Quadian bone and antler industry from Slovakia (1. - 5. century AD)

In this Article, I am going to deal with the finds of bone and antler industry in the Germanic-Quadi environment of southwestern Slovakia. They include jewellery, combs, toilet items, items used for textile and leather working, knife handles, parts of board games and semi-finished products. They have been found on both cemeteries and settlements. Germanic tribes worked bones and antler using almost the same techniques as the Romans. These included mostly coarse cutting, soaking and moulding the material into shapes by lathing, sawing, drilling, grinding, polishing, smoothing, riveting, chiseling and so on. Comparing the structure of the studied items with those from the territory of Bohemia, which was settled by the Germanic tribes of the Marcomanni, we notice certain differences. As for jewellery, we have a greater variety of forms bone hairpins. They include also various kinds of amulets, a larger number of drilled animal teeth and bone pearls. In the Marcomannic space we find a larger number of bone gaming pieces, rod dice, fishing tools, various catheters, and a wide range of single-sided and double-sided combs. When we compare the structure of bone and antler products with the finds from the Roman Empire (particularly Pannonia), we can see also clear differences. There is a wider typological range of hairpins; there have been found various parts of furniture, weaving items (spindle whorls, weaving tablets, etc.), gaming pieces, parts of military equipment, various kinds of amulets, writing tools, whistles, and so on.