2015 Beaker Year Wrap-up!

2015 is the year the "pots not people" pyrocumulus mushroom-cloud started expanding on the horizon.

Certainly people change over time, but genetic evidence is building that large folk movements are the usual catalyst for major social change.

That creates a lot problems, questions, where-froms and everything else.  Here's a few things I found interesting this year...

Things Beaker people did.

We learned that throughout the entire British Beaker period to the Late Bronze Age, mummification was a normal treatment for the dead.

Disabled Central European Beakers were assisted for long periods of time and received normal treatment in burial.

Beaker women with knives, daggers and male accoutrements in Central Iberia are examined in this paper.

In Central Europe, DNA showed that a Beaker diagnostic male grave was actually a woman, or at least what we interpret to be a warrior's burial.  There may be quite a few of these.

Surprisingly, it appears that a large amount of Beaker gold and copper was panned or fleeced from water, possibly through sluicing systems.  In my own wild ass hypothesization I proposed that chronic mercury poisoning could be from contaminated water supplies as a result of the amalgamation process used in hydraulic mining.

Leading mining was taking place in Western Britain as well.

A few new Beakers emerge

There was Marlborough Man (actually a kid) wearing an awesome amber necklace located near a henge.  A warrior's grave in Scotland near Loch Ness.  The Polish region closest to Belarus has turned up quite a number of Beaker artifacts and human remains.  Most interesting is the recurring, intentionally shattered and half missing pottery at this site.  Seems to have been a common practice around Europe.

I failed to cover the discoveries at Perdigoes this summer.  Partly because I have trouble understanding what it is, but also because it seemed that there might have been a full burial.  But you can see some of what Perdigoes is churning out...

Perdigoes Research Site 2015 [Link]

Monuments and things uncovered or analyzed

The Dartmoor Arc appears to be about as old or older than Stonehenge.  A Sicilian celestial megalithic site is analyzed,  Another logboat keel was discovered in Canterbury in deep mud.


A few favorite posts

The Smithy, Beakers in Hofestede' Paradigm, Corded Cultures deep genetic links, The Brachycephalic Problematic, Sailboats and Solarboats, How ceramic pottery came to the West.


Animal DNA

A few things about domestic pigs, and bees, and cattle,

People DNA

Of course this was the Mittle-Saale burials from the Haak paper and Bavarian and Czech burials from the Allentoft paper.  We now have the Ratlin burials, two Vučedol period men, basically a night and day situation.

We've learned that Beakers were indeed an ethnicity with a genetic profile that extends across Europe.      


Next up, 2016 and expectations for the year ahead.

Rathlin Burials (Cassidy et al, 2015)

For all intents and purposes, a 'Bronze Age Food Vessel burial' on either side of the Irish Sea is essentially a Beaker burial*.  So now with this new paper on the first ancient genomes of Ireland we have three more Beaker men to throw on the pile of diagnostic Beaker men, of whom are to this point uniformly R1b, in stark constrast to the previous ages (still not proven at this point).

If you want to know a little more about these men, check out some of the material from Brian Sloan from Queens College [here].  I'm not a hundred percent sure these are the exact men that were tested, but I believe these three men are from the glebe-land of the local parish.  This guy below might be one of them.  Also, Sloan's page [here]

A Rathlin Food Vessel Burial (Sloan, 2006)

In any case, if you read this blog then you're probably are reading the blogs in the sidebar, so I won't rehash those discussions (but I'd stay tuned in since this is one of a number of papers that will be looking at the Atlantic Neolithic, the Isles in particular)

Much of Ireland and half of Britain was underneath a large ice cube during most of the Paleolithic, receding slowly to oak stands and natural clearings.  Aside from fishing, the number and size of mammals in the Isles is and was very limited and this in turn limited population strength and density of the hunters.

That changed when the baby machine of the Neolithic invited itself into the Isles.  This interaction really is best understood using fourth grade math.  The farmers could generate food, certainly babies and live in larger, protected communities.

The important thing about the farmer food machine is that labor is proportional to food production. It's an economy of scale.  More babies = more food.  Each new worker reduces the individual burden of security, management or harvesting, thus freeing up more time to do other things (like making babies) or building things.  This is kind of a backwards to the Mesolithic economic person/food ratio. Numerically, farmers dominated Ireland.

Finally, the amphibious Bell Beaker phenomenon runs up nearly every beach of the Isles.  The old cultures don't die out either; rather, they seem to be grafted into larger social systems with Beaker culture being the dominant force leading to the regular Bronze Age.  The food vessel tradition is a good example of two cultures fusing.

See also [Eurogenes], [Dienekes], [Razib], and [Dispatches]

Winter Solstice 4:49 GMT

Funny that I'd check solstice time against my local time, and because I have impeccable timing it so happens to be that exact moment.  Score again.

It's the time of year for weirdos with tambourines to be pissing on and carving their names into ancient megaliths.  In fairness, it's probably true to purpose anyway.

Anyhow, the Telegraph UK has a quick trivia guide to solstice day [here].

Speaking of which, if you scroll down in the Telegraph article, there is indeed a weirdo with a tambourine!  Score yet again!

Similarity Matrix and mtdna Math (Revesz, 2015)

The conclusions here aren't really new, just another way to get there.

Everyone understands the data is fragmentary and their is bias in the selection of diagnostic remains.  No real surprises, but here its quantified in a way that's a little more stark.


A Computational Model of the Spread of Ancient Human Populations Based on Mitochondrial DNA Samples, Peter Z. Revesz (2015)
[Link]

Chronology, Innovation and Memory (Müller, Hinz, Ullrich 2015)

Let me condense this down to a sentence:

Within the Rhine-Main-Neckar regional group of the Bell Beakers, it is rigorously demonstrated that there is a stylistic cycle, periods of variation followed by a more conservative periods.

This may seem a little dense or not that interesting, but hang with me for a moment...

Here, Beaker pottery seems to have an ebb and flow pattern in stylistic variation:

"What triggered BB communities to develop pottery styles in such a cyclic rhythm, which involved the creation of innovative styles..."

"We suggest that the construction and creation of new design systems and their function for individuals and societies is influenced by the nature of memory, in particular social memory in non-literate societies. (Forty and Kuchler 1999)"

If I understand the conclusions of Muller, Hinz and Ullrich correctly, they seem to rightly point to social memory and cyclical nature of human society.  They go further and reference what practical, realistic social memory means in a non-literate society.  From this, they seem to suggest that linear, cultural transmission becomes jumbled past a certain number of generations and this is the cause of the punctuated periods of variation in Rhine-Main-Nectar pottery.

"In a recent study, Whittle came up with 100-200 years duration for memory transmission in non-literate societies (Whittle et al. 2011, 911-914) as some type of real social memory in contrast to 'mythical time'."

"To sum up, approximately 4-8 generations of more or less unchanged memory transmission seem to guarantee the prerequisites for the transmission of ideological basics within an unaltered societal background."

I take a slightly different view on what this means for the Beaker society.  Rather than social chaos and the limits of faithful cultural transmission, I would interpret this as a normal ebb and flow of any society, literate or illiterate. 

It's a difficult case to make that durable materials are subject to the limits of social memory when they are in fact, durable.  This means that he who makes a spear point different from his father does so, knowingly.  (because he is a bratty teenager that doesn't want to listen)

So how does this apply to a modern person? 

In the English-speaking world, given names are cyclical on a 100 year to 150 year basis.  It makes sense that younger generations want their own stylistic expression and identity, but also borrow from and pay homage to their family and heritage.  After a while, old-fashioned names loose their oldness and become sexy and attractive once again.  Some names, like some pottery design features, will be more enduring because of a religious nature.

If you are to believe the Strauss-Howe Generational Cycle of American history (the structure of which is not unique to America), then we have completed the third turning, or unraveling phase, in which institutions have been deeply distrusted (the media, the government, the church) and have now splashed into the fourth turning of crisis and survival, a period of increasing nationalism that may climax in a decade or two.  Then the first turning begins.

Everything is cyclical.  Hope to see more from this book soon...

Taken from this from this book [The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe.  Prieto-Martinez, Salanova 2015]

The full article can been seen [here]