KODAS2019-001 - archaeological find

Boncuklu Tarla

Turkey - Upper Tigris - Dargeçit, Mardin province, southeastern Anatolia - Near East

Function not recorded Candidate only

Kemik Plak 3 came out of the ground at Boncuklu Tarla, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic village on a tributary of the Tigris in Mardin province, in eight pieces. Put back together it is a thin flat blade of bone, 68 mm long, 20 mm wide and 5 mm thick, incised with a snake above a horizontal band and bored through with a single hole near the narrow top. Its excavators published it as a pendant from a necklace, and the graves at Boncuklu Tarla are so thick with beadwork that the reading needs no defending. What makes the plate worth a second look is the company it keeps. Decorated perforated bone plates of this kind turn up across the Upper Tigris -- at Körtik Tepe, Hallan Çemi, Gusir Höyük and Çayönü -- and the class is serpent-coded wherever it appears, one Hallan Çemi piece cut into an S-curve so that the snake is the whole silhouette rather than the ornament on it. Oliver Dietrich and Jens Notroff have argued that some of these plates were bullroarers. Nothing at Körtik Tepe can test it, because the one plaque there carrying an unmistakable serpent is broken off at exactly the end where a hole would have been. This plate is the only one in the class that carries both at once, and it is flat along its length, which is the thing a blade must be if it is to fly. It is not proof; the top of the plate is a reconstruction and the hole sits a little off the centre line. It is the closest the Neolithic Tigris comes to putting the snake and the cord on the same object.

Yatay çizginin hemen üzerinde de, plağın üst bölümünde, bir delik bulunmaktadır.

And immediately above the horizontal line, in the upper part of the plaque, there is a hole.

Kodaş, Genç, Labedan-Kodaş, İpek and Erdoğan, Artuklu İnsan ve Toplum Bilim Dergisi 4(1), 2019, p. 4

Object

Flat bone plate, 68 x 20 x 5 mm (L:W 3.4, T:W 0.25), recovered in eight fragments from an Early PPNB context; find no. K9/0002/Q/03. Incised with a snake motif above a horizontal band and two drilled pits, and pierced by a single hole through both faces in the upper part of the plate. Published edge-on profile is a thin, essentially parallel-sided bar with no longitudinal curve.

Function

Published as a necklace pendant; carried here as an archaeological bullroarer candidate on morphology.

Map confidence

low - Boncuklu Tarla site, Ilısu village, Dargeçit district, Mardin province, within 1.5 km of the Tigris (37.529444N 41.832361E).

Source location

Page references

Kodaş et al. 2019, Şekil 6 (p. 4); Kodaş and Siddiq et al. 2022, JAA 65:101393, figure gr6 (publisher image sequence)

• Snake-linked

View source Open this point on the interactive map