Lapis Lazuli Bead Making at Shahr-i Sokhta. Interpreting craft production in a urban community of the 3rd millennium BC

The book publishes, 50 years later, the results of the excavation of the lapis lazuli workshops found at Shahr-i Sokhta, Sistan, Iran (c. 2500 BCE). A careful reconstruction of the manufacturing sequence of lapis lazuli beads performed in this great Bronze age city, with updated scientific methods, takes into consideration the parallel production of the flint drill heads used in perforating the beads. The results also question many pre-conceived assumptions on the ancient organization of work of bronze age cities. In fact, - the craftsmen were multi-specialists working at the same time diverse materials such as lapis lazuli, turquoise, flint, alabaster and copper, and not narrow specialists; - they camped freely among the ruins of the city, collecting their food on the shores of the nearby lakes, rather than being forced to live in palaces and being fed with rations by the elites; - they were probably independent nomads moving along the Helmand valley for transhumance, and not a permanent component of the early urban context; - they had discovered the technology of corundum-containing abrasives; - and they worked for the elites that ruled the city, and not for the merchants and rulers of faraway Mesopotamia.