The first studies on ancient Near Eastern ivories centred on iconography and style, an approach that became standard. Technological features have only come into focus in recent years in studies by Georgina Herrmann, Annie Caubet and François Poplin. The French-Italian team who undertook a new study of ivories from Arslan Tash has developed a protocol to re-approach these objects in a way that they have never been documented before. It provides outstanding new data that will give scholars a chance to study this material from different points of view. My contribution outlines this protocol and presents new findings that were made based on it. In particular, I will discuss how one can reconstruct the ancient production cycle.

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