Gianmarco,

there are a variety of hypotheses on the use of such discs based on form and morphology. The easiest ones are those round to ovoid ones with centrally drilled holes which were used as spindle whorls, but there are also others with offset and/or multiple holes which seemingly wouldn't have worked on a weaving loom. Those disks are believed to have been bull roarers or similar implements.

Some of the early colonial Pueblo sites here in the US Southwest that I've been working on have produced an astounding variety of undrilled shaped discs, from roundish to ovoid to rectangular to triangular. The standard interpretation for those sherds is that they were used as gaming pieces, an interpretation which may well be accurate for most of them (e.g. Gaming in the Rio del Norte: Defining the Typology and Usage of Modified -Potsherds at Pot Creek Pueblo (LA 260, TA 1), @ http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=socanth_honproj). See also this short summary of Native American games: http://moa.wfu.edu/files/2012/04/Fun-and-Games-Teachers-Guide.pdf

More recently, however, especially the rounded variety in Greek/Roman contexts (pessoi) has been subject to more detailed forensic analysis, and it has turned out that they may have been the equivalent of toilet paper - see Philippe Charlier et al., Toilet hygiene in the classical era, British Medical Journal, 2012. This is a very interesting article, to say the least. I seem to remember a similar analysis was done on some prehistoric Puebloan ceramic discs, with similar results, but I need to search where I read that.

Hope this helps a bit .

Hi Gianmarco

I think You can see the answer in the pages 35-37 of this text:

S. Rzepecki 2002/2003; Środkowoneolityczne znaleziska talerzy z Niżu Polskiego, "Folia Praehistorica Posnaniensia", 10/11: 21-45.

https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/7724/1/02_S_Rzepecki_%C5%9ARODKOWONEOUTYCZNE%20ZNALEZISKA%20TALERZY%20Z%20NI%C5%BBU%20POLSKI_21-45.pdf

Best Regards

Maciej Wawrzczak

Gianmarco,

It will take me some time to find references, but in the meanwhile. I recently saw a paper on ceramic pottery disks being used by Native Americans as gaming pieces. I remember other papers that had similar findings. In addition, there is a recent paper on either RG or Academia concerning pottery shards being used as hide scrapers, though I do not recall their shape.

Ethnographically, bivalve shells were sometimes used to scrape and smooth the interiors and exteriors of Native American pottery, but I believe that the edge of a rounded pot sherd would be too rough and porous for that purpose. Considering that I make authentic Native American pottery, I can definitely say that the used of a pottery disk for smoothing or burnishing a firm to leather-hard vessel is highly unlikely given its porosity. Usually polished, fine-grained quartz or quartzite pebbles are used for that purpose. The clay even sticks to the most shiny of pebbles and requires cleaning often. While a pottery disk could possibly be used for final stage polishing, I find it hard to imagine that prehistoric people would use something so fragile when a pebble works much better.

Gianmarco,

there are a variety of hypotheses on the use of such discs based on form and morphology. The easiest ones are those round to ovoid ones with centrally drilled holes which were used as spindle whorls, but there are also others with offset and/or multiple holes which seemingly wouldn't have worked on a weaving loom. Those disks are believed to have been bull roarers or similar implements.

Some of the early colonial Pueblo sites here in the US Southwest that I've been working on have produced an astounding variety of undrilled shaped discs, from roundish to ovoid to rectangular to triangular. The standard interpretation for those sherds is that they were used as gaming pieces, an interpretation which may well be accurate for most of them (e.g. Gaming in the Rio del Norte: Defining the Typology and Usage of Modified -Potsherds at Pot Creek Pueblo (LA 260, TA 1), @ http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=socanth_honproj). See also this short summary of Native American games: http://moa.wfu.edu/files/2012/04/Fun-and-Games-Teachers-Guide.pdf

More recently, however, especially the rounded variety in Greek/Roman contexts (pessoi) has been subject to more detailed forensic analysis, and it has turned out that they may have been the equivalent of toilet paper - see Philippe Charlier et al., Toilet hygiene in the classical era, British Medical Journal, 2012. This is a very interesting article, to say the least. I seem to remember a similar analysis was done on some prehistoric Puebloan ceramic discs, with similar results, but I need to search where I read that.

Hope this helps a bit .

Hello! Thank you all for your quick and informative replies. I will look further into your suggestions.

@Maciej: thank you for pointing out the article to me; I will try to use Google Translator. In the meanwhile, could you give me a quick summary of what those pages are actually saying, at least in terms of core information.

@James: your remarks sound interesting. I will try and locate the reference to hide scraping. I seem to recall to have read something about the use of reworked sherds in the context of pottery production. It was something related to American SouthWest, but maybe my memories fail. But thanks for widening the spectrum of possible uses.

@Michael: toilet paper? Very interesting. And thanks for pointing out to me those two documents. Yes, I have read that in some contexts the objects in question could have been used as gaming pieces. The hypothesis as to spinning tools is interesting as well, but the objects I am referring to have no hole(s).

Just to add yet another hypothesis, I read that in some part of the Mediterranean (e.g., Aegean area) ceramic disk were used as tokens and were involved in some kind of counting procedures.

Thank you again, and if you have any further comment, feel free to share it here.

Best

Hi Gianmarco, just kind of stumbled on this, right here on RG:

www.researchgate.net/publication/272479614_Worked_sherds_and_ceramic_discs

I suppose from the responses to you question so far one can take away a wide range of uses across different cultures.

Also, it seems to me the kind of analysis you subject to pieces to (or don't) conditions our understanding of them. I mean, if you don't look for traces of human excrement on such objects, you'd probably not consider a "toilet function" for them, right?

Michael,

I am not sure by what is entailed in looking for "traces of human excrement", but testing for human-derived phosphates used to be standard protocol in defining burial grounds and habitation sites in the southeastern United States because of the organic phosphate molecules' binding with the soil, thus restricting lateral migration via leaching.

Gianmarco,

You didn't say how many disks and how old. However, I find it hard to believe that prehistoric peoples regularly used pottery disks for sanitary purposes. If that was the case, then we should find many more on archaeological sites than we do. I perused a number of Lower Mississippi Valley prehistoric site reports and found that about 50 percent yielded at least one pottery disk and never over five or six. None noted them coming from interior living spaces.

I am sure you are more concerned with occurrences in Europe. Hopefully we have given you some ideas to pursue. Even though the disks you have do not have holes, I would still like to mention that there have been drilled pottery disks that were used as personal ornaments.

James,

the idea of sanitary use of ground sherds seems relatively recent and has been in part at least driven by context, i.e. such sherds found in close association with Greek/Roman latrines. Microscope analysis have shown solidified and partially mineralised feces, which apparently the researchers do not believe to derive simply from depositional context. There is enough of a pattern here to suggest that in some places and at some times such sherds were used for sanitary purposes. I don't think anyone claims this to have been a universal behavior as there is enough historic and ethnographic information (as well as some archaeological data)  to show that folks in Classical Antiquity and pre-/proto-historic peoples of the US Southwest primarily relied on other (mostly plant) materials for those purposes.

Rather, the "toilet paper function" is one aspect along what can be assumed to be a rather wide functional spectrum. Pueblo sites, for instance, often contain hundreds and hundreds of worked sherds in all forms and sizes, drilled and undrilled, found in both habitation and non-habitation contexts. This range of form and morphology, plus the range of depositional context no doubt reflects something of that functional variability, which - as some studies in other contexts now suggest - may include instances of sanitary use, and which thus adds another potential aspect in the analysis of such sherds.

HI Gianmarco

Yesterday I replied Your comment, but my internet is not well at home :(

I will try to write in English, but I think it, itsn.t good idea. Especially, that I see, that my ansewr is not well. So please forgive me.

But ok, I will try translate Polish in to English this part of a text.

An author wrote that the function of this kind of articatcts is: a dish for eating, a dish to make a bread, lid, or a support for a dish, but the author claims, that the most probably is a dish to make a bread hypothesis (p. 35).

An author said, that we must to remember, that it isn't a nowdays bread, but a subject like wafer (in polish "podpłomyk" but I don't this word in English) (p. 36).

The author in this text arguse, that this kind of an objects are very rare, so can be interpreted by the symbolic function of baking (p. 36).

Especially the "cult" of bread is present in  a forming communities (the examples of Poland from 100 years ago) (p. 37).

Best Regards

Maciej Wawrzczak

P.S. I can see, that You didn't ask about the artifacts I was wroting about. So once again, please forgive me.

Hi Gianmarco,

These are commonly found in middle Holocene contexts from Egypt. Ones with holes are given the most attention, but those without do exist, in great numbers at some sites such as Merimda Beni Salama. There are a number of potential functions for these, but the only hard evidence I have seen for the use of a disk is as a lid for a pot. A example of this was found in situ at Maadi. This example is in:

Rizkana, I.  and J. Seeher. 1989. Maadi III: The Non-Lithic Small Finds and Structural Remains of the Predynastic Settlement. Mainz am Rhein. page 12

Hope this helps,

Josh

Hi Gianmarco, 

are the disks you're interested in with a regular rounded smooth margin (as in the items called "placchette discoidali") or an irregular cut-like margin (as in the items called "tokens")? Which are their dimension?

Nicoletta Martinelli

prof. Alberti,

in iberian protohistoric contexts (4th-1st centuries bc) there is usual to find this kind of discoidal pieces, made from pottery sherds. In the ausetani sites (el Casol de Puigcastellet, and l'Esquerda), the greatest amount of them are found in street contexts. So, we think about some kind of "public" activity, like any kind of game.  

Despite it's not very precise, I hope this can help you.

In Western Iberia's Iron Age and Roma period this are usually interpreted as game pieces.

Hi Gianmarco

in the Near East pottery fragments are sometimes re-worked so to obtain ceramic disks that may be used used as tokens to facilitate the record keeping of a number of different things. Alternatively they have been interpreted as tokens/items used for games or as jar stoppers (but I must say that my preferred interpretation is the first!) I hope I have been of some help

Best

Marco

Hi Gianmarco

We know disks of small dimension with regular rounded smooth margins from Bronze age contexts in northern Italy (mostly pile-dwellings) known as "placchette discoidali" (see attachment). Some of them (both with holes or without holes) were probably used as lids on small vessels.

All the best

Nicoletta

Dear collegue, there were some similar disks on Daskaleio and Keros islands in the Cyclades, Greece published in Keros I & II volumes (chapter 31 in the first, and chapter  chapter 10 in vol. II) You can find full version of chapter 31 here on RG, please follow this link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272172538_The_other_finds_from_Dhaskalio?ev=prf_pub

I hope this helps, at least as a refernce. All the best wishes,

Marina

Chapter The other finds from Dhaskalio

When we excavated a site above Cuzco, Peru in 1972-73, we found many such potsherds that were chipped or smoothed into circular form with no holes in them. I have been trying to figure out what they were used for. This discussion helps.

Dean,

The general consensus is usually that those without holes represent either gaming pieces or vessel lids. Historically, pot sherds that have been chipped and ground into discs are well documented as gaming pieces at southern plantation slave habitations.

Hello, thanks for keeping this thread alive with your thoughts. I seem to recall to have read an article (by one of the scholars who replied to this question) in which the function of some ceramic disks as pottery surface smoothers has been hypothesized. Maybe, this may sound interesting to Dean Arnold, at least something worth keeping note about.

Gianmarco,

Being a ceramicist who replicates prehistoric pottery, I use a quartz smoothing stone, but have read ethnographic accounts of a pecan or walnut shell also being used to polish/burnish pottery. I'll have to try a potsherd next time.

with respect to the common finds of samian on medieval sites with have been cut down in a similar manner J Bradley's 1984 paper in Ulster Journal of Archaeology argued for a medicinal use.  I wonder whether any of your examples come from curated sherds that may have acquired a similar level of spiritual power by virtue of association with great deeds of the past and might therefore be used for medical purposes.

While working on the Dolores Project (1979 - 1982) in SW Colorado I had the opportunity to replicate some ancient Puebloan pottery. In our lab we also analyzed thousands of sherds under a microscope. Some of the disks we identified could have been used as spindle whorls and the like. The larger ones were thought to be what we called "pukis", or a base to coil clay on in order to make pottery. Seems reasonable and the wear patterns we saw seemed to have born this out to some degree. Nothing was wasted. A broken pot could become a spindle whorl, a puki, gaming piece, or a child's toy.

Gianmarco,

Not sure if you have seen these.

https://www.academia.edu/22092535/SECONDARY_USE_REUSE_AND_RECYCLING_OF_CERAMIC_VESSELS_EVIDENCE_FROM_LATE_NEOLITHIC_VIN%C4%8CA

https://www.academia.edu/5487947/POTTERY_SHERDS_AS_TOOLS_IN_LATE_NEOLITHIC_VIN%C4%8CA_In_Serbian_summary_in_English_

During a survey undertaken in the area of a roman rural sttlement ( ca. 160-260 AD) at Buchen-Eberstadt i found such a disk. The researcher of the territorial archaeological state department thought in a game stone used in a board game.

in Pyrgos / Mavroraki, Cyprus, we found thousands of modified sherds, some of which are used to coat low benches at the foot of interior walls, others larger used as cosmetic pallets, others still perhaps used to mix ingredients. We are in the Ancient and Middle Bronze Age and the most interesting aspect is the cutting of these sherds prepared in advance with incisions, then cut with lithic tools, flints and basalt strikers.