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Ezekiel; I suspect that the Luthier (Stradivarius) had a jig with a specialty clamp whose small round jaws clamped down on what would be the center of the scroll and probably had a second clamp for the neck. The scroll clamp may have had something like a hatch pattern on jaw of the clamp an this would be responsible for the star pattern.

My thought is that Stradivarius would start with a block of maple wider than the finished scroll. This might be deliberate to allow him to go back and clean up the damage done by the clamp jaws later. The Luthier would clamp down on the center of the scroll and he would fashion out the scroll using the gouge. I suspect that once this was complete he would normally cut away the the "ears" projecting out from the center of the scroll, but in this case, the block he was working from was narrower and he could not remove any more wood without damaging the finished scroll.

See:

Fine Woodworking

See page 41. Note that there is a pinhold in the center of the scroll. Here he probably also had a clamp or a jig with the pin in the jaw face to keep the scroll centered while he worked with a gouge. (Or, it held it in place while a duplicarver machined a rough copy of the scroll that would later be cleaned up by hand.)

Since this involves "The Messiah" and a star....

"O gracious Light, pure brightness of the ever living Father in heaven, O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed! Now as we come to the setting of the sun, and our eyes behold the vesper light, we sing your praises O God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O Giver of life, and to be glorified through all the worlds." Anglican book of Common Prayer

And of course return to the Old Testament:

"Seek him that made the Pleiades and Orion, that turneth deep darkness into the morning, and darkeneth the day into night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his Name. Amos 5:8"

Wishing you a good and peaceful night!

(The horsehead nebula in Orion is of course, a center for star creation; A Psalm with an old Testament description of the water cycle! Nifty!)

Thank you for the interesting link and for taking the time to read and respond.

The enigma with the Messiah is that the people in this business don't even know what or why the star imprints are there, and that no other instrument has them, except as I noted on the 'Pingrille' that had been a later detail from Sacconi's work.

You'd think that if he (Sacconi) left a tool mark artifact from his carvings, everyone else would know what was the source of the original marking on the Messiah.

There is also the matter of the two other star marks within the pegbox itself.

2016:

The 300th anniversary of Stradivari’s 1716 ‘Messiah’ violin was very appropriately celebrated in the city of its birth. The instrument, which has not left England since 1890 and has been in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford since 1939, has finally been allowed to go home. It was the first opportunity for the collected experts of Italy and beyond to subject it to the battery of modern scientific analysis.
The results of all the various forms of scanning, microscopy and wood examination were formally presented on 9 October at the ‘Messiah Study Day’ in Cremona.
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The UV signature of classical Cremonese varnish is certainly distinctive and, it would seem, not generally replicated. But there was a little debate left to run; one of the strange distinctions of the ‘Messiah’ is the presence of small star imprints on the bass eye of the scroll and within the pegbox.
In my presentation, I gave the opinion that these imprints are the same as those seen on some of the Stradivari moulds, and are beneath the varnish on the scroll, thus providing a strong linkage between the violin and the original moulds in Stradivari’s workshop.
Unfortunately Cacciatori’s UV examination brought him to the conclusion that the impression was made over the varnish, meaning that it was done later, and thus possibly by anyone who had access to both the violin and the forms. Was our good friend Cozio interfering again?
But Brigitte lobbed the ball back over the net, explaining how her interpretation of the UV analysis led her to believe the impression was indeed under the varnish, not over it, and made while the violin was ‘in the white’.
This could be a long game. It leaves us with the useful warning that not every bit of laboratory evidence is conclusive, but the accumulated effect of all the fascinating work that has been done in Cremona provides us with more insight into the master’s techniques, and confirms the authenticity and artistic value of the great Stradivari we call the ‘Messiah’.
And this was an historic occasion in many more ways than one, in which the city of Cremona re-established its deep and abiding relationship with one of its most famous children.
https://www.thestrad.com/postcard-from-cremona-messiah-study-day-2016/4387.article

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From the page I linked in the original post, this photo appears to show the stars within the pegbox (click to enlarge):

Between the left two strings, and also between the right two strings.

It's a "read between the lines" sort of thing. :)

I thought this was funny wording:

‘Messiah Study Day’ (Oct 9, 2016), and

the city of Cremona re-established its deep and abiding relationship with one of its most famous children

Stradivari, or the Messiah? :)

Actually for the "study day" part I went to check the Jewish Torah reading (Chumash) for that day. Messiah, after all.

Chumash -- Parshat Ha'azinu, 1st Portion (Deuteronomy 32:1-32:6)

Excellent. Lots of unusual things going on there.

The Ha'azinu portion has its own special two-column formatting, verse 5 is an odd one with much debate over how to translate, and the first letter of verse 6 is a texual oddity: an enlarged hei that is set apart as if it were a separate word.

Plus there's something else that fits with the topic at hand but is beyond the scope of this post. I thank these fine folks in Cremona for unknowingly linking that place in the Torah to information already known about the Messiah.