The British Museum’s decorated ostrich eggs have been reexamined by experts to understand where they came from and how the eggs’ elaborate designs were created. The eggs date back five millenia, all the way to the early bronze age. The Guardian has the details:
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Until now, most academic study of the eggs has been stylistic, focusing on their designs. An international team of archaeologists, led by experts from the universities of Bristol and Durham, set out to discover more about how cultures across a broad swathe of the Mediterranean, north Africa and the Middle East secured their eggs, and how the highly prized items were made.
Even in areas where ostriches lived at the time, however, such as in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa, the eggs excavated by archaeologists had sometimes been sourced from distant regions, their isotope analysis found. “This was a really unexpected discovery – that just because you could source an ostrich egg locally doesn’t mean you necessarily did.
“This opened up new questions such as: in antiquity, was there some prestige value in an egg that was laid in a different climactic zone?”
The team’s microscopic and isotope analysis also suggested that, contrary to their supposition that some later eggs in particular might have been sourced from captive birds, almost all of the specimens were probably collected opportunistically from wild birds, which can be extremely dangerous.
image via The Guardian
Source: neatorama