Virag, Cristian: Situl neolitic Halmeu - Vamă (Satu Mare, 2015)
Abridged version
Abriged version The tools group ■ 4% □ 2% □ 1% 0 26% Ш 1% □ 30% □ endscrapers □ endscrapers on retouched blade blanks □ sidescrapers □ borers В truncations □ truncations on laterally retouched blanks □ laterally retouched blades □ retouched flakes Ш splintered pieces B. The polished stone tools The polished stone tools are one of the main inventions of the Neolithic. They are first associated with woodworking, from falling down the trees and making place for cultivated areas to the working of wood for house-building and furniture. The main tool used for cutting trees was the axe and for house and furniture were used adzes and chisels. All these categories are represented in abundance at Halmeu. We are not going here to make a typological and technological analysis of the polished stone tools. We are just briefly mentioning them, as they will be subject for a future publication. We mention the presence of axes, of various types, some of them perforated, of adzes, chisels, polishers and perforated maces/sceptres (fig. 79). Such a mace/scepter appeared in the feature Ml7 (C 22/2006) - a feature interpreted as “symbolic grave” - fact in accordance with other funerary contexts of discoveries from a larger area. C. Other types of lithic pieces In this category we include first the querns, but also the hammerstones. As in the case of polished tools, querns will be analyzed in detail in a separate publication. The huge number of querns discovered at Halmeu, both complete and fragmentary, is amazing and rises question marks regarding their production inside the settlement or nearby, but proves are still missing (fig. 80-89). Querns were utilized mainly for grains processing along the entire Neolithic period. Eugen Comşa believes that the dimension of querns varies during the Neolithic and that their size reflects the quantity of grains processed in each household8. At Halmeu there is a large variety of querns, from querns of small dimensions to very large querns (utilized by many household together?). Even if the majority of querns are fragmentary, there are also entirely preserved querns, some of them being very probably intentionally deposited (some upside down) during some rituals linked to the agrarian cycle. 7 Astaloş/Virag 2007. 8 Comşa 1987, p. 75; Comşa 1996, p. 43 103
