Bone carvings

FIGURE 79 Bone carving. A seventh-century b.c.e. decorative carving on bone that was inlayed in wood, Tel Malhata, Israel. Bone has been crafted into practical and decorative objects since the dawn of time. Bone carvings hold great detail, and the surface polish that can be achieved is high. Many bone-made objects have survived, partly because it was widely used, but also because buried bone is generally well preserved in many types of soil. 

The earliest bone carvings that have been found are reckoned to be about 40 000 years old. They are inevitably primitive, and it is not known what they were used for. In the Stone Age humans discovered how to carve bone to make sewing needles, but before that they made musical wind instruments from the bones of large birds, such as vultures. Some of the flutes found are thought to be up to 24 000 years old. The fashion for bone flutes continued until Roman times and later. The bone most favoured for the instruments was then the shin bones of sheep. 

After the first millennium the emphasis was on ecclesiastical objects, and these were most commonly made of ivory. However, there are examples of bone carvings, both from catde bone and whale pan bone. Some items were made of part ivory and part bone, which was by then considered a cheaper alternative, and was more easily obtainable. 

Organic Materials. Museums contain large numbers of objects made out of components from plants or animals, including wood, eg, furniture, carvings fibers eg, textiles (qv), paper (qv) fmits, skin, eg, leather (qv), parchment bone ivory etc. Several of these materials have properties related to their preservation. 

A rtifacts and works of art have been carved from bone and ivory from prehistoric times. The importance of these objects to art historical scholarship is well documented. In recent years, many ivory artifacts have been recovered in excavations in the Ancient Near East from such... 

The intricacy of the work may be some indication of its authenticity. The better the workmanship, the more likely it is that the object is made of ivory. Bone has sometimes been intricately carved, but never plastic. 

The art of scrimshaw was actually started by European whalers, but quickly spread across the Atlantic and is now generally considered an American art. It came about because the men on the whaling vessels had a lot of time and little to occupy themselves with in between sightings and catches of whales, so they used the by-products of the whaling industry to pass the time. Marine ivory, bone and baleen could all be carved or etched and in some way decorated to make useful and attractive objects. 

Bone for carving can come from any number of sources. In times past even human skulls have been carved. The type of bone most usually used for decorative purposes probably came from cattle, while large items or scrimshaw were made of pan bone (part of the jaw bone), firom whales. 

Manatees and dugongs - sometimes called sea cows - belong to the order Sirenia. They live in the seas around parts of Africa, Australia, Asia, North America, and in the Caribbean. They are not well known and are protected species, so it is very rare to encounter an item made from their bone. However, they should be mentioned because they are unique in that all their bones are compact and not hollow. This has made their bone more versatile for carving than bone from other species, and it has been used as an ivory simulant. 

Bone can be carved, but only into small or rather flat items due to its thickness. 

Bone can take a hi polish after carving or other work. 

Cut and carved into thin slivers, bone can be used as an inlay materiaL Bone cannot be softened, so must be cut or carved into any required shape. 

Reconstituted bone. This material is not common but does occasionally appear on the market in the atm of small ures or netsuke-like carvings . Probably intended to imitate ivory rather than bone, it shows a total lack of structure or marks om carving tools, but will probably show signs of having been moulded. It is made of powdered bone mixed with a filler. 

Ivory and antler were, together with horn, popular materials for stick dressing - the art of making handles for canes and umbrellas. Bone was less used in this format as it is hollow and therefore difficult to carve into a handle, but sections of round, hollow bone have frequently been used on the cane itself as a spacer between the handle and the stick. 

In the nineteenth century the whaling fleets of America and Europe produced carvings now known as scrimshaw . A lot of whale bone was used, as well as ivory. The huge pan bones from the toothed whales could be made into large, solid pieces of equipment such as meat hammers, or blocks and cleats for the ship s rigging. Because bone is less likely to warp than ivory, it was also made into more specialised equipment such as rulers and gauges. The smaller, finer and more decorative objects that were produced by the scrimshanders were more likely to be made of ivory than of bone, and were made for use in the home rather than on board ship. 

In Roman Europe, bone and antler were used side by side. They were turned on a lathe or carved, and made into all sorts of small items such as spoons or hairpins. Two thousand years later it is difficult to tell whether a piece found at an excavation site is made from antler or bone. The antler used came mostly from red deer, and though the deer were, in later centuries, killed for their meat and the antlers taken as a secondary item, in Roman times only shed antler was used and the meat was not eaten. 

In the north, the Inuit regarded antler in much the same way as they regarded bone and ivory. The materials existed to be utilised, and little went to waste. The meat fix)m the animal was eaten, the skin tanned to make leather, fur provided clothes and bedclothes, and the bones, teeth and antlers were carved into anything from harpoon points and amulets to children s toys. 

First appearance of intricate bone and stone carvings, jewelry,... 

From the first tools that were made, by carving pieces of fish bones or chiseling rocks to form axe heads to modem day computers, humans have used the same top-down design philosophy. For example, in making a computer chip, an ingot of pure silicon is etched with light, pulverizing the substrate... 

As a specific example of such a model object construction in an engineering field we will consider a project in which certain dynamic and structural features of a human shin-bone are studied experimentally (Thomsen 1990). We want to know how such bones react when they are exposed to various kinds of loading conditions. Knowledge of this kind is important in many medical contexts. For instance, it is important as basis for design when various kinds of prostheses are being developed. The research object was in this case confined to mechanical properties of a well-defined carved piece of a shin-bone. Only stractural eigenoscillations in a certain... 

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