Svetlana N. Savchenko
Sverdlovsk Oblast Museum of Local Lore, Ekaterinburg, Russia(sv-sav@yandex.ru)
Keywords: Stone Age, Urals, harpoon points, barbed strikes, typology, chronology, techniques of manufacture.
Among the Urals Stone Age bone projectile points a series of massive barbed items adapted to wooden shafts 20 mm and over in diameter stands out. Their massiveness distinguishes them from thinner barbed arrowheads adapted to shafts 10–15 mm in diameter. Functionally points can be divided into two categories, i.e. barbed spikes and harpoon points, by the mode of hafting. Barbed spikes were fixed in position on the shaft. They served as points of both fish-spears and hunting javelins. Harpoons were used for water hunting, Their points were adapted to the movable joint to the shaft by means of a line and therefore supplied with reversed barbs, grooves, etc. After striking the point was disloged from the shaft while the cord enabled the hunters to retrieve the sunk prey. The paper presents the typology and technology of manufacture of the artefacts under study and considers the dating of their appearance in the Urals and the evolution of their shape over the Stone Age. The majority of articles belong to the Shigir collection of stray finds including heterochronous artefacts. It was established that nearly all of points had been manufactured with stone implements. Very few barbed strikes have been encountered at the sites of the Boreal time and a single Shigir tool was dated to the Late Neolithic by the AMS-method. Harpoon points from the dated site layers spanning from the Late Palaeolithic to the Neolithic are more numerous. Finds of such artefacts in the course of excavations and the dating of stray finds will enable us to refine the pattern of evolution of these projectile points in the Urals.
