Salt Production and Beaker Pottery (Doce et al, 2015)

I'll start today with a chapter entitled "Bell Beaker Pottery as a Symbolic Marker of Property Rights: The Case of the Salt Production Centre of Molino Sanchon II, Zamora, Spain" by Doce, Abarquero, Delibes de Castro, Palomino and del Val Recio.

It is a continuation of the reading from "The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe" by Prieto-Martinez and Salanova.  As usual, I'll give you a brief description then streak across the soccer field of ideas.

In ancient times people procured salt in a variety of ways, but the most accessible way since the Early Neolithic appears to have been the process of briquetage, which reduces brine down through boiling.

Molino Sanchon II is a salt production site where salt was produced through boiling salt marsh water.  Many types of coarse ceramic sherds are present.  What's puzzling though, is that there is a substantial amount of broken Bell Beaker funeral pottery, the largest concentration of this pottery at one site anywhere in Iberia.  This is a site that was flooded most of the year, so no one was buried here.  Unlike Fuente Camacho* (more below), we can positively exclude habitation as well, so that presents us with a basic problem.

Analysis of the funerary sherds do not show that the pottery was used for salt production, so the volume of Beaker pottery (2% of the total sherds, but still a large amount) is somewhat out of place and its purpose at this site doesn't really make a lot of sense.  Nevertheless, someone put it there on a regular basis over a period of time.

It's not a case where extremely clumsy people are eating out of funerary ware and breaking pots all over a salt reduction site.  The authors make a case that the people making the salt were making votive offerings and smashing pottery (something Beakers did) and this also had the effect of establishing their ancestral claim to this turf.  Sounds high-brow but is very inline with what is likely to be the thought process of a person at that time.  All very, very plausible.

Contemporary salt glazed stoneware (Commons)

To preface this next segment I'll say that I use every paper on the Beakerblog as a means to open discussion on a problem rather than critique the paper.  I think this is usually in line with the character of most academics, to present a problem and propose likely solutions as a means of soliciting alternatives or confirmation.

I'll submit a far-fetched, second possibility that may account for both the volume of funerary ware and its presence at a site where salt was being generated.  That is the possibility that Beaker funerary ware was being salt glazed (with sodium chloride) at this site in addition to general salt production and, as is often the case with kilning, many pieces do not survive firing or do not come out well.

Since sodium silicate is water soluble it is unlikely that any hypothetical glazed sherd would keep from breaking down over such a long time, especially for being such a thin layer.  Also depending on how a pottery is kilned, there may be an absence of glazing on the inside of pottery.  It's more likely that the interior of liquid bearing pottery would have been burnished with beeswax. 

The volume of salt needed to salt glaze pottery is fairly substantial, so it could be funerary pottery was made in several distinct phases.  The other thing is that the level of silica and iron in Beaker pottery would be very conducive for producing a dull semi-gloss red, even though using sodium for glazing is first used in Europe during Medieval Times.  Glazing with lead salt goes back to at least Roman Times, so its not impossible that certain types of glazing were known and fell in and out of fashion at different times.  Here's some modern salt glazing on youtube [here]


There is also this paper concerning a similar phenomenon in Andalusia at the similarly aged Fuente Camacho, lots of salt and lots of varied, special purpose pottery in addition to the more abundant coarse pottery.  Whereas Molino Sanchon is definitely not a habitation, Fuente Camacho probably was not as well, since it's in an unusual place for a settlement and the fact it is situated near a salt water spring.  Like in Molino Sanchon II, the problem in Andalusia is the pottery is extremely varied table ware and funerary ware, and interestingly notable, includes funerary ware from the Agaric Culture.

If Fuente Camacho is not settlement, then it can only be a strict salt production site.  If that's the case, then why the volume of highly varied ware?  If the potteries were votive in nature, should be expect such a variety?

Let me close in saying that my purpose here is not to offer serious criticism or well thought out alternative hypotheses but to engage in fully self-serving gratification by streaking naked through the university campus.  It is gonzo archaeology.  Someone writes a serious paper and then I take it and go to wacko world.


See also:

"EL APROVECHAMIENTO PREHISTÓRICO DE SAL EN LA ALTA ANDALUCÍA. EL CASO DE FUENTE CAMACHO (LOJA, GRANADA)"  (The prehistoric use of salt in upper Andalusia. The case of Fuente Camacho (Loja, Granada), Jonathan Teran Manrique and Antonio Morgado, (2011)

Missing Magical Fossils (Peter Leeming, 2015)

There's a chapter in this book by Houlbrook and Armitage I found interesting.   Two of the chapters are preview-able for free.

The highest order of archaeology is, IMO, to get into the minds of prehistoric people and to gain a realistic understanding of who they were.  This book talks about the material evidence for something that real prehistoric Europeans did a lot of and believed in - magic.

"The Materiality of Magic" has a chapter called 'Also found ... (not illustrated) ...': The curious case of the missing magical fossils by Peter Leeming.

Leeming illustrates a problem with a number of archaeology papers in failing to appreciate the motives of deliberate human action.  He looks at Bronze Age monuments of Britain and Ireland and finds buried, almost unworthy of reporting, the presence of echinoids (sea urchins) in graves, circles and tombs.  It seems that sometimes these are fossilized "thunderstones" and in other cases may actually have been urchin remains.

I learned something very interesting, the Amesbury Archer was buried with about fifteen sea urchins (it is not mentioned what kind).  In fact, the sea urchins in his grave were treated this way and quoted by Leeming:

"One small fossil ... was recovered from the fill during excavation, but as 15 small fossil sponges, a shark's tooth, and four other fossils were recovered from the sieving of the grave fill, it is not considered likely that the fossil was deliberately placed in the grave. (Dagless et al. 2013, 71)"

British Geological Survey (interesting stuff here) [Link]

Having dug a little deeper it would seem that this was possibly common, at least in the Isles.  (I also found a book that explores this phenomenon a little deeper "The Star-Crossed Stone: The Secret Life, Myths and History of a Fascinating Fossil" by Kenneth McManara)

If we extrapolate the Iron Age beliefs and meaning of this, it might point to a belief in a thunder and lightning god.  What's interesting is that a number of prehistoric motifs may mimic echninoid fossils.  The Scottish Stone Balls [2] might literally be "thunder balls" (ha ha)  Some of the spirally motifs in prehistoric European art could be more stylized or schematic versions of echinoid motifs, they having a metaphorical significance of the lightning god.


Previously I've referenced this book.  It's also a worthy reference: "Magical Medicine: The Folkloric Component of Medicine in the Folk Belief, Custom, and Ritual of the Peoples of Europe and America"  by Wayland D. Hand [Link]

Symbolism, Metaphors & Beaker Underworld

Reading two recent papers sparked some ideas about funerary wares. 

The first was a discussion on the transition away from positive funerary structures to negative ones in the third millennium in Portugal (Valera, 1).  The other involved gypsum inlay paste of funerary ware (Besse, 2)  (Calcium carbonate and bone paste or a combination mash seem to be more common than gypsum alone)  This got me thinking about the significance of the most basic features of Beaker pottery.

Gypsum will normally occur as stratified veins in oxidized sedimentary layers, so the image to the left is something that might be visible in a creek bed or escarpment in some regions, more often outside Europe with the exception of Portugal and the North Pontic-Caspian region. 

What I find striking is that Beaker funerary ware, despite its many influences, generally retains core characteristics that necessarily must have been important.  After all, cars have changed a lot in the last hundred years, but most still have four wheels, and having four wheels seems to be more important than the shape or size of the car. 

Funeral pottery is almost always an oxidized red and they almost always have stratified bands of horizontal, white inlay.  Red, white, horizontal, stratified. 

The actual motifs could be sometimes borrowed from other ancestral cultures. For example, the Polish cup on the right has what might be tablet weaves, especially on the second to bottom band.  Again, I'll try not to over-project (and this is all theoretical), but the character seems to be suggestive of the cavernous depths of the Earth, and in the above case, maybe weaves associated with identity.

I'll get to the point and state that character of the beaker looks to be metaphorically connected to being buried in the Earth, the underworld and the contents of the beaker itself. 

We can look to later Bronze Age religions, those of the Greeks and Egyptians, an sensibly extrapolate some concepts about the sequence of events after death to Beaker religion.  Immediately upon death, the person needed to cross a river in a ferry or solar boat.  In Egyptian religion, the sun god cycled from the sky to the underworld each day taking the day's dead with him.  The Greek paid his way across the river into the Greek underworld with the money placed under his tongue.

The Atlantic gold lunulae look very much like solar boats [this post], and while found near burial sites, don't yet seem to have been worn by the dead but were instead hidden in weird places.  Were they possibly worn by someone regularly officiating the funeral?

What we can be certain of though, is that Bell Beakers were oriented in a side-prostrated, flex position towards the rising of the sun.  A strange body preservation story may be developing as well.  The accompanying beaker seems to have contained beer, and in a few cases it appears sufficiently provable that beer was bittered with henbane (herb of the sun god in European history).

Burials might contain offerings or payment in order to find passage or protection during this crucible.  The dead faced trials, tests and trickery and that this happened in the cavernous depths of the Earth.

At the same time, I don't want to suggest that Beakers were even consciously aware of this metaphorical meaning, assuming it's at all valid.  We say and do many things that are riddled with metaphors and history, but we just do them because that's the way things are done. 



1 Valera, A. "Twilight of Enclosures" 2015
2  Besse, M "Territorialités, transferts, interculturalités dans les contextes de la diffusion du
Campaniforme en Europe" 2015

Menorquinas

A very inbred type of dairy cow caught my attention last week.  It is the Menorquina [2] of the Balearic Islands, hypothesized to have been most plausibly introduced by Bell Beakers (William H. Waldren?) and apparently having a fairly isolated history.  The milk is used mostly for Mahon cheese, and how could I resist not putting this out there [here] for a little gastro-archaeology.

Previously, I've directed attention towards several hypotheses from archaeo-zoologists and taxonomists that the short-headed cow* (more often a dairy cow) entered Western Europe from North Africa via Southern Spain about the time of the Bell Beakers.  The Beakers are also coincidentally the people likely responsible for the frequency of lactase persistence genetics in Western Europe.

There is no empirical proof just yet, but the Balearic Islands seem to provide an interesting test case scenario given the unique history of settlement and activity on the islands.  The islands offer possibly the longest continuously Beaker cultural areas in Europe and possibly one of the more severely impacted.

See Also:
"Guia de Campo de las Razas Autoctonas Espanolas" [Link to Page 104]

* The naming conventions, taxonomy and genetics is a jungle.  For the purpose of this page, I'll rely on what has generally been understood as a sub-species of bos taurus with a certain set of racial characteristics.  Also, the majority of dairy cattle, at least in the U.S., are not shorthorns (as oppossed to the shorthorn which is not a shorthorn, or otherwise the shorthead (not the sometimes distinct shorthead subclassification of shorthorns, the shorthorn or shorthead (variously) also being known as the longface (longifrons, as called in the U.S., as opposed to bos brachyceros in continental Europe, which is also a Nubian water buffalo.  brachyceros/longifrons. Trust!

Slash and Burn (Costa, Lopez, Kaal, Martinez, 2015)

"Environmental Changes in North-Western Iberia Around the Bell Beaker Period" is a chapter looking at evidence of changes in the landscape, soil and climate during the time of the Beakers, keeping in mind that they are one group among many.  (The hyperlink should be visible above)

This is a continuation of the previewable portion of "The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe" by Prieto-Martinez and Salanova.

Burning the Brushwood (Eero Järnefelt, 1893)

It may be easy to oversell the environmental impact of the Beaker period since it is really a continuation of Neolithic clearing practices and exasperated by climate change at the end of the third millenium.

Nevertheless, these authors see a fairly dramatic acceleration of soil erosion and clear evidence of slash and burn indicators in the soil.  The Beaker Period marks an intense increase in land use (in this area) for agricultural activities.*   It's during this time that many rock surfaces at high elevations became exposed, creating the canvass of Bronze Age rock art.

We already know from multiple isotopic studies that Beakerfolk had a diet rich in meats and dairy.  Aside from diet, loom weights suggest that much of their clothing was made of wool, so it follows that more pasture would have been required.

In addition to needing more room for animals, some crops like barley might have needed sandier soil at a higher and cooler elevation.  During the Beaker period many places experienced a cooler and wetter trend and this may have partly caused the shifting of preference between the varieties of barley and wheat grown, or maybe even where they were grown.

One thing that has been common in the United States is to use goats to clear lush underbrush in a deciduous landscape.  It'd be interesting to know if there was a relationship between the goat population and deforestation/defoliation during the Beaker period.


* I seem to recall in other areas of Europe, older fields are no longer maintained.  I'm not sure how the population size is estimated (concerning the population crash of the Late Neolithic), however erosion and drainage may have required seeking out previously unused land.