A typo-technological study of bone artifacts from Agiabir, India (c. 2300-600 BC/BCE)

Abstract

The multi-cultural site of Agiabir, located on the left bank of the River Ganga in the Mirzapur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh (India), was discovered in the late 1990s and excavated for eight seasons between 1999 and 2018 by the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, Banaras Hindu University (India). Six successive periods of cultural habitation at the site have yielded a rich bone and ivory assemblage comprising 416 artifacts. This paper presents an archaeozoological and experimental study focusing on 124 of them, recovered between 2014 and 2018, predominantly from periods without iron (I-Neolithic and IIChalcolithic) and periods with iron (III-Pre-Northern Black Polished Ware). The beginning of a longer study, presented here, attempts to trace their chaîne opératoire and the role they played in the site's different cultures while addressing the vital question regarding their continued production even with the advent of metal technology. Potentially, every skeletal part could have been optimally exploited; still, this study indicates that certain hard parts (long bones and ivory) of large adult mammals were consistently preferred for a plethora of artifacts. Interestingly, the artifacts' occurrence continued not only to increase but also to diversify through Periods I to III. Therefore, arguably, these bygone craftsmen and consumers alike probably valued bone as highly as other seemingly rarer raw materials like semiprecious stones and metal. The manufacturing techniques involved removing the epiphyses and flaking the diaphyseal blanks to desired shapes followed by retouching and abrading or polishing the working edges by grinding against whetstones in earlier periods and metal in later periods. The remnants of every step in these processes are well-represented in Agiabir's faunal and antiquity assemblages. The nature of their use ranged from tools to styli, hair ornaments, pendants, inscribing pencils, and needles, many of which continue to be made with different raw materials and in present-day India.