Obsidian-Tipped Hunting Spear with Copper Binding, Middle Kethari Period

This spear represents what excavation teams working across Kethari-period strata have come to designate Class III hafted projectiles — the workhorse weapon type of the Middle Dominion, distinguished from the ceremonially elaborate Class I temple deposits by their functional construction tolerances and workshop-formula decoration. The piece is datable to the Middle Kethari period (approximately -1900 to -1600) on the basis of three convergent lines of evidence: the copper wire alloy composition (approximately 94% copper, 4% tin, 2% trace, consistent with Keth-period smelting ratios as established by Orvaine et al. in their 2019 survey of the Tharuvek Smelting Complex), the clay sleeve firing temperature signature (estimated 780–820°C by thermoluminescence analysis conducted at the Meredin Institute), and the knapping tradition visible in the obsidian point, which shows the characteristic Keth-Orun pressure-flaking margin with percussion interior that typifies Middle-period production before the Late-period shift toward smaller, more standardized tanged points. The decorative program of the clay sleeve is particularly noteworthy for the light it casts on the diffusion of Vorrashi cultural material into common Kethari practice. The coiled serpent figure — the river symbol originating with Vorrashi River People cosmology, where it represented the animating spirit of the great river system — appears here not in a formal ritual context but on a mass-production utilitarian object, incised with the casual confidence of a familiar motif. By -1850, Vorrashi religious iconography had clearly penetrated deeply enough into the Kethari visual vocabulary that a common workshop decorator would reach for the coiled serpent as a natural companion to the flame motif, without apparent awareness of or concern for its originally distinct theological provenance. This is consistent with the broader pattern of Vorrashi cultural absorption documented in the administrative clay tablet record: what began as diplomatic and trade-mediated cultural exchange had, within several generations, become seamless folk syncretism. The copper binding wire's wave-like terminal coil is a feature appearing with sufficient frequency in Class III spear assemblages to suggest it was a standardized workshop instruction rather than individual decorative choice — a vernacular expression of the wave-form pattern that appears at every scale of Kethari material culture, from monumental stone reliefs at the Seven Temples down to the humblest domestic pottery. Its presence here argues against reading Kethari visual language as purely hieratic; these patterns were evidently internalized at the level of craft habit. The incised inscription warrants brief comment. Five logographic signs in a single top-to-bottom column, headed by a flame-star determinative of the type associated — in the partially deciphered corpus — with categories of possession or consecrated status, followed by four characters only two of which can be confidently matched to attested morpheme-signs in the current lexical database. The irregular stroke weight and inconsistent glyph spacing indicate a non-specialist hand; this is not scribal notation but the kind of functional marking — owner's mark, workshop batch number, or simple protective inscription — that literate or semi-literate craftspeople and soldiers applied to tools throughout the Dominion period. Comparable brief inscriptions appear on Class III spearheads from the Tharuvek garrison deposit and the Bol-Eshum household cache, suggesting the practice was widespread. No close parallel exists for the specific combination of coiled serpent and flame motif on the clay sleeve within the published Class III corpus, making this piece a modestly significant comparative datum for ongoing discussions of Vorrashi-Kethari iconographic synthesis at the common-object level. It was recovered from a domestic midden context rather than military or temple deposit, which is itself informative: these spears moved freely between subsistence hunting, household defense, and organized military use, and were discarded rather than curated when damaged or superseded.