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

carpentry/masonry tools contribute to their analysis, and to identify from the
archaeological record any examples of metal tool kits (some with an occasional stone
implement like a whetstone) that were associated with the carpentry and/or masonry
industries. Tools that were deliberately grouped together are found throughout the
Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, but have rarely been identified as tool kits of a
specific craft. Implements appear in metal caches more often and more plentifully than
other hoard objects, such as weapons, vessels, scrap, and slag. This chapter asserts that in
contrast to the assertion that metal hoards consist largely of metal scrap, they contained
meaningful assemblages, of which tool kits are an important constitutive element. The
identification of craft-related implement sets, however, has proven more elusive in
contexts other than hoards and shipwrecks.
Interregional craft links and shared technology cannot be fully assessed without
considering craft-related tool sets. Self-contained kits are better indicators of far-reaching
similarities in craft work than are sporadic distributions of individual tools. Congruities in
the composition of tool kits from different sites may indicate that implement sets were
standardized. If similarities among kits were found in locales far from one another, the
mobility of craftspersons could be more easily ascertained. Tool sets common to different
areas would indicate shared technologies and methods of craft work. Although tool kits
may aid the evaluation of cross-regional connections, this potential insight has, in the
past, proven difficult to access since kits are hard to identify and therefore analyze.
This chapter presents a detailed review of Mediterranean hoards and argues that
their compositions reveal repetitive patterns indicative of a style of hoarding not widely
acknowledged: one governed by deliberate choices of certain objects, particularly tools.
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