistraženi. Sustavnim istraživanjima ili bar rekognosciranjem terena sigurno bi se pronašao poneki artefakt ili barem ulomak kasnoantičkih klesanaca, poneki potpis radnika u kamenolomima, koji bi upotpunili saznanja o životu majstora klesara u prošlosti.

Researchers have explored how hearths were used and the composition of fuel to understand cultural differences and environmental adaptations. However, scant research has been conducted to understand and document methods for producing fires. Given the long-lasting durability of stone, the stone-on-stone method for producing fire with a strike-a-light will survive for thousands of years in
the archaeological record; hence it is important to recognize and document these tools. This paper will present an artifact used as a strike-a-light for producing fire in the subarctic region of interior Alaska
(middle Tanana Valley) some 5,500 years ago. The strike-a-light recognized at Goodpaster-IV is, to our knowledge, the most ancient example currently known in the American Subarctic. By reviewing the current state of research on European strike-a-lights from the French Mesolithic and Neolithic and describing use-wear analysis of the strike-a-light, we demonstrate important characteristics that reveal how strike-a-light tools were implemented in prehistory.

Ancient economies have been characterized by many researchers as localized, highly controlled by political actors, and static over long periods of time. In Mesoamerica, recent research has cast doubt on these views, with the recognition of early market place exchange, production by households for exchange, and the wide-ranging integration of communities into regional trade networks. Here, we expand onan earlier network analysis of obsidian assemblages from the Maya region during theClassic and Postclassic periods to incorporate data for all of Mesoamerica between 900BC and AD 1520. Using both visual graphical representations and formal network metrics, we find that the Mesoamerican economy was dynamic and generally not highly centralized over time. The topology of this interactive network underwent significant changes over time. In particular, trends towards decreasing network hierar-chy and size culminated in the highly commercialized “international” economy of LatePostclassic period as noted in previous studies. Based on this analysis, we make the case that the ancient Mesoamerican economy was neither predominantly top-down nor static, and so does not conform with oft-held presumptions regarding preindustrialeconomies.

Barely two centuries fter the appearance of the first archaeologi cally-visible elements that served to define the earliest Neolithic in the west of France around 4900 BC – that is, domestic buildings, pottery, a distinctive flint technology, and other aspects of material culture that reproduced the norms that had been established in the Paris Basin and on the middle Loire river – along the southern shores of Brittany there was a sudden and unexpected ‘accu-mulation of concepts’ among the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities who lived there. The emergence of an extremely inegalitarian political structure was expressed in terms of massive standing stones and colossal funerary mounds, architectural constructs that were unique in Europe at this time and which constituted the earliest permanent architecture in the region. These monuments were funerary and symbolic in nature, being associated with the most extraordinary accumulation of objects made from rare and exotic materials. Moreover, the represen-tations of the world that appeared as engraved im-ages on the standing stones constitute visible signs of a divided society. By tacking between two extremes, from symbol to material within the protean phenomenon that we call megalithism, this contribution sets out to capture a sense of the distinction that was being ex-pressed by this élite – a distinction that did not just define inequality in that society, but also differentiated it from contemporary groups elsewhere and from its successors in southern Brittany.

Between 2004 and 2011 nearly eight thousand prehistoric artefacts from ploughed fields across the Clodgy Moor area of West Penwith. In 2011 a project was carried out by the Historic Environment Service Projects team, Cornwall Council, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Cornwall Archaeological Society to catalogue and digitize all the finds recorded from the fieldwalking.The project demonstrated that some places within the project area were persistent locales which were occupied throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The results were particularly signifi cant because they shed light on the context of the production of greenstone axes, widely exchanged around Britain and across the Irish Sea during the Neolithic, and suggest why, despite large numbers of artefacts, no greenstone ‘axe factory’ site has been found close to the potential sources of the before.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00665983.2013.11021000#.Va03tP_H_IU

At the starting-point of the Alpine jade routes: regional specialisation and initial transfers


This chapter presents a general synthesis of chapters 7–13, which deal with the people who produced polished jade axe- and adze-heads in Piedmont, Liguria and Emilia Romagna.

Three zones where primary outcrops and torrent deposits had been exploited have been identified. Of these, the massifs of Mont Viso and Mont Beigua are certainly the most important, but the existence of a third zone in the lower reaches of the Trebbia river seems likely, since the site of Gaione has produced evidence for the exploitation of local rocks in addition to imported roughouts from Mont Viso and Mont Beigua.

Corresponding to these three groups of exploitation areas, in a radius of a three-day walk, are villages whose occupants specialised in the reduction of roughouts by hammering. These roughouts comprised both examples that had been obtained through exchange and others that had been created by the villagers, accessing the raw material sources directly themselves. In every village, even including Rivanazzano, there was a mixture of roughouts from Viso and Beigua, the proportions varying according to the distance from the raw material sources. 

The distribution of small spherical hammerstones of jade rocks – the archetypal tool of the stone roughouts producer – allows us to define an overall area of production, extending nearly 300 km from west to east, from Savoie (Bozel/Le Chenêt des Pierres) to Parma (Gaione). In this vast region – which supplied the whole of western Europe with jade axe- and adze-heads, over distances up to 1700 km as the crow flies – raw materials, hammerstones and roughouts were circulating, as was the manufacturing know-how, which was exchanged during face-to-face meetings between the specialist producers. We should note, however, that the producers in Piedmont and Liguria were working above all on jades from Mont Viso, which are fine-grained, with a more or less aligned mineral structure, and which can be shaped at the initial stages of roughing out by means of hard-hammer flaking. The jadeitites and eclogites with a saccharoidal structure, which are dense and particularly tough, feature only as a minority of roughouts. As for other Alpine rocks of lower quality (i.e. the serpentinites, glaucophanites and greenschists), these seem only to have been exploited in a minor way, to supplement and compensate for the irregular and constantly insufficient supply of high-quality jades.

Within the area of production, we must however isolate one region where a different working technique was developed, namely that of sawing. This was a tradition of the north-west Alps, which spread into the north of the Viso massif around 4500 BC. So, between Mont Viso and the Haute Maurienne, via the Suse valley and the Mont Cenis col – and in parallel with the production and circulation of flaked roughouts – blocks of saccharoidal jadeitite and of eclogite from Viso Porco (along with other tough jades that are hard to flake) were gathered at high altitude and also from the moraine deposits in Paesana, to be sawn. The famous roughout from Lugrin (Haute-Savoie), found on the southern shore of Lake Léman, certainly belongs to this tradition of production, whose end products were destined to supply (on a privileged if not exclusive basis) the Paris Basin, the north of the Massif central, Brittany, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland. It should also be noted that there is a total absence of axeheads showing signs of sawing in the area of production in Piedmont, as elsewhere in the whole of northern Italy.

The authors go on to consider the domain of social representations, and try to understand the technical and ideological functions of polished axe- and adze-heads within the Piedmont production area (which is the best-known of the production areas). In other words, they are trying to understand how the producers treated and regarded their jade axe- and adze-heads. In the villagers where the producers lived, all of the axe- and adze-heads, irrespective of their length, were used for felling trees and for woodworking. In this context of everyday use, then, these were tools that had such an indubitable technical value and that were sufficiently rare – even at such relative proximity to the raw material sources – that they were carefully maintained, re-sharpened and recycled for use as hammerstones when they broke. We are therefore dealing with a parsimonious, economical use of a resource – which scarcely differed from that pertaining to the people far away who were importing the axe- and adze-heads, as at Sammardenchia. Two reasons can be invoked to account for this situation: the difficulties in obtaining roughouts (perhaps relating to the seasonal nature of the trips to extract raw material) on the one hand, and the desire to retain as many roughouts as possible to use in exchange transactions on the other.

In the graves of the Square-mouthed Pottery Culture in the region of Parma, the polished axeheads – small or medium-sized – are not particularly spectacular: as personal possessions of the deceased, their only social role was to affirm their attribution to the world of men. The large axe- and adze-heads seem to have been excluded from grave good assemblages, and this suggests that in the villages, ownership and use of such items would have been restricted to certain individuals. This idea of limited access to the best tools and the finest, translucent raw materials is arguably supported by the hoard of San Damiano d’Asti, which consists of a personal set of tools – one very long adzehead, four small adzeheads, one adzehead in the course of being polished and one double-ended chisel – but made of the extraordinary jades of Mont Viso, with remarkable aesthetic qualities. It is tempting to suggest that this hoard, which is unique in the Piedmont production area, had belonged to a member of the elite who had the power to control the circulation of roughouts, if not also the exploitation of the jade sources themselves.

Furthermore, certain long axe- and adze-heads were consecrated – that is, deposited in special points in the landscape, probably as offerings to supernatural beings. Such rituals have similarly been identified in the high-altitude extraction sites in the Mont Viso massif, allowing us to suggest that the individuals in question believed that there was divine intervention in their  expeditions up the mountain. At Vaie/Rumiano, four large axeheads were deposited in this way, below a rock shelter. The question of the origin of this ritual, where the axeheads were sometimes set vertically in the soil with their blades pointing upwards, is then discussed. With the production of Bégude-type adze-heads, this ritual is attested as much in Italy as in the south of France, from the first half of the fifth millennium, and it may be that these were the areas in which this practice originated. The practice could have spred as far as the Gulf of Morbihan a little before 4500 BC. However, given the uncertainties in dating between Italy and Morbihan, this can only be an hypothesis.

Finally, the question of what was given in exchange for the polished axe- and adze-heads is considered. There are clear and numerous examples, in the Piedmont production area, of imported flint from the Lessini mountains, of Mediterranean obsidian, of painted pottery from central Italy and of influences from the Serra d’Alto culture. However, the same cannot be said of the production area where sawing of the raw material was practised. Here, the exchanges are materialised in the form of exports from the Gulf of Morbihan, reaching the Alpine valleys that led to the most heavily-used cols of the north-western Alps (namely Mont Cenis, Petit Saint-Bernard and the col du Théodule, among others). An example of a Spanish variscite pendant that had probably passed through Morbihan is known from Aime (Savoie), but the commonest imports are Carnac-type axeheads – axeheads of Alpine jades, repolished in Morbihan and re-injected into the Continental circulation flow – which seem to have retraced the route originally taken by the jade, back towards Mont Viso. Likewise, the architecture of standing stones (and the mythological engravings that are found on them, to a lesser degree) as seen in Morbihan has now been identified at Cavaglia, scarcely 100 km from Mont Viso. These two-strand circulations – which included ideas and myths – thus seem vital to our understanding of the essential role played by the Gulf of Morbihan–Mont Viso axis during the second half of the fifth millennium.