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

the larger and stronger metal types were made. Moreover, the importance and value of
wooden tools in farming should not be underestimated. Wooden hoes, plows, and shovels
were effective in breaking up soil, especially if their tips were fire-hardened. The efficacy
of wood implements is clear from ethnographic examples. 151 Wooden tools may also
incorporate a small portion of metal to fashion an effective implement. For instance, one
could line the tip of a wooden plowshare or shovel with metal; this practice would limit
the amount of metal that was needed without sacrificing functionality. Winnowing-forks
(or pitch-forks), rakes, harrows, and threshing sledges are other effective implements
typically made from wood, thus emphasizing the importance of the material to
agricultural activities. 152
Yet with the inception of metal agricultural equipment, the
efficiency of digging and plowing likely increased. There are regional differences,
however, in the use of metal for agricultural tools.
By the LBA (Fig 3.5b), there is a dramatic rise in agricultural tools (381
examples), although the proportion of these metal items (10.9%) was low in comparison
to other functional tool categories. Regional patterns of consumption are distinctive in
this period. Metal agricultural implements were more prominent in the eastern
Mediterranean than in the Aegean. Cyprus and Syria-Palestine exhibit a comparable
percentage (just under 20%) of their region’s total tool count (Fig. 3.5a, b). The
preference for this functional category in the eastern Mediterranean is reinforced by
numerous fragmentary (and some complete) picks and hoes—probably originally from
Cyprus—aboard the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck. Bronze tools for agriculture were
151 Frank and Miller 2001, 28.In a discussion of Early American tools, Sloane (2002, viii) notes that
wooden shovels may have been more effective and more durable than metal versions.
152 For modern evidence of these tools made in wood, see: Wulff 1966, 267, 275-6 (20 th century Persia);
Polyzoi 2009, 63 (19 th and 20 th century Greece); Whittaker 2000, 61-62, 64-66 (Cyprus); Frank and Miller
2001, 37-38 (colonial New Mexico).
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