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

Workshops 33 24
Hoards 427 400
Shipwrecks 75 75
Table 5.1: Carpentry/masonry tools by context and number of examples found with other tools
A craft-related tool kit is more complex than a simple grouping of implements,
and every collection of tools is not necessarily a kit. The structured assemblage of a kit
reflects intentional selections that were made by a craftsperson. In order to recognize a
tool collection as a plausible set, there needs to be a sufficient range of variation in terms
of tool type and/or subtypes (e.g. such diversity may be evident in size and/or form).
These criteria are necessarily subjective, but provide basic guidelines for identifying tool
kits in the archaeological record. There are many tool groupings that fit one of these
conditions and are probable kits. Tool groups that lack diversity may be more incidental
in their deposition. The boundaries of these distinctions are full of ambiguous examples,
but this rule-of-thumb is a helpful means for recognizing deliberate tool kits.
More than half of the carpentry/masonry tools found in burials were deposited
with at least one other utensil, but indisputable tool sets are rare in mortuary contexts.
Only a few second millennium burials have produced adequate variation in their
implement types to qualify as craft-related sets. One such tool group came to light in an
Early to Middle Bronze Age burial in Pyrgos, Cyprus (Tomb 21) and was interpreted by
its excavator, Belgiorno, as belonging to a coppersmith. 542
The grave contained a copper
ax, a bronze ax, two copper chisels, a copper awl, two copper knives, two copper
tweezers, five whetstones, and four stone mace heads (which might also be considered
sledge-hammers). Bolstered in part by archaeometallurgical evidence at the site,
Belgiorno argued that the tools belonged to a smith (not a carpenter) and were for “the
542 Belgiorno 1997.
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