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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

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