How Scholarly Communication Works

A cow’s foreleg with six holes was illustrated in color in “Digging in the City of David,” BAR 05:04.

Archaeologists identified the perforated bone as a flute; by blowing into the hollow bone and covering different holes, different notes could be produced. The bone flute, recovered from a destruction level of the first century A.D., was found in 1975 in the first year of the ongoing excavations in the City of David, the oldest inhabited part of Jerusalem. (See Yigal Shiloh and Mendel Kaplan, “Digging in the City of David,” BAR 05:04.)