Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

Chapter 5: Carpentry/masonry implements: variety and tool kits
I. The importance of tool kits
The metal tools used by prehistoric craftspersons were certainly valuable, for
ethnographic parallels demonstrate that craft tools were worthy enough to be retained and
passed along to the next generation (see Chapter 3). From ethnographic documents we
know that when tools were given to apprentices as gifts they were presented as kits. 527
This practice recognized that individual implements alone were of far less use than a
coherent set designed to cover the range of tasks required to accomplish a job. With tool
kits, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each industry, such as metallurgy,
carpentry, masonry, wall painting, and leather working, has its own specific assortment of
tools. Within those crafts, the tools varied according to the craftsperson’s level of skill
and the type of material being worked (e.g. different masonry tools were employed for
soft sandstone and hard conglomerate). Variation is a defining element of a craft set, and
it can take the guise of either different kinds of implements or sub-forms of a type. A tool
kit can be defined as a collection of two or more implements grouped together
intentionally for the sake of carrying out affiliated yet distinctive tasks—in other words,
“groups of tools commonly and consistently used together.” 528
Metal tool kits are under discussed in scholarship, probably because they have
been difficult to identify, though this is not the case for implement sets within lithic
529
assemblages.
The purpose of this chapter is to consider how the find contexts of
527 According to an apprenticeship wage agreement on the island of Syros in 1827, a set of tools were given
to the apprentice after four years of service. Polyzoi 2009, 159.
528 Cahen, Keeley and Van Noten 1979, 662.
529 The literature on stone tool kits is large, and a small selection of useful studies is suggested here:
Binford and Binford 1966, 238-240, 263, 287, 292; Cahen, Keeley and Van Noten 1979, 662, 671; Morrow
1996.
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