Bone flakes from traditional metapodial reduction in Postglacial deposits
Résumé
To better understand technological change during the Stone Age, various methods for the
production of splinters that form the basis for the manufacture of bone tools have recently
been studied. It is now generally assumed that the manner in which bone splinters were
extracted from animal bones depends on the culturally rooted working tradition of the
craftspeople. Unfortunately, examinations of specific bone artefacts displaying regular flake
scars rarely consider how the bone blanks they were made from were exactly produced.
Therefore, artefacts displaying negatives of removals that represent a specific stage in the
reduction of the bone and possible subsequent discard of debitage, are of particular interest:
the ‘knapped’ animal bones and the flakes deriving from them. In Mesolithic Europe, the first
known bone flakes record the ‘calibration’ (preparation) of metapodials of large ungulates
for further manufacture. Together with the bone flakes removed in this way, they represent
the first stage using the wedge-splinter technique. The second stage consists of the splitting
or grooving of the tubular bones prepared in this way into splinters, mainly used for bone
point production. At sites where flakes, splinters and other diagnostic items are present and
found in situ, this opens up the possibility to refit the bone fragments and to thus demonstrate
a common Mesolithic bone reduction method. At sites with only one or another type of
debris present in situ, it can still be possible to gain insight into this manufacturing process,
as well as the function of the excavated sites where it was observed. To enable identification
of this technique in preserved Mesolithic bone deposits, this paper presents some of the
archaeological materials with the different preparation stages represented, as well as the
results from an experiment conducted in 2017 and on the ‘calibration’ stage alone.