The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MORTENSEN1970-001

Shimshara pierced rib strip

Iraq · Rania plain, Lesser Zab, Sulaymaniyah Governorate (Kurdistan Region); Hassuna period · Near East · Mesopotamia

Function not recorded Candidate only

Archaeological datec. 6300–6000 BCHassuna-period level 13; object not directly dated.
Line drawing of a long straight-sided bone strip with a small hole near its rounded top and an irregular break at the bottom, with two thin lens-shaped cross-sections drawn beside it.
Plate I. Drawing of the Shimshara rib strip with two cross-sections; the pierced end is at the top and the lower end is broken. Image source

Source term: spatula

Only eleven worked bones survive from the Hassuna-period village at Tell Shimshara, a mound beside the Lesser Zab in the Rania plain, and four of them lay together on one floor. Three were long knife handles cut from red-deer foot bones, grooved at each end to hold blades of flint or obsidian, and badly scorched by fire. The fourth is this strip, cut from the rib of an ox or a big red deer: flat and straight-sided, rounded at the top and drilled with a single hole, its far end broken away. Obsidian from the same level came from the volcanoes of eastern Anatolia.

Particulars

Object
Flat strip cut from the lower part of a rib of an ox or a large red deer, with parallel sides, a thin lens-shaped section and one rounded end pierced by a single hole; the other end is broken. Preserved length 13.8 cm.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. Peder Mortensen, Tell Shimshara: The Hassuna Period, Historisk-filosofiske Skrifter 5(2) (1970), pp. 58–59, fig. 49d; Colin Renfrew, 'Tell Shimshara and the traffic in obsidian', pp. 139–140 View
  2. Pascal Flohr et al., 'Radiocarbon dating of Bestansur and Shimshara', in The Early Neolithic of the Eastern Fertile Crescent (2020), pp. 187–196 View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.