Dear Andy, Horse metapodia represent a great raw material in serial manufacturing for producing regular bone rods which can then be transformed into all sorts of things such as decorative pins or dice. Stage one in the manufacture process is to remove the epiphyses with a saw to create a prescribed bone length. Workshop debris from Roman sites commonly contain some horse, although mostly cattle, epiphyses, rings of diaphysis or, much more rarely, lengths of metapodia with proximal-distal sawn ends. Since this is the part of bone being worked it is clear that most of these diaphyseal lengths were used and therefore do not show up archaeologically very often. I have even seen examples of such production in the LBA of Egypt and in the EBA of Anatolia but the epiphyseal ends are deeply grooved and then snapped off. With more ready access to metal saws the technique becomes increasingly common so scholars dealing with the British Iron Age should expect to find this technique - if of course, this what these pieces actually represent. No absolute truth in archaeology. Best, Alice ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the ZOOARCH list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ZOOARCH&A=1