Reassessing the Levantine Tradition of Early Bronze III Bone Tubes: The View from Tell el-Hesi

Incised bone tubes are an important class of artifacts associated with the 3rd millennium b.c.e. throughout the Near East and eastern Mediterranean. Typically made of ovicaprine or cattle long bones and decorated with a series of incised motifs, bone tubes are a rare find in Early Bronze (EB) elite burial and settlement contexts. New work at Tell el-Hesi, Israel, has shown that a specialized bone tube workshop was present at the site, operating only during the southern Levantine EB IIIA (2800–2700 b.c.e.). This article provides a reassessment of the Levantine tradition of bone tube manufacture and design based on the existence of the Tell el-Hesi workshop. The authors provide a detailed description of the workshop’s stratigraphic context, review its chaîne opératoire, and, using the established baseline of morphometric variation characterizing its workshop style/tradition, compare bone tubes produced elsewhere to this known production center. It is thereby demonstrated that a subset of bone tubes from other sites in the Near East share morphometric proportions, motif sequences, styles, and techniques with Tell el-Hesi. The authors interpret these artifacts as products of the Hesi workshop, providing a chronological anchor for their contexts and evidence for a bone tube exchange operating during the EB IIIA period.