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

of fragmentation practices restricted to users of axe-adzes in the Romanian Copper
Age.” 541
The insight on broken items and their potential value is something to keep in
mind when evaluating the implements from the current study region. Complete and
broken—yet often still operative—implements coexisted in craftsperson’s tool kits, for
they are regularly found together in metal assemblages in the Aegean and eastern
Mediterranean. Repetitive patterns of analogous tool groupings may even signify
standardized tool kits. It is asserted here that fragmentary tools, when their functionality
(however limited that may be) is considered, can shed light on a hoard and the potential
existence of kits.
III. Ascertaining tool kits within different contexts
The distribution of tools according to context suggests where implement kits are
more likely to occur. Craft sets are infrequent in cult or sanctuary locales, and surface or
unknown proveniences; this conclusion is implied by the quantity of tools that were
recovered with at least one other utensil from the same context (Table 5.1). Since
workshops, burials, hoards, and shipwrecks habitually yielded multiple tools, these
contexts require probing in the search for implement kits. It is worth pointing out that
hoards are regularly found in settlements, and in these cases, the tools therein are
classified as “hoards” rather than “settlements.” Thus settlements may technically
produce metal implement sets, but usually only as a collective and well-defined hoard.
# of carpentry/masonry tools # of examples found with other tools
Total 2257 726
Settlements 1001 54
Cult locale or 52 3
sanctuary
Surface or unknown 361 0
Burials 309 171
541 Chapman 2000, 103.
232