Lock-shaped Stone Handbags (Pierres Ansées) from Central Asia. Typology, Distribution, and New Findings

This paper is dedicated to the study of the stone handbags of a lock shape and other similar forms discovered across Copper and Bronze Age Eurasia. Information, data, and measurements are collected and presented for the first time in a comprehensive paper. A preliminary typology of the artefacts divided into six large super-types, with types and sub-types, is then advanced. Unfortunately, most of the handbags have been found by chance and lack useful information to understand and re- construct their original function – whether ritual, social or economic – which remains enigmatic. The earliest artefacts were found at Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites of south Turkmenistan. However, the period of their greatest diffusion comprises between the mid-3rd and the mid-2nd millennium BCE, as confirmed by the discovery of some handbags in stratigraphic contexts of farmers’ settlements located in northern and south-eastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Recently, other handbags have been identified in the storerooms of different museums in southern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, extending their area of diffusion northward toward the cultural world of the Eurasian steppes. With awareness that the geographical definition of the Oxus civilisation is a matter of broad scientific debate, the study of this class of objects allows some new light to be shed on the socio-eco- nomic and cultural contacts between the settled farming communities of southern Central Asia and the mobile groups of cattle breeders widespread across the Eurasian steppes.