Resurrection in Beaker Religion?

I continue to pick away at the Valera, Evangelista, Castanheira paper on zoomorphic figurines of Iberia's Early Chalcolithic.  It had come out months ago, but was not accessible till recently.

Although the following tradition straddles pre- and early Beaker culture, so many cultural elements of this region are carried forward into Europe that perhaps this is one early manifestation of a wider belief system (maybe not rabbit iconography per se).

These little grave rabbits are sometimes found with the dead in parts Western Iberia. The one above is from Perdigos(?), but they also were abundant in Zambujal as well. Rabbits appear to have a special, symbolic meaning as a grave offering.

Reading the Valera paper, the symbolic value of these rabbits is something that seems to stand out among the figurines.  The authors' discussion on these items provides some fascinating insight:

And within this broad sense related to an idea of reproduction we may look at the double lagomorphs as if sprouting from a common base or multiplying, suggesting that this representation supports the main idea behind these objects: renewal. Expressing and acting over the capability of regeneration, these objects (most of them pendants) may have been used as amulets, revealing an ability to act in transforming reality. Although arguing for a different meaning, by associating underground movements of rabbits to the return to the earth expressed by funerary monuments, the proposal of Thomas and Waterman (2013) follows the same general view of rabbit figurines as metaphors.

Easter Egg Hunting, An American Variation of the Tradition

Maybe it is possible to see some parallels in pre-Christian Europe.  The rabbit was in ancient times associated with Germanic, pre-Christian Easter whose symbolism was adopted for expressing Christian concepts.  Its ancient meaning allowed the rabbit to represent the burial and resurrection of Christ.  Other Easter icons such as the Easter egg and the lamb were re-used to represent rebirth and the innocent sacrifice. All of these things are metaphors for the central message of Christianity.

In old Anglo-Saxon, Eōstre means to 'face-east' which is derived from Proto-Indo-European austrōn 'rising sun', being the domain of the PIE goddess, H2eus(os).  This goddess, Eos or Aus (the dawn or morning star) was sister to Helios (the sun) and Selene (the moon), to use the Greek names.  In Germanic lands, she was the fiery red-head associated with resurrection, bunnies, Easter eggs and the vernal equinox.

Typical East-facing Beaker at Shrewton, Wiltshire

Knowing the exact meaning of the rabbits in the Iberian Chalcolithic is impossible to know for sure, but it is interesting to know that Beaker burials almost always face the rising sun.*  Additional materials may suggest respects to this heavenly trio: Eos, Helios and Selene.

We know that the most archaeologically visible aspects of Beaker material culture were drinking beakers with solar crosses, amber, gold badges and pinheads with solar crosses, lunulae of various forms, and solar calendars.  The resurrection goddess of the vernal equinox would have been extremely important to those who adorned all of their equipment with solar and lunar depictions. Theoretically, the vernal equinox (in Ēostre's month of April*) would be the holiest day in Beaker religion based on the materials they left behind.  It would also herald the first month of the calendar year (the dawn of a new year) as was common in ancient Iran and Northern India.

(* Update.  Actually, if their calendar was strictly solar, then the vernal equinox might start the month before Easter/April.  The Corded Ware calendar may have been Zodiac based looking at their burial orientation, so it its case it may have oscillated between March and April.  On the other hand, it's possible to make a case that April had been the first month in early Near Eastern religion where the similar Astarte was worshipped.  I realize this can become circular reasoning)

Items excavated from Zambujal

It doesn't appear that rabbit figurines spread to other parts of Europe, but a matured Beaker package does.  One included item that might also have had a symbolic meaning was the beer beaker that accompanied the dead.  In Ancient Egypt beer was associated with the goddess of childbirth and in Mesopotamia the goddess of procreation.

There has also been some discussion about Beaker idealism where men, women and children are buried in their ideal forms.  Young boys have little weapons, young girls are buried with little pots. This idealism may point to an underlying moral and metaphysical worldview.

Concerning idealism in death, Harry Fokkens offers some ideas on idealism in life and death; the following slide stands out in my mind.  It's hard to know if they believed they would experience bodily resurrection as they Egyptians did.  It does appear that they believed they were leaving a corrupt world and being reborn in a idealic world.

Harry Fokkens (burial of the ideal man)

*(It would be interesting to know if the slight variation in body orientation , ENE, due East and ESE, conform to the season in which Beakers died.  For example, does the palynological record jive with sun up/body orientation for that latitude?  Do winter deaths align with sun up, etc?)

ZOOMORPHIC FIGURINES AND THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPIN THE NEOLI-THIC AND CHALCOLITHIC SOUTHWEST IBERIA Valera, António Carlos, Lucy Shaw Evangelista, and Patrícia Castanheira. 2014 [Link]

Burial Myth Buster

Beaker burial busted.

It's been popularly believed that Bell Beakers in the Southern domain preferred collective formats, re-using megalithic monuments, and Bell Beakers in the Northern and Eastern domains preferred individual burials.

Christian Jeunesse says no.  Data points to a regular and widespread pattern of intrusion and individuality.

Summary : From the point of view of funerary practices, two large, broad provinces of the Beaker culture used to be distinguished : in the south (the western Mediterranean and Iberian Peninsula) and in the west (the Atlantic region) areas of the Beaker culture, the dead would be preferentially buried in reused pre-Beaker megaliths, while the domain of the individual grave falls in the eastern region. A closer examination shows that this division does not relect the prehistoric reality. Far from being specfic to the Atlantic-Mediterranean region, the reutilisation of earlier monumental tombs (megalithic chambers or tumulus) is commonly practiced throughout the Beaker area. This practice is simply more visible in the zone with the most monumental graves which corresponds to the southern and western areas of the second megalithism. A careful review of the available literature also shows that the southern and western zone produced, alongside reused megaliths, numerous lat individual graves, which in certain cases had been covered by a tumulus. This mixture of practices is attested in all the regions of the Beaker culture where monumental tombs existed. In the south and west, the predominance of reuse is only manifested by the great visibility of monumental graves. The traditional opposition between a large province where reuse was practised and a province where individual graves were used, therefore has to be abandoned. Before the beginning of the Beaker period, reuse had already been widely practiced in the Corded ware and Yamnaja cultures, posing the question of an eventual eastern origin for this usage.  In the Corded ware and Beaker culture, reused structures are not systematically monumental tombs, in a number of cases flat graves were reused. The reused funerary contexts were either old tombs, pre-Beaker or pre-Corded ware, or the first users of the tombs had the same material culture as the second users. In the first case, the chronological scope between the two users is very variable. The reuse can involve  monuments abandoned for many centuries as well as ‘living’ structures. The idea frequently advanced that Beaker period reuse hides the reality, particularly for the Iberian Peninsula, of a continuity both demographic and ideologically from the culture substrate, is equally open to discussion. Actually, the available data strongly support a hypothesis which, in contrast, places a greater emphasis on notions of intrusion or rupture. The corresponding scenario is illustrated by the cases of partial destruction and the emptying of older monuments. The fact that monuments are frequently abandoned for centuries before they are reused also supports this argument. Finally, it is important to underline that Beaker communities in general only placed a single burial in pre-Beaker funerary chambers. There is thus not a continuity with the previous practice of collective burial, but rather the placing of an individual burial within a collective tomb. The treatment of the dead therefore obeys the same rule across the whole of the Beaker field. In the south and in the west, this practice is clearly a rupture with indigenous use. Generally, this is merely a reproduction of the funerary system used in the Corded ware culture.

Pratiques funéraires campaniformes en Europe
Faut-il remettre en cause la dichotomie Nord-Sud ?  La question de la réutilisation des sépultures monumentales dans l’Europe du 3e millénaire, "Données récentes sur les pratiques funéraires néolithiques de la Plaine du Rhin supérieur"  Christian JEUNESSE, 2014 [Link]

Paper: Portuguese Burials (Pre-Beaker)

FUNERARY PRACTICES AND ANTHROPOLOGY DURING MIDDLE-LATE NEOLITHIC (4th AND 3rd MILLENNIA BCE) IN PORTUGAL: OLD BONES, NEW INSIGHTS
BOAVENTURA, FERREIRA, NEVES, SILVA ANTHROPOLOGIE, 2014

Fig 7, #337, Adult Female, Monte Canelas (Boaventura, 2014)

I meant to post this earlier in the week along with another paper, but I'll go ahead and post now before it gets buried in a stack of 50k PDF files.  This paper covers the types of burials in Portugal (before the Beakers).  Of course, as with England's troubled Middle Neolithic, one of the main concerns is properly sequencing diverse burial traditions that now apparently/probably co-existed in many places.  There is some interesting re-analysis of the bones, health, endogamy and physical types in this paper.

Reading this paper through the lens of the North Meseta DNA from this week, it seems to make an exotic origin of the Beaker phenomenon more likely.  Theoretically, if you believe Iberia was a Pleistocene refuge that harbored many of Europe's modern lineages, then the Meseta should have been carpeted with ultra West European lineages, but it wasn't for the people of Mirador who had traditions similar to some of the people described in this paper on Portugal.

Footnote:  With dig season coming to a close, we are entering the exciting closing months of the year when we can begin expecting weekly fireworks on ancient Eurasian and African DNA.  There's some exciting stuff in the works, so I think within the five months the entire conversation in Beaker archaeology will be in an entirely new place.  Worlds colliding, total paradigm shift!

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews and updates the anthropological knowledge about Middle-Late Neolithic populations in Portugal. This territory is rich in prehistoric burial sites, particularly those of the designated Middle and Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic periods (4th–3rd millennia BCE). In the past 150 years, more than 3000 tombs, namely natural caves used as tombs, dolmens, rock cut tombs and tholoi (vaulted chamber tombs) were identified and hundreds of
them explored. Within these funerary structures, generally used as collective burials, the bones were frequently found and registered as disturbed and in a very fragmentary condition with total or almost total absence of anatomic connections. The systematic study of these human remains started in the 1990's and are mainly based on data obtained from tombs located in Estremadura and Algarve, two regions with limestone bedrocks that contributed to a better bone preservation. Those studies led to the assessment of anthropological profiles of several tombs. Among the more relevant data is the frequent sex ratio in favor of females, a greater mobility than that expected for agricultural communities and a low rate of main types of pathologies. Meanwhile, mainly due to an increase of Management Archaeology in South Portugal hinterland (Alentejo) new sites and types of tombs were located in the last 15 years: rock cut tombs were unknown in Alentejo, as well as pit graves; also pockets of cremated human bones have been found, as well as human bones lying inside ditches. Besides suggesting a more diversified funerary practice by those prehistoric populations, this new data raises many more questions: Were all contemporaneous? Was there different treatment according to belonging within the groups? Are there regional patterning for those differences?

[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