New analytical approaches to sickle blade use and cereal harvesting at Ras Shamra-Ugarit during the Late Bronze Age

At Ras Shamra-Ugarit, knapped stone tools largely persisted during the Late Bronze Age, despite the widespread use of metal. Flint was used to produce geometric sickle elements and tools as part of the domestic toolkit. Previous technological and functional studies of the lithic material from the “Centre de la Ville” and “Grand-rue” areas revealed the inhabitants’ involvement in agricultural activities, particularly cereal harvesting and sickle maintenance. In this study, we apply recent analytical methods – confocal microscopy for gloss texture analysis and FT-IR spectroscopy for the identification of hafting residue – to reassess the function of these tools. Our results support earlier interpretations that these flint implements were used for cereal harvesting, underlining their importance in food production. More specifically, in this study, we demonstrate that sickles were used for low-cut harvesting of fully ripened domesticated cereals, pointing to a mature and well-developed farming system. This paper represents an original contribution to applying non-destructive and interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative methods for investigating lithic tools use at a site where metalworking practices were fully established.