The results of a techno-traceological study of stone tools used for making petroglyphs based on the piquetage technique

Rock art is a type of archaeological source quite sophisticated for chronological and cultural attribution. Based on iconographic data and specific content of images, researchers are most often likely to identify petroglyphs' belonging to one or another artistic tradition. The analogy method, comparison of petroglyphs with figurative elements of different artifacts found in a well-dated archaeological context, allows us to most accurately attribute rock engravings. However, the technological aspect of making petroglyphs is far from being well-researched. Meanwhile, the question of how and by what means petroglyphs were created is no less important than that of their visual side. The ways and techniques of picking petro-glyphs show that different iconographic traditions had their own technological features. Despite the fact that this issue has been covered ever more in research papers in the last decade, our knowledge about the tools used for creating petroglyphs are extremely fragmentary, if not negligible. Although there are a great number of rock art sites in the Minusinsk basin which have been studied for over two centuries now, no data has so far been published with regard to the tools found alongside petroglyphs. Thus, this article provides some results from a study of an archaeological collection of artifacts found in different years and at sites dated to different periods which is kept in the Minusinsk Local History Museum named after N.M. Mart-yanov. The research combined the experimental-and-traceological approach (use-wear analysis) and three-dimensional reconstruction, and that helped identify some traces of using a series of stone artifacts as bumpers and intermediate tools for working the surface of rocks. In addition, the context of these finds indicates that they were used for making petroglyphs.

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