Nicolas and Guéret on Amorican Arrowheads

These are among the finest stone arrowheads ever made in Europe.

Beginning with the incipient Beaker barb-and-tang in Brittany (with a floor of around 2150 B.C.), the Amoricans develop into incredibly fine, wafer-thin arrowheads.  The translucent flints give an added beauty to these high-quality arrowheads which, like the Danish flint daggers, were probably professionally made with a metal tool set.

Figure 6. Arrowheads stemming from one of the wooden boxes found in the Kernonen barrow at Plouvorn, Finistère (photo C. Nicolas).

There is an unusual story to how these arrowheads were deposited into single graves, usually by the tens up to sixty something.  It appears they were removed from the arrowstock and placed into a charms box which accompanied the dead.  This was not only limited to arrowheads but to daggers also, which sometimes occur to the tune of around ten in a single burial.

Figure 1. Distribution map of the Early Bronze Age graves including Armorican arrowheads in Brittany (mapping C. Nicolas). [additional detail in original document]

Nicolas and Guéret seem to discount the notion that they were only funerary objects as hafting glue and other indicators make it clear they were hafted on arrowshafts.  There's a few other oddities, such as paint traces or polishing agent on a few arrowheads.

It seems that these items could  have been mementos placed in the graves of some men, the same way immediate family members put roses on a casket or certain items in the grave.


Armorican Arrowheads Biographies: Production and Function of an Early Bronze Age prestige good from Brittany (France).  Journal of Lithic Studies.  Clément Nicolas, Colas Guéret, 2014.  [Link]

Abstract:

Brittany can pride itself on the Armorican arrowheads found in Early Bronze Age graves (2150-1700 BC). In the present state of knowledge, these are the only specialized craft products in knapped flint produced in this region at the western edge of continental Europe. Admired since the 19th century, these flint arrowheads have never really been studied. Due to the wealth of graves and grave-goods, a relatively precise study can be undertaken of the development of these craft products, despite the low number of reliable radiocarbon dates.

These arrowheads are characterized by a well-defined type (pointed tang and oblique barbs) most often combined with ogival form. Raw materials show the selection of a high quality yellow translucent flint, of which the origin has to be sought at more than 400 kilometers (Lower Turonian flint from Cher Valley). From a technical point of view, Armorican arrowheads reveal a great mastery of retouch by pressure-flaking. This skill is written in stone by the perfection of forms, the extreme thinness (until 2,5 mm thick) and very long barbs (until 25 mm long). Such work could not have been done without the use of copper, even bronze, awls. Moreover, some marks may testify to the implication of these tools. On 549 arrowheads that have reached to us, none of them presents diagnostical impact features. However, use-wear analysis indicates that most of them were hafted (adhesive traces, bright spots, blunt edges). These facts suggest that they are less functional arrowheads than objects for the show. In the graves, Armorican arrowheads are frequently set down carefully in wooden boxes taking the shaft off.

The Armorican arrowheads with their exotic raw materials, their high-degree of technicality, and their absence of use, have all features of a prestige good. They have been discovered by dozens in few graves under barrows with very rich funeral items (bronze daggers decorated with golden pins, precious bracers, silver beakers, etc.). According to these obvious facts, they symbolize the power of the elites. The genesis of Armorican arrowheads are in all likelihood explained by a climate of increasing social competition, which express itself in Brittany by an individualization of burial rites, a development of metalworking and a reorganization of territories.

In this article, we will stress on raw materials selection, technology and know-how, as well as use-wear analyses. All these approaches will help us to trace the biographies of the Armorican arrowheads.

Beaker Language and a Badass Reconstruction

This was going to be a comment at Eurogenes, but it got kind of long and preachy because the topic is complex, so instead I'm pasting that comment here.

The question Davidski asks is, "What are the linguistic implications of Oldade et al, 2019?"

But first, let me interject and introduce you to some badass re-enactment photos from Jak obléci pračlověka.  These are well done.  Very well researched and up to date in many details.
Here's their site.  I'd like to feature a subsequent post on just these, and of course, a few comments.

Czech Bell Beaker drawing down for the kill

Back to Beaker language.

I think Beakers spoke a single language or intelligible dialects.  I'm confident that that language was Indo-European based on how the child cultures develop in the EMBA in Central Europe, particularly those descending into Bronze Age Italy.  Also, the low countries have strong continuity in the Hilversum and Elp Cutures and these are hypothesized to be speaking an IE language that was neither Celtic nor Germanic.  That follows to pre-LBA Britain and Ireland.

But!

Rather than try and defend the IE character of Bell Beaker, I think I'd rather make a case that they spoke a single language based on their habits, regardless of what the DNA says. 

Why one language?

1.  The geographic expanse of Bell Beaker was enormous.  Janusz Czebreszuk went so far as to say that in the history of Europe only the EU was of comparable size.  Very large inter-regional networks generally communicate in a single language regardless of what is spoken at home. 

2.  Beaker spreads across Europe shockingly fast.  In a short time they are in Ross, Doagh, Man, the Orkneys, little islands in the North Sea and the Baltics. They're all over the Western Mediterranean, sometimes in islands previously uninhabited or seldom visited.  They are literally in the Arctic and the Sahara at the same time.  If you read Volker Heyd's comments on the early Aegean Bronze Age or Jan Turek's "Echos", it's possible these people were really canoeing waaaay out there.
They moved over long distances quickly because they were horse-riders and boatsmen. 

3.  It wasn't all style.  Most everywhere, Beakers lived by or with other people, maybe even in the same house.  Even when they lack Steppe ancestry, their heads are still deformed which means as infants they were raised as Beakers.  So their culture is more than hip artifacts and styles, it's their upbringing and their ancestry. 

4.  Beaker religion and superstition is clearly different from the Neolithic.  Their expressions are, as Antonio Valera commented, almost iconoclastic, being always schematic, geometric and skeumorphic.  Because they were not literate, traditions and myth were conveyed through storytelling and singing.  Beaker religion and Beaker language were almost certainly connected as we should expect for Bronze Age religion and language.

5.  Beakers essentially controlled most of the avenues of movement in Western Europe.  Lots of peoples lived around Csepel Island.  Lots of people lived around the Tagus Estuary.  But it is Beakers who impose themselves in these examples as the dominant, intrusive group.  This is an important point, because it really doesn't matter what language most people in Portugal or Hungary spoke, the important thing is that if you wanted something, or wanted to go somewhere, you'd be dealing with Beakers.  VanderNoort made a somewhat similar observation regarding riverine and island hopping settlements.

6.  Beakers seemed to have recognized and sometimes tolerated Beakers from other regions.  It's fascinating to see Beakers who plausibly come from different backgrounds in the same locality or even in the same cemetery as other Beakers (consider Southern Britain, or the Mesetas, or Little Poland).  This is huge because it tells us about how they viewed themselves as a nation.  Beakers from Brittany, the Middle and Lower Rhine, and probably Portugal, can be found within several miles of each other in Southern Britain.

Time, space, money, identity and God, I'll bet there was only one language.

Color Me Beaker (Berlin and Kay)

Did you know that many languages have no words for colors like orange, purple or green?

This short video describes Berlin and Kay's "seven-stange evolution of color terms" in languages.  From this, we might ask if there is physical evidence to infer the lexical colors of Beaker language*.

I have some ideas, but first, check it out...




Let's apply this theoretical scheme to the Bell Beaker Culture.  Remember that WHITE, BLACK and RED are Stage 2 development (and as a side note, these three colors are the only PIE lexical colors that can be reconstructed with any certainty.  In fact, they may be the only true lexical colors of PIE, the rest being descriptive, such as "shining", "glimmering", "lightish", "wine-red sea", etc)

What are lexical colors in the Beaker world?


A very decent case can be made that Bell Beakers distinguished BLACK, WHITE and RED.  In fact, we might suspect this just from the antiquity of their culture.  This three-part color scheme appears to have been the decorative colors of Atlantic Megalithic Culture (Bueno Ramirez et al, 2015, below), as well as, the roughly contemporary PIE Culture.  There's a few other circumstantial arguments we can delve into, but let's look at the material evidence.

Beaker Culture seems to have an almost dualistic tendency in contrasting various ideas, from gender to celestials, and probably, coloration.  The contrast between red and white is most apparent in the funerary pottery and a name for the two colors seems likely.


RED

Red and white pottery, red and/or red and white cattle, probably reddish horse coats, red and white petroglyphs, red and white textiles, red-dyed wool or linen.  Certainly they often used ochre or cinnabar in burials.  Some of that was from dyed blankets, in Iberia that might have sometimes included red facial shrouds.  Red hair would have been worthy of linguistic distinction.  Of course, pure copper would belong in the red category (using the Berlin and Kay definition).  Semetite amber is red.   (Baltic amber is lighter, but we can't be sure they made any lexical distinction at this stage.  More on this in a moment...)

WHITE

Quite a few things of importance were almost contrastively white in their culture.  Dairy products are uniquely white.  The inlay paste of their funerary pottery was usually gypsum, bone or other combinations. The ivory buttons and toggles must have accented darker clothing.   Whalebone pommels would have been striking.  Their cows may have been a single coat of red, but some may have had white faces or bellies.  Wooly sheep are white.  Salt is white, and interestingly the etymology of the Basque word for white probably comes from a word meaning 'salt'.

Of course every language understands black, as white and black are Stage 1 colors.  Jet would have been the most striking, but bitumen would be known to many men making arrows.  Charcoal is black, and that would have made pigment for tattoos and paint.

Beyond this, it is very difficult to imagine much else in the color palette of the Beaker tongue.  For one, it appears unlikely that many peoples of this time distinguished between green or blue, much less anything more interesting like purple (which obviously came very late).

Proto-Indo-Europeans, for example, seem to have had difficulty expressing many colors as distinct lexical terms.  A lot of the examples that could be used to describe a greenish-blue sea or gold, seem to use descriptive words like 'shimmering' or 'shining'.  A lot of words for these other colors are interchangeable and describe totally different colors in the daughter tongues.

Stage III?

It is possible that another color existed in Beaker Culture/PIE Culture *-ghel.  From this we get a color yellow from 'shining' which can be used to describe the Sun, gold and (quite specifically) Baltic Amber.  The debate is whether this had crystalized into an actual lexical term that literally meant YELLOW, or does this apply to anything shiny like the sparkle of the sea?

There is one other color in Stage III, that is green.  This is another debate topic for PIE, but what about Beakers?  Greenstone bracers seem to have been prestigious among Beaker archers.  In the age before this the green axeheads.  Obviously the oxidation of copper is green, and copper ores would be green as well.

So where were the Beakers?  Probably somewhere between 2 and 3.





See also:

Mallory and Adams in "The Oxford Dictionary of Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World"

"Natural and artificial colors: the megalithic monuments of Brittany" (Bueno Ramirez et al, 2015)
Antiquity 89 (2015): 55-71.  toi: 10.15184/aqy.2014.29

Proto-Indo-European Etyma.  University of Texas at Austin

"A Taste for Green..." (Rodriguez-Rellan et al, 2020

* Let's not be retarded.  Beakers certainly were able to communicate with each other in a commonly understood language even if the language of their household or communities varied significantly.