A finished comb is a personal object. The scraps left beside a comb-maker’s bench can describe an entire trading world. At Ribe in Denmark, fragments of antler, unfinished pieces, and discarded manufacturing waste help archaeologists separate two journeys that can look identical in a display case: a finished object arriving from elsewhere, and raw material arriving to be worked locally.
That distinction makes the waste unusually valuable. An imported comb proves that a comb moved. A scatter of antler offcuts can show that a material moved and was transformed at its destination. The scraps put a workshop back into the story.
Why a comb is not simply a carved outline
Early medieval composite antler combs were assembled objects. The 2015 study by Steven Ashby, Ashley Coutu, and Søren Sindbæk investigated combs, manufacturing waste, and raw antler from Ribe, Aarhus, and Aggersborg. The research concerned the supply networks behind a specialized urban craft, rather than treating attractive finished objects in isolation.
A useful way to look at a composite comb is to follow its joins. Where are the tooth plates? What holds them together? Do the cuts and rivets suggest a sequence of work? The answers depend on the actual object, but the questions draw your attention away from decoration alone. A comb embodies decisions about material thickness, assembly, and the danger of breaking a small tooth during manufacture or use.
The University of York’s Combs and Communities project places production and consumption together. That pairing matters: a craft object belongs both to the person making it and to the people who chose, carried, maintained, and eventually discarded it. Neither side of that relationship is fully recoverable from a pretty silhouette.
When a fragment stops looking like an animal
Once antler has been cut, smoothed, and worn, identifying its source animal by eye can become difficult. The 2015 investigation used ZooMS, a method of species identification through peptide mass fingerprinting. In accessible terms, surviving protein information offers another route to identifying material after its recognizable anatomical shape has been removed.
The study documented reindeer antler in Danish town assemblages by the 780s at the latest. Reindeer material connects those workshops with a supply area beyond Denmark. The Aarhus UrbNet research report stresses the implication: the activities sustaining an urban workshop need not all occur within the town. A resource landscape far away can be part of the town’s practical life.
It is tempting to draw one confident arrow on a map and label it “the route.” The identification itself does not supply that complete itinerary. Material could pass through several hands. A species identification is evidence about the substance, while a reconstructed journey requires additional reasoning about habitats, dates, other finds, and transport.
A later study makes the sequence sharper
A 2023 study of Ribe material dated 720–900 CE combined biomolecular approaches with archaeological context. Early combs made from non-local reindeer and moose antler could be distinguished from evidence for later local working of imported material. Reindeer appeared among workshop debris from the middle of the eighth century in the studied sequence. The authors also reported limits: insufficient preserved DNA prevented a finer geographic attribution of one reindeer comb.
That result is more interesting than a claim that “science proved where the Vikings came from.” It describes changes in the movement of objects and resources. It also shows different methods doing different jobs: an archaeological layer places a find in a sequence; protein or DNA helps identify material; the distribution of working debris helps identify an activity.
Three finds, three different claims
| What you find | What it can support | What it cannot establish alone |
|---|---|---|
| A finished comb of non-local antler | Movement of the object or its material | The exact workshop or every stop on its journey |
| Offcuts from the same animal species | Working of that material near the deposit, subject to context | The identity or origin of the craftworker |
| Finds in carefully recorded successive layers | A changing local sequence | Every event between the surviving deposits |
