Lucone pierced shinbone blade

Source term: spatola ricavata da scheggia diafisaria ... trasformata in pendaglio (spatula from a shaft splinter, made into a pendant)

The little lake of Lucone, in the moraine hills west of Lake Garda, has long since been drained, but for most of the Bronze Age villages of timber houses stood at its edge. When excavators cut a long trench through the old lakeside bank in 1966, worked bone turned up so thickly at one end that they nicknamed the spot "the craftsman's workshop". This blade came out of that trench. It was split from the shinbone of a large animal and ground thin and broad into a rounded paddle at one end. The other end was cut square and drilled through with a single hole. It is fifteen centimetres long.

Particulars

Object

Splinter of a large mammal's tibia worked into a long blade, 148 mm, thin and broadened into a rounded paddle at one end and cut square at the other, where a single hole is drilled through the centre. Broken across the middle and rejoined; one edge of the narrow part is rough where a fracture took it away. Museum inventory St 79073.

Function

Not recorded.