BONES USED TO MAKE TOOLS, GAMES, JEWELRY, MUSIC ETC.

The word fibula means pin in Latin and it’s easy to see why. The pig’s fibula is an ideal shape for a pin, with its natural head and tapering form. Before buttons became commonplace in medieval times, pins were one of the principal ways of securing clothing. Most were just simple straight pins, but some had a hole cut into the head of the pin through which a tie could be looped. Archaeologists have unearthed numerous early Christian and Viking pins. A select few are intricately carved or covered in gold leaf. These pins were not mere clothing fasteners but were worn as jewelry for special occasions. Different bones are easily fashioned into useful items without much work. Smaller animal scapulas, or shoulder blades, made good utensils for scooping flour or grain. Long thin scoops, rather like a very large marrow spoon, could be made from the metacarpals of sheep, and perhaps these scoops were used to core apples or to sample cheese to test its ripeness.
Hollow bones can be cut into lengths and threaded together. The American Indians made necklaces by stringing together small pieces of bird leg bones or individual salmon vertebrae. More complex exploitations of bone developed and flourished later. A beautiful early example, dating from 700 A.D., is the Franks Casket, a whalebone box that is a masterpiece of bone carving. (It is named after the man who presented it to the British Museum, not the unknown artist who carved it.) Bone is durable and readily available. It can be carved by anyone, from skilled Italian craftsmen to prisoners of war. The Embriachi family was famous during the Italian renaissance for their exquisitely carved and inlaid bone jewelry boxes. Prisoners of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, held by the British, whiled away their incarceration by carving bone. Many of these soldiers had learned their skills as comb makers in Europe or as scrimshanders on whaling ships.
With bones scrounged from the prison kitchens, they made toys, boxes, trinkets, and intricately detailed model ships, which they could sell or trade. To return to more practical purposes, more than three hundred thousand perforated bone strips were found in the German town of Constance, dating from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, remnants from bone button and bead manufacture. Along with pins, clothes were fastened with leather knots and loops, and these knots were often reinforced with bone disks. Eventually bone buttons replaced the disks and knots. However, the most important boost to the bone manufacturing industry was the expansion of the Holy Roman Empire, which resulted in increased demand for rosaries. Traditional rosaries were made from glass, amber, precious stones, or metal, but these were expensive and out of reach of the general population. Bone rosaries provided an affordable alternative.
The working of bone was an important industry during the Renaissance, and bones were crafted into everyday items from combs to spoons, spectacle frames, tweezers, and toothpicks. Military applications were not overlooked, with scabbards, bow splints, and hilts or handles for knives and swords all made from bone. While other materials, especially plastic, have mostly supplanted bone today, it is still carved and is a common replacement for ivory.

BONE TOOLS 

Killing game for meat left man with plenty of bones for making tools. Large leg bones were especially useful. Reindeer tibias were sharpened and used to remove the hides of animals, and tubular cannon bones (the bones between the hock and the fetlock) were employed to scrape the remaining flesh off the hides. The knuckle of the cannon bone forms a natural handle, and teeth were notched into the other end. Early man extracted the rich, nutritious marrow from such bones by smashing them with rocks. That left him with splintered bone pieces with very sharp edges, quickly recognized as useful weapons, and these bones became the first crude spears. As civilization progressed, man replaced his bone tools with metal ones, but often kept bones as decorative items or features. Even today, many knives, especially hunting ones, have carved bone handles, and we can buy bone-handled cutlery for our dining tables.

MUSICAL BONES

The Latin word tibia means both shinbone and flute. Archaeologists have found many Roman flutes made from the tibias of sheep or large birds like cranes or geese. Although the tibia is ideal for making a flute, any long, straight hollow bone will work. American Indians made their flutes using both the long wing bones of birds and their leg bones. Others turned bones into into whistles and tuning pegs for lyres and harps. With little work, they could become percussion instruments. Simply struck, rattled together, or placed between the fingers and knocked against each other, like spoons, they were used to keep rhythm. Metacarpal bones of pig and sheep with a hole drilled in the center have been recovered from many archaeological sites but their use is not as clear-cut.
Some speculated that these bones were used as toggles to fasten clothing, but more recent research has convinced many scholars that they were “buzz bones”: the bone was attached to a twisted cord and spun, causing it to make a humming or buzzing noise. Bones don’t just make music or other sounds, they are celebrated in many songs. The most famous bone song is the African American spiritual “Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones.” With its origins in the book of Ezekiel, the song is about resurrection; it tells of the power of God and teaches basic human anatomy at the same time. Then there is the jazz classic “Saving the Bones for Henry Jones.” Written by Danny Baker and Vernon Lee, it was recorded by Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer. Henry Jones doesn’t eat meat, but he’s no vegetarian. The clever Mr. Jones prefers bones: “We’ll save the bones for Henry Jones ‘cause Henry don’t eat no meat.”

BONE GAMES 

Although we grew up on opposite sides of the world, my husband and I both played jacks. His Canadian jacks were formed from thin metal strips fused together in the center, so when you tossed them, they landed on the spokes. My jacks would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks and early Romans; they were made from the knucklebones of sheep’s ankles. One source I read while working on this book stated that the tradition of using real knucklebones survived only until the last days of the nineteenth century. Well, I can vouch that it lasted at least until the 1970s in Australia.
Plastic jacks were available, but my mother, ever frugal, boiled up the lower leg bones of sheep to extract the small knucklebones. If you want to try this at home, ask your butcher for lamb metatarsal bones. These are the bones between the hind leg shank and the foot, and they are usually left on the carcass and tied together to suspend it. Then most butchers toss them away with the string still wound around them. They come in pairs, so ask for three pairs, although you will only need five knuckles to play jacks. Mix them with some meatier lamb bones and make stock. Then, once the stock is strained, you can retrieve these leg bones and leave them to cool. Use a small knife, preferably a flexible boning knife, to cut into the ankle joint, where you will find the small knucklebone.
(There is a bonus to all this: these metatarsal bones will have added extra gelatin to your stock, making it set like a jelly.) To clean and whiten the knucklebones, soak them in a sodium carbonate cleaner, such as a household carpet cleaner or spot remover. Knucklebones is a very old game, and its origins are difficult to pin down. It may in fact have been one of the first games ever played. It is easy to imagine early man sitting around the fire and passing his time playing games with leftover bones. In the British Museum, there is a small terracotta sculpture dating from third century B.C. that depicts two young girls playing with knucklebones. During the classical and Hellenistic periods of Greek art, numerous scenes of young women and goddesses playing this game were sculpted and painted. These girls would have played with either real bones or ones made from ivory, bronze, or terracotta. The game remained popular with children through the ages, as Brueghel’s 1560 painting “Children’s Games” reveals.
It illustrates more than two hundred children playing different games, and in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, you can see young girls playing knucklebones. Astragali was the Greek name for knucklebones; the Romans called it tali. They both played several versions of the game ranging from a simple tossing and catching game to one that involved gambling. Knucklebones have an elongated S shape. There are four long sides, the front, the back, and the two sides of the S and when tossed, the bone can land on any of them. The other two “sides” are the top and bottom of the S; they don’t come into play, as the bone cannot land on these curved sides. The four long sides were assigned the values 1, 3, 4, and 6, marked by dots or Roman numerals. Four bones were tossed together and a complicated scoring system was used. All around the world dice games are played using bones. In India, there is one called k’abatain, its name coming from the Arabic word k’ab, meaning ankle bone.
Even in English, dice are called bones. Ankle bones were probably the forerunners of the six-sided cubes we use today. A cube is the most practical to toss as all sides have an equal chance of coming up and so it became the most popular shape. The placement of the numbers on the dice varied, but the general convention became that the numbers on opposite faces of the die would total 7. Other games like draughts, checkers, chess, and dominos all began with bone playing pieces.

BONE JEWELRY

In 2004, a discovery of beads in a cave at the southern tip of Africa revealed that man’s love of adornment is very old. These beads were made from shells and dated at over seventy-five thousand years old. Bone tools were found alongside them. We view jewelry as purely ornamental, but for early man it had many meanings. While its intrinsic beauty counted, jewelry could also be an amulet or worn to denote the social status of its wearer. Early jewelry was fashioned from objects at hand like shells, seeds, and, of course, bones. Bones were a powerful symbol. For early man the power and strength of an animal resided in its bones. By wearing the bones of a certain animal, he could assume its characteristics: skill at hunting, for example, or strength or speed. Bones from horned animals were especially valued. The horn was a phallic symbol, and the bones of these animals naturally bestowed sexually potency on their wearers.
Beginning with simple pendants made from hollow bones strung on plant fibers, bones were carved, polished, and pierced to create intricate jewelry—sometimes ceasing to look like a bone. Bone is slightly softer to carve than gold, so it was an ideal medium for practicing the art of engraving. Many early jewelers and metal workers refined their skills on bones before embarking upon precious metals. More recently, the ban on ivory revived the interest in bone jewelry and it is enjoying a renaissance. Bone has one more connection to jewelry. Bone ash is an ingredient in jewelry cleaning and polishing compounds.

FASHIONABLE BONES

Bone is carved into exquisite jewelry, but wearing just plain bones never caught on. British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, famous for her unique view of fashion, created a T-shirt in 1972 emblazoned with the word rock spelled out with real chicken bones. She had collected the bones from meals ordered from her local take-out restaurant.

BONE CHINA

An Englishman, Josiah Spode, created bone china toward the end of the eighteenth century. Bone china does indeed contain bones—about fifty percent of its composition, in fact, in the form of calcined bone ash. To make this ash, animal bones are stripped of meat, then heated to 1832°F (1000°C), which alters their structure (and sterilizes them). They are then ground into a powder that is added to the porcelain clay. Bone china is not only stronger, but also less likely to chip than regular porcelain. The biggest advantage of bone china when first introduced, though, was its very white color and translucency. It set the standard for fine English china, and  Spode’s competitors, the Wedgwood, Minton, and Coalport factories, quickly followed his lead.

Excerpts from the book "Bones Recipes, History, and Lore" by Jennifer McLagan, Harper-Collins,2005. Compiled, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.