Early and Middle Holocene Antler Tools With Holes From the Gravel Pits of the Smarhon Area, North-Western Belarus

Abstract

The present article focuses on artefacts made of antlers with holes drilled for the haft, both those available in physical collections and those known only from archaeological literature. This category of items is held by a number of central and regional museums in Belarus, as well as in private collections. Such ‘dispersion’ of the items makes their study problematic. Until now, no comprehensive study of antler artefacts with drilled holes from gravel pits located in Smarhon has been conducted. Publications have so far considered only the specimens that are most representative from the point of view of comparative typology. Michal Chernyavskiy and Piotr Kalinovskiy invariably associated tools with drilled holes with the Mesolithic period. However, this group of tools is more diverse and chronologically complicated than previously thought. The authors of the present article propose a new typological scheme for this item category which is part of a pan-European cultural and chronological context based on a complex analysis of antler artefacts with drilled holes.