Metallurgy in the Meseta

Copper Age settlement discovered in Central Spain

Re-evaluating Beaker garbage

Blanco-Gonzalez continues to chip away at some of the older, prejudicial notions of Beaker life.  His new chapter kind of dovetails on a previous paper, the very first commented on by the new Beakerblog.

Rajasthani cattle (Marcin Białek)

The most intriguing part of his work is how he is re-interpreting orphan pottery fragments from fills in the Spanish Meseta to come to a more logical understanding of sites previously understood as habitations, burials and festival trash pits.  Apparently, there is a preponderance of orphan fragments weathered on one side (El Ventorro among others) indicating they were exposed by the elements for a period of time before being filled into a non-occupied structure (presumably).

Typical orphan from Los Tiesos. <1" (Evocative monuments, Blanco, 2014)

I speculated in the very first Beakerblog post that the shear volume of orphan fragments could be coming from cow poop, it being a plausible explanation for the many tiny, broken and orphaned fragments.  There is no doubt that Beakers, being agriculturalists, collected cow manure.  They may have used it for fertilizer, pig feed or for accelerating compost or silage.

If Beakers were anything like the American wildlife that throw their beer cans in their front yard, chances are Beakers had heaps of garbage scattered about or in the barnyard. 


Not picking on India here, but this Youtube clip exposes a common sight through most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  Understand also, they're not just picking through the garbage, they are actually eating inorganic materials such as plastic bags and metals. 


You may ask, 'why the heck would a cow eat rusty nails, rocks, glass or pottery?'
A lot of it has to do with the mineral requirements of cattle.  Modern ranchers supplement cows with licks, however range cattle or cattle in developing countries will either eat rocks or hang out at the local dumpster.  There's only 50,000 of these videos on youtube.  Half of these cows end up at McDonald's.  If this bothers you, don't google what pigs or chickens eat!

So while it may be a gross question, I have to ask.  What would we find in a manure heap in some of the cattle communities above?

These guys looked at the chemical content of Ciempozuelos Beaker pottery.  Meseta pottery seems to have had respectable levels of Fe (Iron), Na (Sodium), Mg (Magnesium) along with other trace elements, notably selenium and copper (important for cattle).  While I've added my own twist to this, and I'll admit I don't have first-hand experience with the evidence.  I do think, however, that Blanco-Gonzalez is heading in the right direction.  He is challenging the cartoonish notions of Beaker life and re-evaluating old sites more carefully.

 


Domestic chores or community feasts? A taphonomic and re-fitting
approach to the Chalcolithic ceramics from El Ventorro (Madrid, Spain) (2014)

Abstract: 
The understanding of how cultural remains entered the archaeological record has been a neglected topic in the research on later prehistory in Iberia, even though its discussion should be addressed in advance of any functional or spatial account. This paper presents an analytical protocol designed to characterize the patterns of breakage, abrasion and representation of prehistoric pottery. A taphonomic and re-itting operation has been carried out with the selected ceramic assemblage retrieved in 1981 from an unusual residue-rich context: the so-called ‘pit-hut 013’ and its annexed
pits at El Ventorro. This has allowed to test divergent hypotheses about its formation processes and meaning. This sunken feature has been interpreted either as a pithouse illed with domestic remains in primary context or as a gully quickly illed with bulky refuse as a result of repeated collective celebrations. The results are inconclusive, but allow to reject the idea of being dealing with fossilized occupation soils representative of house-loors and domestic activities. All lines of evidence point to this feature actually being a ditch segment illed with a very partial and cumulative aggregate of freshly discarded remains mixed with secondary residues exhibiting great variability in their temporalities and depositional histories.

[link]

Chemical Analysis of Beaker ceramics ("Campaniforme") from Northern Spain

Bell Beaker pottery (Campaniforme) appear in the Middle Chalcolithic Meseta (in Northern Spanish plateau) and very gradually replace the older pottery styles.  Ballestero, Diaz and Alonzo argue for a methodology of chemical analysis, which is really the main focus of the paper.

Chemical analysis has previously and very convincingly demonstrated that burial beaker cups were used for drinking wheat and barley beers, mead, possibly milk and less frequently, medicinal substances.  The authors argue that knowing the origin of the clay is critical to understanding alien pottery in a region.

Here, chemical analysis was used to determine that roughly 10% of the Late Chalcolithic (Beaker) pottery in the Arlanzon area came from out-of-town.  Pottery that came from outside the region was almost exclusively International Style Beakers.  A substantial portion of that they link to a known pottery studio on the Guadiana River (Southern Portugal).

Arlanzon River Valley pottery (Ballestero et al, 2014)

Of course, 90% of the Arlanzon pottery in the Late Chalcolithic was locally made which the authors leave as a discussion topic for others:  At what point did the Arlanzon region begin producing locally made 'alien beaker pottery' or did the alien potters slowly migrate to Arlanzon?

Chemical analysis of chalcolithic pottery from Arlanzón river middle basin (Burgos): a way to examine the origin and exchange (Ballestero, Diaz, Alonzo, 2014)

The study is aimed on pottery that it is recovered in Chalcolithic contexts from Arlanzón River Middle Basin. Within these sets of pottery there are similarities and differences —morpho-typological and technical—, which it is necessary to study in order to understand its significance in archaeological terms. To doing so, we need to use a different method than typology. In fact, we used chemical analysis of ceramic as a way to obtain less subjective observations. The results allow discussing about origin and exchange of Chalcolithic pottery in this zone of the Spanish North Plateau. Data show a mainly local origin of ceramics with some exchanged artifacts. In archaeological terms, the pattern may be related to a domestic model of production.

[link]

Reassessing Depositional Practices beyond Funerary and Domestic Realms (Blanco-Gonzalez, 2014)

This paper speaks to probably one of the biggest problems of historical Beakerology:  Confusing or variable archaeological contexts of Beaker finds which has led to all sorts of highly varied Beaker origin and identity theories.  There is, however, a somewhat established modern notion of what constitutes a Beaker package and a Beaker burial, but this is not without problems.

Here, Blanco-Gonzalez has made a case that some of the so-called Chalcolithic 'tumuli' in Iberia associated with Bell-Beaker 'stuff' should be reconsidered more carefully, especially those where no contemporary body was found.  This may hold true for Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Tumuli in other parts of Europe as well.

He looks at the contents of two sites in the Amblés Valley and Campo Azálvaro in the Iberian Peninsula.

At the first site (Ambles Valley)... 

"Black, ashy, charcoal rich sediment was recovered, but no structure was documented, despite the recognition of a vague line of boulders – a rough peristalith –in the fourth layer of stones."

Los Tiesos II barrow, Ambles Valley (Blanco-Gonzalez)

 The second site (Campo Azalvaro)..

"The tumulus was made up of seven layers of local slate cobble with a sandy matrix. At its centre several slate slabs positioned on a slight alignment suggested a highly disarranged polygonal cist
although no other internal structures were recorded." ...  "This uneven depression was filled with compact dark archaeologically rich sediment; soil-chemical analysis detected high organic signatures of plausible anthropogenic nature."

Both sites contained very tiny orphan fragments of low quality cook ware, flint flakes, ash and a single instance of two necklace beads in Los Tiesos I.  And with regards to a number of post-neolithic tumuli in Spain he says ..

"Likewise, a mortuary purpose for all these tumuli is a contentious overgeneralization since human skeletal remains are actually rare."

In other words, some of the recorded Tumuli that don't have positive mortuary evidence probably need to be looked at with a little more scrutiny.  Blanco hints at a possible alternative explanation for original use of the two sites he cites, but does not elaborate.

 Blanco's description of these sites makes them sound (to me ) like they may have been silages (my opinion) originally in the early Chalcolithic.  Of course, the details may not bear that out, but as I would imagine that Beaker folk thrived off of dairy in temperate regions, you'd expect to see lots of silaging in Beaker communities and so it's not without possibility.

Cato's "De Agricultura" describes silaging of the ancient Germans who covered their silage pits with manure, which may have helped the anaerobic fermentation processes.  More often, modern silages include a cistern to form the base with post-harvest silage heaped then covered with a tarp and large stones.  

Because silage is highly volatile, it is prone to fire and it may have also at times have made an expedient funerary pyre by a bronze age farmer (or a bronze age farmer's wife).  Interestingly, a number of the tiny loner pottery fragments were...

"Undecorated ceramics belonged to coarse hemispheric bowls and cooking pots, very common in nearby Chalcolithic settlements (Fabián 2006). Moreover, most of the sherds are small in size (<4 cm) and bear marks of pre-depositional abrasion and weathering."

A possible explanation for this may be that these fragments came from ruminant manure.  Semi-browsers like goats and sheep often eat weird things and trash in the field, but true ruminants like cows do as well.  Inorganic materials like glass, metal and rocks are not unusual (broken pottery?).  I would guess grazing areas and barns in the Chalcolithic included trash that were stepped on and occasionally eaten by cattle with the manure later collected for other purposes.

Whatever the case, the Beaker Blog is officially inaugurated!  yee-haw


Blanco-Gonzalez, A. (2014) doi: 10.1080/00293652.2014.897749

Evocative Monuments in the Late 3rd Millennium BC: Reassessing Depositional
Practices beyond Funerary and Domestic Realms

"This paper challenges customary archaeological accounts of non-megalithic tumuli during the
Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Because of their wide range of regional and chronological variability across Atlantic Europe, rigid interpretative templates based on restrictive Western concepts such as ‘domestic’ or ‘funerary’ become inadequate. The analysis of several well-documented case studies in the Central Meseta (Iberia) through a programme of fieldwork prompts reconsideration of some uncontested assumptions extrapolated from research on megaliths and funerary contexts associated with Bell Beaker pottery. Some of these constructions lack actual layering or clear structures, their material assemblages are scarce, scattered and highly fragmented – including everyday residues and partial Beakers – and luxury items or human remains are barely recovered from them. The article discusses these peculiarities and confusing contents, commonly regarded as being the result of post-abandonment disturbance. A taphonomic assessment of their cultural debris attentive to formation processes and a comparison among depositional contexts within their local settings allow reappraisal of these constructions other than simply as areas of occupation or looted burials. Some of them could be better understood in terms of complementariness and mutual reference, as being the outcome of evocative practices that, through quotation and emulation, linked together absent places, beings and episodes."

https://www.academia.edu/5984252/Blanco-Gonzalez_A._2014_Evocative_monuments_in_the_late_third_millennium_BC._Reassessing_depositional_practices_beyond_funerary_and_domestic_realms._Norwegian_Archaeological_Review_47_1_1-17