[Bonetools] Worked Astraguli from Turkmenistan

[Alice Choyke]

Dear Kate,
       I would LOVE a PDF of this article. I just met a potter in southern
Armenia who swears that traditonally potters in the region prefered bone as
a burnisher and beyond that red deer bone. I personally doubt there is much
difference between the density phalange/astrag from domestic animals kept
extensively and those of red deer but clearly the insistence on the better
qualities of red deer bone as burnishers is related to ideas about the
nature of wild animals and red deer in particular. The potter actually says
he would be willing to start using bone again if we send him enough examples
from prehistoric contexts. Your article is about material right in the
neighborhood as it were...


Cheers!
Alice

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Katherine M. Moore
<kmmoore at sas.upenn.edu>wrote:

> Dear colleagues:
>
> A few weeks ago we shared an exchange about astraguli (and phalanges) that
> had been worked on one or both edges, and I commented that I was familiar
> with this from work in Bronze Age Turkmenistan. This was older work! and it
> took me a moment to dig out those records. At this point, there is no pdf,
> and I can't even find a computer file for the report in which this material
> appears:
>
> 1993  Bone tool technology at Gonur Depe. Information Bulletin (Moscow),
>  vol.19: 218-227
>
> If there is interest, I could produce a pdf using a hard copy. I am
> attaching a drawing of two representative pieces. My manuscript notes a
> cache of 8 and a cache of 17 from room fill contexts at the southern, later,
> massive room block at this site. Single examples were also found. Worked and
> unworked bones were packed together, and sheep bones occurred together with
> those of the less common (probably wild) pig. Up to 4mm of bone material had
> been removed from individual faces of these bones. I speculated that they
> had been used on a softer but still abrasive material, but I regret that I
> am not sure if these pieces now are in Turkmenistan or in Moscow, and I have
> no good photographs of the pieces after they had been cleaned.
>
> for context on the American excavations at Gonur:
>
> Moore, K.M., N. Miller, F. Hiebert and R. Meadow 1994  Agriculture and
> herding in the early oasis settlements of  the Oxus Civilization.  Antiquity
> 68: 418-427.
>
> Hope this provides a further clue to the variability in these pieces.
>
> best wishes,
>
> Kate Moore
>
> Zooarchaeology Laboratory
> University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
> 3260 South Street
> Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bonetools mailing list
> Bonetools at listserv.niif.hu
> https://listserv.niif.hu/mailman/listinfo/bonetools
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://listserv.niif.hu/pipermail/bonetools/attachments/20110822/3d7e33c2/attachment.htm>