[Bonetools] Medieval Italian comb

[trzaska at lineone.net]

Dear Marta,

What a lovely comb that is ! Steve is quite right and it should be viewed in a local perspective. 
It might be late Roman in date but that is difficult to tell in the absence of the back edges of 
the end segments. They might have been profiled, but we don’t know. There are a number of combs 
illustrated in the recent publication of the cemetery at La Collina di San Mauro at Cividale by 
Isabel Ahumada Silva but only one of them is double-sided and it has a different section. That is 
what you would expect really; 7th-century combs tend to be single-sided and that can be seen in the 
dispersed studies of Alamannic combs from cemeteries, as with Ursula Koch’s work at Pleidelsheim, 
for example. 



Gian Carlo Menis’ fabulous I Longobardi catalogue of 1990 is still available and is probably the 
best place to start. But again, there aren’t many combs that are similar to this one in that volume 
either. John Mitchell published a few comb fragments from San Vincenzo al Volturno in a 1991 volume 
but, as far as I remember, they don’t look like this either. I’m sure there are a lot more combs 
out there from northern Italy too.



The section is very interesting and might be a clue to its date. I tend to describe these sections 
(inaccurately but usefully) as trapezoidal, with a flat apex and angled sides. They allow the saw 
marks from cutting the comb teeth to be projected onto the connecting plates as a form of 
decoration. Precisely this kind of thing, and with this type of decoration, can be seen in Ireland 
on combs of 8th- to early 9th-century date – see the enclosed text. I would not suggest that this 
is an Irish comb at all, but it is possible that northern Italian comb design of the 8th century 
was following a similar trend in design. The comb doesn’t look much like the 6th-century northern 
Italian combs that I have seen but its particular section does occur on that specific type of 
double-sided comb both in Ireland and in England in the 8th century.



My vote is for the 8th century, but on a very tentative basis,



Ian Riddler





>----Original Message----

>From: marta.moreno at cchs.csic.es

>Date: 03/05/2016 18:06

>To: <bonetools at listserv.niif.hu>

>Subj: [Bonetools] Medieval Italian comb

>

>Dear all,

>I am currently studying the bone assemblage recovered from the Duomo of

>Padova (Italy) dated to the early and high Middle Ages. An Italian student

>is working with the worked bone material, among which there is this comb

>(see attached photographs) that comes from the cleaning layer. First of

>all, I would like to ask for your expertise in order to identify the

>material it is made of and secondly, I would appreciate very much any

>comments you would like to make on its typology. If you send some

>bibliography we can read, it would be great!

>

>Best regards,

>Marta

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