Bones at a crossroads

Bone tool studies are at a crossroads. A current path is to go beyond the concatenation of methods or concepts borrowed from other disciplines and aim instead at a truly integrated approach that is more in line with the objectives of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

The papers in this volume follow this direction by adopting various forms of dialogue and integration between old and new methods and approaches, including technological analysis, usewear analysis, typology, zooarchaeology, stable isotope analysis, experimental archaeology or spatial analysis. They represent a mixture of methodological issues, case studies, and discussions of larger cultural and historical phenomena that span thousands of years and many parts of the World, from South Asia to the Near East and Europe, and from North to South America. The synergies deriving from these multi-perspective approaches lead to the repeated identification of diverse social aspects of past societies, including the identification of general social contexts of bone tool production and use, transmission of knowledge, the symbolic dimensions of artifacts, and intergroup relations as well as warfare and state formation processes.

All these papers grew out of communications presented at the 13th meeting of the Worked Bone Research Group (WBRG) on October 7th–13th, 2019, at the Département d’anthropologie, Université de Montréal, Canada. The WBRG is an official working group of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) dealing with the study of worked faunal remains from archaeological sites.

Content:

Introduction

Christian Gates St-Pierre, Markus Wild, Beverly A. Thurber, Stephen E. Rhodes

Osseous arrowheads in the Iron Age of the Upper Ganga Plains

Vinayak

Uncovering some aspects of the worked bone assemblages from Periods I-III (Neolithic to Pre-Northern Black Polished Ware with Iron Cultures) of Agiabir, India

Ravi Shankar, Pramod P. Joglekar, Sharada Channarayapatna, and Ashok Kumar Singh

Magnifying the differences: Investigating variability in Dorset Paleo-Inuit organic material culture using microscopic analysis

Matilda I. Siebrecht, Sean P. A. Desjardins, Sarah M. Hazell, Susan Lofthouse, Elsa Cencig, Katie Kotar, Peter D. Jordan, and Annelou van Gijn

Antler as raw material among hunter-gatherer groups from the Pampean Region (Argentina)

Natacha Buc, Alejandro A. Acosta, and Lucía T. Rombolá

Osseous artifacts from the Maros-culture necropolis at Ostojićevo (northern Serbia)

Selena Vitezović

An antler workshop in a Germanic settlement in Nitra, Slovakia

Gertrúda Březinová and Erik Hrnčiarik

The worked bone and tooth assemblage from Piaçaguera: Insights and challenges

Daniela Klokler

Traceological evaluation of bone instruments as an indirect indicator: Rebuilding textile technology during the Ceramic period on Mocha Island (Chile)

Helga Inostroza Rojas

A microscopic view of Maya needle and perforator production at Ucanal, Guatemala

Carolyn Freiwald, Christina Halperin, Camille Dubois-Francoeur, Caroline Schlinsog, and Kimberly A. Bauer

Warm it up! Using experimental archaeology to test shark teeth extraction hypotheses

Simon-Pierre Gilson and Andrea Lessa

Crafting white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) bone and antler at Cerro Juan Díaz (LS-3), Greater Coclé Culture Area, Panama

María Fernanda Martínez-Polanco, Luis Alberto Sánchez-Herrera, Máximo Jiménez-Acosta, and Richard G. Cooke

Preliminary spatial analysis of the morphologically identifiable bone tools from an Early Bronze Age III domestic building in a residential neighborhood house at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath (Stratum E5c)

Sarah J. Richardson, Haskel J. Greenfield, Tina L. Greenfield, and Aren M. Maeir

A Woodland-period bone tool industry on the northern Gulf of Mexico coastal plain

Gregory A. Waselkov, Sarah E. Price, Alexandra Stenson, Carla S. Hadden, and Long Dinh

The many dimensions of a bone

Marie-Ève Boisvert, Claire St-Germain, and Christian Gates St-Pierre