Overview
The plan of the blade workshop at Titris Höyük at right shows the architecture recovered with the cobbled areas shaded. The workshop is located on the northeast edge of the site in one of its suburbs.

The workshop was excavated in the 1998 and 1999 field seasons by Steven Rosen, Sumru Aricanli, and Britt Hartenberger and workers from the village of Titris/Bahceli.

Remnants of specialized blade production were concentrated in Trench 5, with debitage pits located in areas E and G and room O. Caananean blade cores were predominantly located in pits and features in Trench 5 but were also reused in some contexts in the other trenches.

Contents: Cores, Features incorporating cores, Production sequence.

Evidence of Blade Production - Cores
About 1600 Canaanean blades cores were found in the excavated workshop area. This is a great contrast with the number found elsewhere on the site (1) despite an impressive 3000 square meters of horizontal area excavated across the site.

The images at right show the blade face of a core (left) and a side view of a core with its parts labelled (right).

Evidence of Blade Production - Cores in unfinished and exhausted states

A portion of the cores found (about 12%) were unfinished and still in a preform state. The core at left is a preform of gray flint. This piece has not had a blade face or platform prepared but is in the process of being shaped into a core. Two of its edges have been flaked into crests, preparatory for the removal of crested blades.

Other cores were found from the end of the production sequence, namely exhausted or damaged cores (about 38% of all cores). The piece at right is an exhausted core - it has a large fault in its blade face, making it difficult to remove any more blades.

Cores in Features: Evidence of Storage

Canaanean blades were produced in great numbers at the workshop and stored in features such as pits. Locus 039 in Trench 5, shown here, is a three-part pit feature almost exclusively composed of cores and a few limestone pieces. The middle cylindrical part extends at least one meter deep, as shown by a probe next to it on its east side.

The most puzzling feature of the core pits is that they do not contain only exhausted cores, but also preforms and cores that are still fully useful, with intact blade faces and platforms.

Cores in Features: Evidence of Disposal / Recycling
Besides being stored in pits, cores were also reused as building material in the workshop. This wall in Trench 5 incorporates cores in its lower courses; these are then topped by a few large limestone pieces (trowel is resting on top of preserved wall base).

Cores were reused in walls in Trenches 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the blade workshop.

Production sequence
Finds of cores in various states provided evidence of the Canaanean blade production sequence. Debris found in the workshop's debitage pits showed how these cores were shaped. Core trimming elements (CTEs) used at the workshop included crested blades (also called ridge blades), core tablets, flanks, thinning flakes, and plunging blades. These pieces were removed in order to prepare a flat platform and blade face for the core. Preforms went through at least three stages between their raw state as chunks of flint and their final state as fully prepared cores: