Prehistoric bone artefacts from the northern Moluccas, Indonesia

Abstract

The abundance of bipointed bone artefacts in Golo Cave makes it likely that all stages in the manufacture, use and discard of these artefacts were carried out at this site. The Golo Cave spatulae were almost certainly used in variety of ways, although probably not in any way that generated high-pressure loading of the tip itself. Shaving appears to have been dominant method for shaping bone artefacts in the Golo Cave assemblage with 85% of cortical artefacts and 54% of shaft artefacts showing the characteristic irregular, wavy grooves. Spatulae make up 14% of the Golo Cave collection but were not found in any other northern Moluccan site. The ratio of bone artefacts to unworked bone in Golo Cave is 1 artefact per 22 gm of bone. Although only small quantities of bone were recovered from the latter three sites, it is nonetheless clear that bone artefacts are genuinely scarce in these sites compared with either Golo Cave or Siti Nafisah.

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