Combs made from bone or antler

[Alcyoneus]

http://www.dnaco.net/~arundel/bone_pamplet4.htm gives a very good description of how to do it, as does a book called (?) "The Dig At Ribe".

corrected for correction

[This message has been edited by Alcyoneus (edited 07-11-2002).]

[Ny Bjorn]

Might that be "the Dig at Ribe"? Ribe = The oldest town in Denmark at the base of the Jutland peninsula north of the German border.

They've preformed extensive excavations there resulting in a Viking Age museum (well, there are some medieval stuff as well) and a Reconstructed village.

Follow this link to go to their English home page.

/N B



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Ny Björn Gustafsson
Archaeological guide
Birka

[Patrick]

My wife and I have made one antler comb out of moose antler (it is what we had at the time). We were aiming to copy a Viking comb in the book _Viking Artefacts_ (yes, that's how it was spelled).

It came out pretty well, I thought. We ended up giving it to one of the local ladies who was about to leave town. Sadly, she didn't seem to care about it at all. And that silly thing represented more time and effort than many of the knives I make! I should have just given her a few glass beads. Viking women are always impressed with a handful of colored glass.

-Patrick

[Buran]

The York Archaeology series has a lot of material on antler combs, you could probably make one based on their descriptions. They note that there were no horn combs found, but that material is not preserved very often.

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<I>Did I claim to be a wise man?
It surely means that I don't know...</I>

[Abaddon]

That site is pretty cool.
A comb doesn't look too hard to make really.

[Ny Bjorn]

- No - a comb isn't that hard to make, especially if you use modern tools. The tricky thing is to make the teeth round in section - without breaking them!

/N B

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Ny Björn Gustafsson
Archaeological guide
Birka