Nineteen hollow bone tubes from a 6,000-year-old Armenian rock shelter have archaeologists stumped about what they were for

Nineteen of the 40 worked bone objects pulled from a 6,000-year-old Armenian rock shelter are hollow tubes, and the archaeologists who studied them cannot say what the tubes were for. The artifacts come from Yeghegis-1, a shelter in the Yeghegis River valley of Vayots Dzor in southern Armenia, which was excavated from 2021 to 2024 and sits about 1,500 meters above sea level.

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Radiocarbon dates place the occupation at roughly 4100 to 3500 BCE, late in the Copper Age. A team that includes Marina Évora and Mariya Antonosyan examined the bone assemblage as a whole, mixing a study of how the pieces were made with protein analysis to learn which animals supplied the raw material. The tubes are the one category the data could not explain, which makes them the most talked-about part of the paper.

A shelter high in the Yeghegis valley and its bone workshop debris

The study was published in Archaeological Research in Asia under the name “Integrated technological and ZooMS analysis of late Chalcolithic osseous industry from Yeghegis-1 (Armenia).” Coverage by Arkeonews summarizes the counts: of the 40 pieces, 23 were unfinished, 10 were completed tools, 4 were production scraps and 3 were raw or barely processed fragments.

That mix matters. A site dominated by unfinished work looks like a place where bone was being shaped on the spot, not a place where finished goods were simply dropped or traded in. Stone tools did the shaping, and the team found no traces of metal tools, even though the period sits within the era in which the Chalcolithic takes its name from growing copper use.

Yeghegis-1 is a rock shelter at about 1,500 meters of elevation, and the Arkeonews report does not say whether the occupation was year-round or seasonal. What the bones show is activity: people sat in this shelter, shaped bone with stone tools, and left behind more half-made objects than finished ones.

Goat, sheep, rabbit and gazelle: what collagen fingerprints show

Worked bone rarely keeps a recognizable shape, so the researchers used ZooMS, a technique that identifies an animal from distinctive fragments of its collagen protein. The method gave an answer for 39 of the 40 objects. Sixteen came from goat, 11 from sheep, 6 from rabbit, 1 from gazelle and 2 from pig or wild boar, while 3 could be assigned only to a broad animal group.

Goat and sheep together account for 27 of the 39 identified pieces, so the shelter’s bone workers leaned heavily on the animals most likely to be on hand from herding. The remaining identifications, rabbit, gazelle and pig or boar, add up to nine objects. The dating rests on radiocarbon measurement of the occupation, so the species list and the age range can be read side by side: a late Copper Age shelter whose residents worked bone from several animals rather than a single favorite.

Tube hypotheses the Yeghegis-1 authors decline to confirm

Hollow bone tubes from other prehistoric sites have been read as musical instruments, containers, amulets or personal ornaments. The Yeghegis-1 authors list those options and then state that their own study does not confirm any of them. Arkeonews quotes the caption on the tubes bluntly: their intended function remains unknown.

The authors offer a few explanations for the silence. The tubes may reflect a specialized activity, local use, exchange with other communities, or abandonment before completion. Because many of the pieces were never finished, the wear patterns that normally reveal how a tool was handled are missing, and a half-made object is a poor witness to its own purpose.

The large share of unfinished material raises its own question. If the tubes were abandoned before completion more often than other forms, the shelter may preserve an early stage of a craft whose end product was carried elsewhere. If instead tubes were simply hard to finish, the pile of failures would look much the same, and the published evidence does not separate the two stories.

Pointed tools in the same assemblage are easier to place. The researchers suggest they could have served in leatherworking, weaving, basketry or pottery decoration, though they say experiments would be needed before saying so with confidence. The team also cautions against reading too much into the size of the sample. Forty artifacts are not enough, they write, to draw firm conclusions about how much bone working took place at Yeghegis-1 or how widely its products circulated across the region.

The open question is concrete. Nineteen tubes, a mix of finished and unfinished pieces, make up nearly half of a 40-object assemblage whose other members have tolerable explanations, and the authors say plainly that the study of those finds confirms none of the earlier suggestions for what tubes like these did.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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