Tracing the Source of the Elephant And Hippopotamus Ivory from ...

of the waste pieces may be reused for secondary manufacture, as for pegs, dowels, or
other types of joins.
Krzyszkowska (1993: 28) further warns “no single site has yielded a complete
range of workshop material from unworked tusk to finished product, by way of blanks
and unfinished pieces and with a full complement of workers’ waste. Nor do I expect
such a site to be found... I suspect that our rather offhand use of the term ‘ivory
workshop’ may have seduced us into seeing ivory production as a much more centralized
activity than it actually was.” By ‘centralized’ Krzyszkowska means the idea that all
stages of manufacture occur in a single, central, workshop, not that the ivory workshops
were free of centralized control. For example, the ivory may have been stored in one
location, carved in another, and assembled in yet another area. Thus in the
archaeological record working areas may be distinct from assembly areas and storerooms.
There may additionally be separate storerooms for separate stages of the manufacturing
process (i.e. raw materials, blanks, reusable offcuts, interim stages of manufacture, and
finished pieces). Of course each site is unique and these stages may be collapsed into one
area or extended further, and may not offer such a nice and clean-cut picture: at Knossos,
for example, there is “debris of ivory-working in fairly close proximity to an assembly
area for finished inlays. But where the inlays were made is a mystery, since they are
hippopotamus ivory and the chips and offcuts are elephant ivory” (Krzyszkowska 1993:
28).
58