Undead in Eching-West? (Sueddeutsche Zeitung)

Via Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "Lebenszeichen der Urahnen"

Archaeologists Delia Hurka and Birgit Anzenberger have uncovered a five acre site in Freising, Bavaria which includes quite a few Bell Beaker deposits.  The pits look like graves but appear to lack skeletal remains despite the presence of complete skeletons from later periods.  Hurka and Anzenberger wonder if children were buried whose delicate remains faded into oblivion.

Another possibility could be that this is part of a growing list of Beaker deposits that look like graves but are actually something else ritual related, involving smashed pottery and divided or single article offerings.  Rojo-Guerra et al, 2014 was one recent paper on this party pit phenomeon.

We'll see.  I think one satisfying possibility is these are bothros pits which may explain the underworldly nature of the deposit.  Whatever they are, they're everywhere.  All throughout Europe. 

I don't know if that is the case at Eching, but the brief description sounds like it has the prosphoric gift tendency (Prosphora- for the lack of an actual word, something that has been broken or divided in a small ritual gift of a piece of a whole that connects the living and the dead.) 

A single piece of gold foil was found in one of the pits, I'll try and find a picture.

Specialized Beaker Archers!! (Ryan et al, 2018)

This study on ancient archers has been in the works for a while, and eagerly anticipated.  Well, it's here.  As this work continues to develop in an upcoming doctoral thesis,  Jessica Ryan's data will add new social dimensions of the Bell Beakers.  There's some surprising results.

Mounted Beaker Archer

This is the first step in what will be an expanding collection of skeletal data on specialist Bell Beakers.  Since trade specialties often leave entheseal and other changes on the skeleton, it's possible to understand the repetitive motions and stresses that may be associated with certain activities.

Because of burial context, Ryan could associate or interpret certain entheseal stress and muscle-headedness with archery stress.  Jessica Ryan took 27 Bohemians, which included 10 suspected archers, and found differences that defined the suspected archers as a group of "specialist archers".  These Central European archers have been hypothesized to have used short composite bows, whose development coincides with mounted warfare.*

As Jessica Ryan will be expanding the study throughout the Eastern Domain for her doctoral thesis, the initial focus on Bohemia is to refine the methodology.  One issue she remains aware of, and in fact has evidence of here, is that most Beakers may have been archers of some competency (similar to the universality of archery in Medieval England). So comparison between groups is formally clarified to mean a distinction between suspected archers (or specialists) and non-suspected archers (presumably mom and pop folks who are not specialists). 

Ryan, Desideri & Besse identify archer burials with the typical diagnostic set.  They look at the stress indicators and musculature, comparing these individuals with non-suspected archer Beakers.  Although the differences between groups are subtle, it's important to define what that means here.  Most individuals had entheseal changes associated with archery, but the distinction between them and specialists is in the severity of those changes and the associated archaeological contexts.  The most important factor in interpretation is not comparison between individuals or groups, it is the network of changes that can be observed working together on the skeleton.  (If enough of the skeleton is present, then it can be used for statistical analysis between groups)

They present an additional line of evidence that stone bracers, whatever their function, are indeed associated with experienced archers.**  Importantly, it is possible to see in the human remains something akin to a social category or distinction in daily labor.  That's what's surprising here.  Non-specialist archers had 'other' physical stresses that the warriors did not.  I don't know what those were, but we've seen in other studies on Beakers where some people work harder than others.

A Mittle-Saale Beaker by Karol Schauer

I'll bet this study expands beyond the Eastern Domain and into potentially related areas, such as hip dysplasia.  This makes me remember Stuart Needham's recent work on Beaker knife fights or Horn's work on halbards.  The data continues to tell a story of a tough people who were frequently feuding with each other or in general war.


J. Ryan/J. Desideri/M. Besse: Bell Beaker Archers: Warriors or an Idealogy?  JNA 20, 2018S, 97-122 [doi 10.12766/jna.2018S.6]

*It would be interesting to see how these numbers correlate with the occurrence of hip dyplasia among archers.  Hip dyplasia is a consequence of frequent horse riding and has been observed in Beaker individuals from Germany and west-central Europe.

**Since I've had a few years to baste on the bracers, my current view is that bracers were worn on the outside of the arm as a dead weight or a shock weight to steady the arm for a short bow or for riding.  I'm guessing if Beakers did ride and shoot that they did not have stirrups and lacked the stability of an Iron Age barbarian.

Sherford Sherlocks

There's a giant planned community being built outside Plymouth (Southwestern Britain) called Sherford.  Wessex Archaeology has been tasked with all the surveying and rescue archaeology.
You can get a glimpse of these barrows and other discoveries [here].

One of the finds was this guy (2200-1700 BC) who was cremated with an inverted Food Vessel. Apparently enough bone remained to have some data on height, but be on the lookout for this guy! 

Anyhow, the guy had a copper dagger with some (arsenic?) hardening.  Will Foster created this 3D visualization based on what is known of the period.

Will Foster recreation via Wessex Archaeology

Lower Austria Beakers Discovered (Unterirdisch)

This article via unterirdisch.

Drasenhofen.  As the A5 North Autobahn punches through Mistelbach in Lower Austria, a Paleolithic mammoth kill site is discovered and these Bell Beaker graves.

Peter Vizi via unterirdisch

Boscombe 20.0

On second thought...

This just occurred to me.  Now having a better understanding of the bowmen's ancestral origins, I wonder if the style of burial does indeed reflect the collectivist habit of Megalithic farmers?

In the comments of that Eurogenes post, Olalde himself confirmed a likely 3rd degree relation.  So  we might reasonably guess that the person who dug this grave was more similar to peoples found in the lower left quadrant.  If so, their views on death and burial might be reflected in this grave.

And who dug this grave?  In my imagination I see the mother of some of these boys, but who knows.
Who was she and what were her beliefs?  I2416's plotting is instructive.

Ceramic Beaker Census (Bilger, 2018)

This is a census of beaker pots and the context in which they were found: strays, settlements, graves and totals.

As Michael Bilger explains, there are many subjective elements to these analyses and many biases inherent to finds.  But an honest effort is put forth to create beaker maps like this and the many others in  "Der Glockenbecher in Europa - eine Karteirung".

It was published with other papers here.

Before sharing some observations, I'll remind that some of the vacant regions are not without Beaker activity.  Some were not studied and some purposefully excluded.  Population density or rejection of Beaker culture (Corsica) factor in some parts.  There is a bias toward heavily excavated urban areas where large earth-moving projects uncover disproportionate artifacts.  I'm saying this for the benefit of the reader since the paper is in German.

Having said that, there's some interesting out-takes when you look at the maps closely.

Often the volume of Beaker pottery around Lisbon and surrounds is cited as evidence of gravity emanating from this area and its seniority in the development in the Beaker phenomenon.  No doubt, it was a gravitational hub and exerted stylistic influence far away.  But looking at the numbers, almost 85% of that pottery is associated with settlements not graves.  A lot of those graves are also not straightforward.  To me, that's more of a question rather than a supporting fact.

The volume of beakers in the Czech Republic is mildly surprising.  It has more beakers than anywhere else, but that is partly an artifact of these gigantic, flat cemeteries that are continually in the way of major highway projects.  While a much greater percentage of pottery is coming from the graves, a good amount is from settlements.

If you look at France on the other hand, most ceramics come from actual graves, pried from cold dead hands.  So while the volume is much lower than Portugal or Czechia, the map is larger.  In other words, Bell Beaker may have been more significant in the French countryside than raw numbers tell.

The concentration in Central Spain seems to indicate Beakers like this area.  Madrid is probably disproportionately represented due to earth-movers and projects, but I'd guess in was an area of concentration anyway.

The numbers around Wiltshire aren't surprising.  It seems to have been a focal point of religion and trade with Stonehenge and all the other crazy mega-monuments.

If you take the results with some clarity and reservation, you'll notice some fairly reasonable patterns emerge that have been noted by Van de Noort, Lemercier and others.  You can see it in the map above.  The heaviest concentrations of beaker activity are found in favorable positions on the waterways, the mouths of rivers, major fordings and on the side of islands with favorable winds and currents. 

On the other hand, the distribution of beaker ceramic is found somewhat evenly across the map, suggesting that most Bell Beakers lived in small farm hamlets connected to distant villages across the countryside. 

Sardinia Looks South (Morillo, Pau, Guillaine, 2019)

This paper was mentioned in the comments two or three posts ago.  It's the final paragraphs of the paper that I'll mention here.

Archaeologists have always had difficulty reconciling the Northern and Southern cultural spheres of the Beaker phenomenon.  What linked them?  From where did the Beaker ideology originate? 

This paper looks at one of the satellites orbiting the Iberian sphere.  It's mostly about the various origins of elephant ivory used to make buttons for their woolen hobbit clothes.  In a time in which the origins of the Beaker cultural identity are being widely discussed, the authors make no secret of their preference by interpreting the materials from this site.

The point being made is that the earliest Sardinian Beaker layer looks to the Southwest and its supply chains.  The authors add to Schumacher's previous comments on the changing patterns of the ivory trade which they see as evidence of a new hegemon choking out non-affliates in the Western Mediterranean.

In other words, this outpost says more about the place from which they came and its age.  It's a similar situation to that recently discussed relationship between Britain and the Netherlands.  While the Netherlands has little to say about itself, Britain has a lot to say about the Low Countries and the Middle Rhine.

The situation expressed here is similar to the changing winds in the Sicilian amber trade.  For whatever reason, when Beakers show up everything gets renegotiated, maybe with a hail of arrows.

Whoever these Beakers were, they were mature enough and strong enough to jam their foot in these far away doorways.  Maybe instead of a cultural phenomenon, we are dealing with a bunch of gangsters.

The proboscidean ivory adornments from the hypogeum of Padru Jossu (Sanluri, Sardinia, Italy) and the mediterranean Bell Beaker

• Autores: José Miguel Morillo León, Claudia Pau, Jean Guilaine
• Localización: Zephyrus: Revista de prehistoria y arqueología, ISSN 0514-7336, Nº 82, 2018, págs. 35-63  [Link]

In the present work, we examine the personal adornment in proboscidean ivory from the Bell Beaker period at the hypogeum of Padru Jossu, Sanluri (Sardinia, Italy) currently preserved in the Museo Civico Archeologico Villa Abbas of Sardara. For the first time, a complete study –morphological, use wear and archaeometric– of this material has been conducted. The typological study established two categories: buttons and pins. Those categories were also subdivided into three groups respectively. Technological and functional analyses were made difficult by the strong degradation of the items and the presence of glue and varnish. The archaeometric study highlighted the diverse provenances of the proboscidean ivories, suggesting a chronological difference in the geographical sources, as well as in the mobility patterns implicit in the movements of the raw material. The ivory from the older Stratum iii is predominantly from the Asian elephant, and in the later Stratum ii the exclusive supplier species is the African Savannah elephant. It is also important to mention that in the ensemble from Stratum iii, one of the items seems related to the Eastern types of ossi a globuli, linking this Asian ivory with an Aegean and Oriental axis of mobility.

Think Global...Beakers in Europe 2018 (Kiel, Germany)

I saw this on from Jos Kleijne's twitter feed.  Lot's of new papers [Link].

Journal of Neolithic Archaeology 2018 (Special Issue 4): Think global, act local! Bell Beakers in Europe

This volume presents a selection of papers delivered at the Archéologie et Gobelets Bell Beaker workshop “Think global, act local”, held between the 17^th and the 21^st of May 2017 at Kiel University, Germany. The Archeologie et Gobelets is a research community and network of archaeological specialists from all across Europe who meet every few years, discussing new findings and research concerning the Bell Beaker phenomenon and the wider 3^rd millennium BC in Europe.

Published: 2018-12-20 

Jos Kleijne
Editorial: Think Global, Act Local! The Archéologie et Gobelets workshop in Kiel and some future perspectives for research into the 3rd millennium BC

Maria de Jesus Sanches and Maria Helena Barbosa 

Campaniforme: chronology, pottery, and contexts of a long term phenomenon in the Portuguese Douro Basin

Miriam Alba Luzón, Gabriel García Atiénzar 

Beaker pottery in the Peñón de la Zorra (Alicante, Spain): Change and emergence of social complexity between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age

Olivier Lemercier
Think and Act. Local Data and Global Perspectives in  Bell Beaker Archaeology

Jessica Ryan, Jocelyne Desideri, and Marie Besse
Bell Beaker Archers: Warriors or an Ideology?

Jan de Koning, Erik Drenth
Heiloo-Craenenbroeck. A Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age settlement on the western coast of the Netherlands

Ralf Lehmphul
Bell Beaker common ware and Giant Beakers. A Final Neolithic to Early Bronze Age settlement model based on the sequence  of site Altgaul, Brandenburg

John Simonsen
Beaker Longhouses: Livelihood Specialization and Settlement Continuity in North Jutland

Jaroslav Bartík, Jerzy Kopacz, Miriam Nývltová Fišáková, Antonín Přichystal, Lubomír Šebela, Petr Škrdla
The Question of Chert Exploitation by Bell Beaker People on Stránská skála Hill (Brno-Slatina,Czech Republic)

Michael Bilger
Der Glockenbecher in Europa – eine Kartierung
The mapping of the Bell Beaker in European

D. L. Clarke (1974)

Here's an old article in the Dutch publication "Paleaeohistoria" by D.L. Clarke concerning the various classifications of Beaker pottery in Britain.

In fact, the entire 12th edition is available with many highly referenced works by J.D. van der Waals, Humphrey Case and many others.

So why does this work matter?  As Sheridan points out the good, bad, ugly paper several posts ago,  David Clarke reordered the scheme of British beakers and associated many of them with traditions originating in continental Beaker groups of the Lower Rhine, in particular.

While some of the material is outdated, many of his observations are relevant for questions regarding who settled where.  You'll notice in the graphic a tendency of the long-neck style beakers to take a shape similar to some SGC pots:

"The tendency for increasingly tall and slender vessel shapes begins to appear in both of the earliest beaker groups, presumably reflecting the influence of the Protruding-Foot beakers of the Rhineland.  This feature is particularly noticeable amongst some of the Maritime beakers and becomes a constant feature in some of the following beaker groups from the Rhine-land."

Here's the link for this paper [here]

A Tentative Reclassification of British Beaker Pottery in the Light of Recent Research (Fig. I)

D.L. Clarke

Abstract

(p. 179)
The history of the analysis and classification of British Beakers between I870-I960 is too well known to need any lengthy restatement here. This complex 'tradition' has been summarised and restated in a more modern guise by Professor Piggott in his recent paper (I963). All that I wish to do at this stage is to emphasise four salient features underlying the current classification of British Beaker material.