Color Me Beaker (Berlin and Kay)

Did you know that many languages have no words for colors like orange, purple or green?

This short video describes Berlin and Kay's "seven-stange evolution of color terms" in languages.  From this, we might ask if there is physical evidence to infer the lexical colors of Beaker language*.

I have some ideas, but first, check it out...




Let's apply this theoretical scheme to the Bell Beaker Culture.  Remember that WHITE, BLACK and RED are Stage 2 development (and as a side note, these three colors are the only PIE lexical colors that can be reconstructed with any certainty.  In fact, they may be the only true lexical colors of PIE, the rest being descriptive, such as "shining", "glimmering", "lightish", "wine-red sea", etc)

What are lexical colors in the Beaker world?


A very decent case can be made that Bell Beakers distinguished BLACK, WHITE and RED.  In fact, we might suspect this just from the antiquity of their culture.  This three-part color scheme appears to have been the decorative colors of Atlantic Megalithic Culture (Bueno Ramirez et al, 2015, below), as well as, the roughly contemporary PIE Culture.  There's a few other circumstantial arguments we can delve into, but let's look at the material evidence.

Beaker Culture seems to have an almost dualistic tendency in contrasting various ideas, from gender to celestials, and probably, coloration.  The contrast between red and white is most apparent in the funerary pottery and a name for the two colors seems likely.


RED

Red and white pottery, red and/or red and white cattle, probably reddish horse coats, red and white petroglyphs, red and white textiles, red-dyed wool or linen.  Certainly they often used ochre or cinnabar in burials.  Some of that was from dyed blankets, in Iberia that might have sometimes included red facial shrouds.  Red hair would have been worthy of linguistic distinction.  Of course, pure copper would belong in the red category (using the Berlin and Kay definition).  Semetite amber is red.   (Baltic amber is lighter, but we can't be sure they made any lexical distinction at this stage.  More on this in a moment...)

WHITE

Quite a few things of importance were almost contrastively white in their culture.  Dairy products are uniquely white.  The inlay paste of their funerary pottery was usually gypsum, bone or other combinations. The ivory buttons and toggles must have accented darker clothing.   Whalebone pommels would have been striking.  Their cows may have been a single coat of red, but some may have had white faces or bellies.  Wooly sheep are white.  Salt is white, and interestingly the etymology of the Basque word for white probably comes from a word meaning 'salt'.

Of course every language understands black, as white and black are Stage 1 colors.  Jet would have been the most striking, but bitumen would be known to many men making arrows.  Charcoal is black, and that would have made pigment for tattoos and paint.

Beyond this, it is very difficult to imagine much else in the color palette of the Beaker tongue.  For one, it appears unlikely that many peoples of this time distinguished between green or blue, much less anything more interesting like purple (which obviously came very late).

Proto-Indo-Europeans, for example, seem to have had difficulty expressing many colors as distinct lexical terms.  A lot of the examples that could be used to describe a greenish-blue sea or gold, seem to use descriptive words like 'shimmering' or 'shining'.  A lot of words for these other colors are interchangeable and describe totally different colors in the daughter tongues.

Stage III?

It is possible that another color existed in Beaker Culture/PIE Culture *-ghel.  From this we get a color yellow from 'shining' which can be used to describe the Sun, gold and (quite specifically) Baltic Amber.  The debate is whether this had crystalized into an actual lexical term that literally meant YELLOW, or does this apply to anything shiny like the sparkle of the sea?

There is one other color in Stage III, that is green.  This is another debate topic for PIE, but what about Beakers?  Greenstone bracers seem to have been prestigious among Beaker archers.  In the age before this the green axeheads.  Obviously the oxidation of copper is green, and copper ores would be green as well.

So where were the Beakers?  Probably somewhere between 2 and 3.





See also:

Mallory and Adams in "The Oxford Dictionary of Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World"

"Natural and artificial colors: the megalithic monuments of Brittany" (Bueno Ramirez et al, 2015)
Antiquity 89 (2015): 55-71.  toi: 10.15184/aqy.2014.29

Proto-Indo-European Etyma.  University of Texas at Austin

"A Taste for Green..." (Rodriguez-Rellan et al, 2020

* Let's not be retarded.  Beakers certainly were able to communicate with each other in a commonly understood language even if the language of their household or communities varied significantly.

Time Team!! (Migdale Astro-Archaeology)

Ever heard of the Migdale Hoard?  Ever heard of a crannog?  Ever heard of Bell Beaker?  pbbbt!

This is a great Time Team episode to beam to the smart tv when you settle down this week.  (The conclusion of the video starts at 45:00 with Tony Robinson questioning Allison Sheridan.)

In the Highlands of Scotland there is a Loch (Lake) named Migdale nestled in several hilly mountains.  The saddle of two mountains forms a point where the sun rose during the Beaker era equinoxes.  Of course, our solar-focused Beakers made this perspective in the landscape, with sacrifices, henges, burials and dwellings.





One of the early discoveries in the area was the Migdale Hoard (seen below).  It's not just a bunch of expensive items deposited in a crevice.  These are some of the earliest and finest bronzes anywhere, with stylistic connections from Ireland to Bavaria.  The sheen of the axehead would have appeared almost silver.  There are bangles and anklets.  The tubular necklace was positively dated to 2,200 B.C. based on the elm(?) inter-tubuals.

What's new is that the original find-place of the Migdale Hoard was positively identified by an elder local woman who was taken to the find spot as a girl.  Not surprisingly, we learn that the hoard was deposited in an astronomical alignment to the rising sun equinoxes.

The crannog appears to have been built within the alignment at least by the Iron Age.   However, the timber that was carbon dated may have only been the most recent rebuild of the decking.  The exact age of the crannog, for now, is only as old as the Iron Age.

The state of preservation in the anaerobic conditions is astounding, and for the first time in Britain, there is evidence of alignment wedges and alignment posts.  We may assume that thousands of the British enclosures had these kinds of sight posts in conditions that weren't conducive to their survival.

Beakers Spoke LPIE (Victor Mair)

Victor Mair now sees evidence that the Bell Beakers were Into-European speakers.  (Hat tip Andrew)

In the linked thread he includes personal communications with linquists James Mallory and Asko Parpola concerning the details of a new Beaker burial at Lechlade-on-Thames.  (LiveScience)

I commented on this burial several posts ago before any details were known.  One man was seated "Indian style" facing another important-looking man in a tightly flexed position.  The archaeologists believe the seated man was some kind of shaman and the flexed man some sort of princely man.

Head and Hoof Sacrifice (via LiveScience)

As far as I can see, the seated configuration seems most closely related to those "shaman" burials of the Maros-Yamnaya type and, at least to me, look like some kind of praying or meditative-type pose.  Hopefully we'll get some photos that show the position of the hands and ankles of the seated man.

Anyhow, without waxing too long on this, I've believed for a long time that Bell Beakers spoke LPIE, and not just some of them, but probably all of them up to a point (including the interior of the Iberian Peninsula).  Aside from the head and hooves burial, other burials have characteristics that seem to point toward IE metaphors or celestials, such as the "thunderstones" or the reversed sexual polarity of lunar and solar divinities.

Any other peculiarities that support (or provide evidence to the contrary) IE speech among the Beakers?

*As a side note.  One question I would like to see answered here is the dietary habits of the seated man.  If he was indeed someone with a religious vocation, it is quite possible there will be evidence to support a social division of diet.  This seems to have been very common throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages, and we see this in the Bible oftentimes as well.

Also, is there anything about his skeleton that is out of the ordinary.  Was he especially slender and tall?  Did he have osteoporosis?

Maybe, maybe not.  But I think we might expect a few specialized religious vocations among the Beakers, such as singers, diviners, healers and priestesses.  It's quite possible that some of the Beaker men buried in the woman's position were of these sorts.  That's up next...

Ireland Before Beakers

Who lived in Ireland before the Bell Beaker invasions and settlement?




Unfortunately, the Lara Cassidy paper on Ireland's genetic history is now embargoed.  But it will interesting to read that paper with this linguistic question in mind:

"why are there typological similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?"   

Cassidy at Eurogenes.  Hopefully someone will send me the PDF, but until then, the question...

The mainstream view is that the Celtic entered the Islands in the LBA with the IA representing its cultural apex.  Population movements certainly spread this language, but genetic continuity would suggest that Bronze Age natives would have learned Celtic (as a new dialect or a new language)

Before the Celtic invasion, the Island of Britain probably spoke a number of languages related to those of the Low Countries (certainly some kind of LLPIE, possibly the speculative Nordwestblok).  But Ireland may be another story as its ethnic enclaves were more choppy, with strange menages of new lifeways and ancient craft traditions.  (food vessels as one example)

We think of the modern Irish as supremely North European with high frequencies of new traits associated with Bronze Age population movements.  But we must remember that this was a long and cruel process on a little Island.  A little Island that spent a lot of energy harassing and conquering the West Coast of the big Island.  We have to be careful looking at Bronze Age Ireland though our modern prism of Celticity.

If Late Neolithic Irish tended toward the more Levantine variety of Farmer, and if they survived in any significant numbers to the MBA in Ireland, then it is well possible that portions of the LBA Irish population were learning (or mangling) Continental Celtic from the aspect of an Afro-Asiatic thinker.

I'll offer a speculative possibility for consideration...

1. Western European farmers descend from two major ancestral epochs/bodies
    a.  Danubian farmers originating in Anatolia and SE Europe that were variously mixed with Hunter-Gatherers (these are the I2 and G guys and are the majority throughout the continental heartland)
    b.  Maritime farmers originating in Syria that dot the littorals and river valleys across North Africa, parts of the Northern Mediterranean, and parts of the Atlantic facade to Ireland  (these are possibly the carries of R1b-V88 and E1b among others)

2.  Although Bell Beakers (probably IE speakers) pummeled most of the large Island, the Irish Sea and Ireland itself may have been more patchy in settlement where Neolithic cultural ways and ethnicities lingered and inter-married through the Early Bronze Age to Middle Bronze Age.

3.  The bastard Celtic of the Irish Sea and Southern Ireland came to dominate or influence all of the Islands throughout the Iron Age, so what happened on the macro level doesn't matter anyway.

4.  Insular Celtic was spread by Irish Bastards with daggers and swords.


See also:  Insular Celtic Languages

**Update**
See also:  Dispatches comments

CASSIDY, LARA, A Genomic Compendium of an Island: Documenting Continuity and Change across Irish Human Prehistory, Trinity College Dublin.School of Genetics & Microbiology. GENETICS, 2018

Mounted Archery and.... "Bracer ornaments!" Clement Nicolas, 2020

Let's get down to the very dirty business of Bell Beaker bracers.  Simple?  Nothing is simple.

This is a paper by Clement Nicolas that re-attacks this issue.  Worn on the inside of the arm with use-wear?  Nope.  Try again.

Nicolas confirms Harry Folkiens' observation that these wristguards (bracers) were indeed most likely worn on the outside of the arm.

Snip from Fig 6 of the paper 

Since we're on the subject of mounted warfare this week, let me shamelessly promote my own (more recent) hypothesis, because I think the cockstrutting explanation is weak.

I believe these archery stones were used to steady the arm by mounted archers.  There's a popular Youtube Blogger, "Survive the Jive", that promoted my theory along with a graphic I made for Jessica Ryan's paper on enthesial skeletal changes... (click and wait a few seconds)



I think as we look at the Fages et al paper (Eurogenes), or the Harald Meller paper, or the skeletal indications of an archery culture (Ryan), we're looking at mounted infantry, calvary, or at the very least a culture of mounted warriors that is very unique in the history of Europe.

Clément Nicolas: "Bracer ornaments! An investigation of Bell Beaker stone ‘wrist-guards’ from Central Europe" JNA 22, 2020, 15–108 [doi 10.12766/jna.2020.2]