Natural Science in Archaeology

Chapter 6
Soft Stones and Other Carvable Materials
6.1 Introduction
Humans have been carving stone since the Paleolithic. Figure 6.1 shows a famous
early example. Throughout the Mediterranean world, the carving of stone vessels
dates from the Neolithic Period and continued through the Greco-Roman era. However,
the apex of carving was reached in the late Predynastic Periods of Egypt and
Mesopotamia and in the Early Bronze Age of Greece. Various soft stones were
employed, the most popular being limestone, basalt, alabaster, serpentine, marble,
slate, chlorite, selenite, steatite, and gypsum. The repertory of shapes and sizes
was enormous. Professional carvers produced every thing from huge amphorae to
small, delicate alabaster and amulets. At times the selection of lithologies for the
manufacture of a class of objects is puzzling. The inhabitants of Kodiak Island,
Alaska, from 500 to 1750 CE, used local diorite and granite for lamps rather than
the available softer soapstone, slate, and limestone.
A visit to the exhibits of any of the world’s major archaeological museums will
show painted limestone, greywacke, quartzite, schist, and igneous rock statues from
ancient Egypt as well as Near Eastern cylinder seals of hematite, apatite, steatite,
chalcedony, lapis lazuli, and shell material. Soft stones such as sandstone, travertine,
and marly limestones have also been used as decorative or finishing material
on buildings through antiquity.
Quite often softstone is a combination of mineral species. The Semail Ophiolite
in the al Hajjai Mountains of southeast Arabia is considered to be the primary
source of carved softstone artifacts found at Iron Age archaeological sites along the
Arabian Gulf coast. Provenance studies (Ruge et al. 2007) to source softstone artifacts
from the United Arab Emirates showed the source materials and the artifacts to
be composed of serpentine, steatite, soapstone [not further identified] and chlorite.
Rocks from the ancient quarries were more mineralogically varied and included
the talc-related minerals birnesite, bemenite, talc, clinochrysotile, antigorite, and
dolomite.
G. Rapp, Archaeomineralogy, 2nd ed., Natural Science in Archaeology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-78594-1_6, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
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