ABRASIVE SAWS OF THE MIDDLE URALS AND SOME ASPECTS OF THEIR USE IN ANTIQUITY

Abstract

In the Middle Transurals, stones started to get sawed with abrasive saws in the Neolithic era and was widely used in the Eneolithic. The author studied 129 abrasive saws and 153 items with traces of sawing. They respectively originate from 26 and 22 archaeological sites. Usually there are one or two saws at the site (11 and 5 sites, respectively). But some sites appeared to have dozens of them (Shaitanskoye Lake I – 13; Ust-Vagilsky hill – 19; Yurino IV – 22). They are found both in settlements, sites, and in sanctuaries. Saws are mainly represented by fragments from 1.5 to 24.5 cm long. Moreover, they were broken intentionally. There are few whole saws preserved, usually their length is 10–20 cm. The thickness of the saws ranges from 0.5 to 2.5 cm. Saws up to 0.6 cm thick predominate and constitute 46.3 %. Fifteen saws have two working blades each. 30 abrasive saws are made of fragments of grinding plates and are both one-sided and two-sided. The saws cut into the processed material from 0.2 to 2.5 cm deep. Most often (56.8 %) the items were sawed 0.2 to 0.5 cm deep. The most intense deterioration (3.6 and 4.4 cm) is found in two saws. The working edges of abrasive saws were usually formed by grinding. At the same time, the opposite edge of the saws nearly always remained untreated. The deterioration of stone saws and sawing traces in various objects were analyzed and showed that sawing boiled down to mostly splitting thin blanks used to make knives and arrowheads. There are very rare traces of saws on polished chopping tools such as axes (1) and adzes (5). Abrasive saws were also used to design teeth on comb stamps or grooves on so-called ironings. Besides, saws could be used to cut out patches out of fragments of richly ornamented broken vessels. Saws were made of 8 types of mineral raw materials. It appeared possible to identify mineral raw materials for102 saws. Two-thirds of them are made of slate (41.2 %) and granodiorite (35.3 %). The next most popular material is mica slate which constitutes 11.8 %. The remaining saws are made of sandstone (5 items), quartzite, carbonaceous shale, brown ironstone (2 items each) and quartzite sandstone (1 item). The experiments made it possible to determine the sawing speed and the deterioration rate of the saw material. It is established how long and how much workforce it took to saw. The research managed to compare the efficiency of sawing different types of stone with saws made of materials with different hardness. The experiment results reveal the peculiarities of abrasive sawing of stone. The peculiarities were the methods for securing the blank and securing the saw in the intended cutting line. Sawing with a two-handed saw, as well as using fine-grained abrasive, significantly increased the processing efficiency. © 2024 Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.