One man’s trash is another man’s treasure – the case of the osseous debitage waste from Drăgușeni – Ostrov
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure – the case of the osseous debitage waste from Drăgușeni – Ostrov

Summary/Abstract: Romanian studies on prehistoric osseous industries focused mostly on the finished pieces which usually preserve only the marks resulted from the final stages of the shaping operation. Waste debitage artefacts and blanks are rarely mentioned, and at times they had not even been collected during the archaeological excavations. We would like to draw attention precisely to these types of archaeological remains, often more crucial to the reconstruction of the technological schemes for raw material processing than the finished pieces. As case study we selected the assemblage from the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlement at Drăgușeni – Ostrov (Romania). The site yielded a substantial osseous assemblage among which a significant amount of waste. The debitage operation through bi- or quadri-partition was carried out on bone, mainly by double grooving. Bipartition was most frequently used on antler, carried out by double grooving. The presence of finished pieces made on flat blanks is an indicator of longitudinal debitage while the presence of waste debitage allowed for the identification of the combination of procedures involved in the debitage operations.

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