A set of 15 stonemason’s tools from the pre-Roman Iron Age have been discovered in an ancient limestone quarry at Măgura Călanului, Romania. The discovery of the toolkit in a quarry that bears the marks of how such tools were used lends new insight into Dacian stone working and architecture.
The cache of tools was discovered by a local villager in the summer of 2022 at the foot of a tree near the main quarry face. They had been dug up recently and left at the spot, possibly by looters whose nefarious plans were foiled by the 25-pound of the toolkit. The finder turned them in to the Corvin Castle Museum in Hunedoara. Deracinated from their original context, the tools are difficult to date with precision, but there are tool types in the kit that were exclusively used during the Dacian kingdom (2nd century B.C. – 106 A.D.), and quarrying of stone blocks stopped completely when the Romans left in the middle of the 3rd century.
The tools include five double-headed picks, two with a rare toothed edge, five splitting wedges of varying sizes used to break large stones apart, a whetting hammer and field anvil used to sharpen chisels, one flat chisel and one point for fine finishing work. It’s a mix of different categories of tools: direct percussion (the double-headed picks), indirect percussion (the chisel and point), cold sharpening (the hammer and anvil) and stone-splitting (the wedges).
The picks with the toothed edges are specifically Dacian in design with no known parallels from Greece or Rome. The toothed sides were used to finish the prismatic blocks for the luxurious ashlar architecture characteristic of the Dacian period. Splitting wedges have been found at ancient construction and quarry sites all over the Greek and Roman world, and while the simple design is basically the same, their weight and dimensions vary widely. You need a much larger, heavier wedge to split marble and large blocks. The wedges in this kit are small, weighing between 150 and 400 grams, and were intended for use on small blocks or soft limestone that require less force to create the fissures and split the stone.
The wedges were not used on a single block. There are stones at the quarry site that were never quite broken apart, but still retain their splitting sockets from the attempt. The sockets are uniform in size and depth. It’s possible that this toolkit belonged to a master mason who had one wedge of each size, made the choice of the appropriate wedge for each stone, then delegated work teams to do the splitting with the matching wedges. Alternatively, the toolkit may be incomplete. The mason may have buried only a selection of his tools, or some of them may have been scattered or lost in the shady circumstances of their recent excavation.
The whetting hammer was widely used to sharped agricultural implements, typically scythes, and examples have found on farm sites in Romania. The field anvil is much more rare, with the only comparable examples known from Roman Britain and Gaul. There too it was used for scythe sharpening. This is the first time a whetting hammer and field anvil have been found in a quarry context, which suggests the set was used to keep the stonemason’s tools sharp as he cut the stone, an essential task as the chisels and points dulled quickly. Having these tools on hand in quarry operations allowed masons to keep working without having to take their kit to a blacksmith over and over.
Most of the tools are small and designed for finishing work, which in a quarry context would consist of splitting small blocks and refining the rough surfaces for construction or decorative features.
The discovery at Măgura Călanului deepens our understanding of stonemasonry in Dacia, challenging previous assumptions about construction and quarrying in this region. It also prompts questions regarding the origins of these tools and the circumstances leading to their preservation in such a complete state. Future research may reveal a connection between these tools and the tool marks on quarry faces and stones, potentially confirming their use at the site and providing insights into the specific techniques employed in Dacian stoneworking. Metallographic, microstructural analyses, and studies of use-wear (such as scanning electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, or wear trace analysis) could provide valuable information regarding the manufacturing techniques and usage of these iron tools, offering a more detailed understanding of how they were crafted and employed by Dacian craftsmen.
* This article was originally published here
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