Experimental butchery with stone tools: a preliminary report

“It has long been recognized that use of stone or metal tools in butchery may leave traces of distinctively different form on bone surfaces (von den Driesch & Boessneck 1975; Binford 1981). Cut marks on animal bones may thus serve as a useful index of the replacement of stone by metal tools, at least in butchery, and as such provide a valuable complement to reliance on surviving metal artefacts with their attendant problems of survival and of distinguishing between symbolic and practical uses of metal (e.g., Greenfield 1999; Isaakidou 2004; Halstead in press;). While discrimination is relatively straightforward between marks inflicted by modern steel and flint knives, experiments suggest that use of (relatively soft) copper and (exceptionally sharp) obsidian knives poses greater problems of diagnosis (Collins 1987). These problems are particularly acute for the transition from stone- to metal-knife butchery, given the likelihood that the earliest metal knives retained an “edge” less well than their modern counterparts, and in regions, such as Crete, where obsidian seems to have been the principal raw material for chipped stone tools through the Neolithic (Conolly 2008) and Bronze Age (D’Annibale 2008; Carter 1998). . . .”