Monica Mărgărit
Dragomir Nicolae Popovici
Production and Function of Barbed Points from the Gumelniţa Tell of Hârșova (Constanţa County) / Producţia și funcţia vârfurilor barbelate din așezarea Gumelniţa de la Hârșova (jud. Constanţa)
1 Ianuarie 2011
Cuvinte cheie:
operational sequence
antler
harpoon
eneolithic
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Abstract
For the Neo-Eneolithic of the Romanian territory, barbed points (harpoons) represent the type of artifact belonging
to the osseous materials industry on which we have most information. Th e lot we had at our disposal for this study,
coming from the settlement from Hârşova-tell, is made up of 19 harpoons (coming from the diggings of the
period 1989–2008), made of Cervus elaphus antler. In this study we have tried to identify how the raw material
was obtained, turned into finished pieces (processing techniques), the economy of these finished pieces (the ways
how they were used and their role in the economy), and finally the eventual repairs of the fractured pieces and
their reintegration in the economy of the community. We also provide a series of experimental and ethnographic
examples, in order to illustrate that the general denomination of ‘harpoon’ is incorrect, when extended to designate
all the points with barbs. Th e ethnographic comparisons, which at first seemed to offer a key to understanding how
these weapons were used, in the end complicate the problem by demonstrating that prey can be hunted in different
ways and that the same weapon can be used with different hunting methods.
