Analysis of Bronze Age daggers has shown that they were used for processing animal carcasses and not as non-functional symbols of identity and status, as previously thought.
First appearing in the early 4th millennium BCE, copper-alloy daggers were widespread in Bronze Age Europe including Britain and Ireland. Yet archaeologists have long debated what these objects were used for.
As daggers are often found in weapon-rich male burials, or ‘warrior graves’, many researchers speculated that they were primarily ceremonial objects used in prehistoric funerals to mark out the identity and status of the deceased. Others suggested that they may have been used as weapons or tools for crafts.
However, the lack of a targeted method of analysis for copper-alloy metals, like those available for ceramic, stone, and shell artefacts, left this problem unresolved.
A revolutionary new method, pioneered by an international research team led by Newcastle University, UK, has enabled the world’s first extraction of organic residues from ten copper-alloy daggers excavated in 2017 from Pragatto, a Bronze Age settlement site in Italy. The new method reveals, for the first time, how these objects were used, for what tasks, and on what materials.
The project team, led by Dr Andrea Dolfini and Isabella Caricola, developed a technique that used Picro-Sirius Red (PSR) solution to stain organic residues on the daggers. The residues were then observed under several types of optical, digital, and scanning electron microscopes. This allowed the team to identify micro-residues of collagen and associated bone, muscle, and bundle tendon fibres , suggesting that the daggers had come into contact with multiple animal tissues and were used to process various types of animal carcasses. Uses seem to have included the slaughtering of livestock, butchering carcasses, and carving the meat from the bone.
The EU-funded project team then carried out wide-ranging experiments with replicas of the daggers that had been created by an expert bronzesmith. This showed that this type of dagger was well suited to processing animal carcasses. The residues extracted from the experimental daggers were also analysed as part of the research and matched those observed on the archaeological daggers.
Professor Andrea Dolfini, Chair of Archaeology, Newcastle University, said: “The research has revealed that it is possible to extract and characterise organic residues from ancient metals, extending the range of materials that can be analysed in this way. This is a significant breakthrough as the new method enables the analysis of a wide variety of copper-alloy tools and weapons from anywhere in the world. The possibilities are endless, and so are the answers that the new method can and will provide in the future.”
Hunter-gatherers made use of open woodland conditions in the millennia before Stonehenge monuments were built, according to a study published April 27, 2022 in the open-access journalPLOS ONE by Samuel Hudson of the University of Southampton, U.K., and colleagues.
Much research has explored Bronze Age and Neolithic history of the region surrounding Stonehenge, but less is known about earlier times in this area. This leaves open questions about how ancient people and wildlife used this region before the famous archaeological monuments were constructed. In this paper, Hudson and colleagues reconstruct environmental conditions at the site of Blick Mead, a pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer site on the edge of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.
The authors combine pollen, spores, sedimentary DNA, and animal remains to characterize the pre-Neolithic habitat of the site, inferring partially open woodland conditions, which would have been beneficial to large grazing herbivores like aurochs, as well as hunter-gatherer communities. This study supports previous evidence that the Stonehenge region was not covered in closed canopy forest at this time, as has previously been proposed.
This study also provides date estimates for human activity at Blick Mead. Results indicate that hunter-gatherers used this site for 4,000 years up until the time of the earliest known farmers and monument-builders in the region, who would also have benefited from the space provided in open environments. These results indicate that the first farmers and monument-builders in the Stonehenge area encountered open habitats already maintained and used by large grazers and earlier human populations.
Further study on similar sites will provide important insights into the interactions between hunter-gatherers and early farming communities in the U.K. and elsewhere. Furthermore, this study provides techniques for combining sedimentary DNA, other ecological data, and stratigraphic data to interpret the ancient environment at a site where such information is difficult to assess.
The authors add: "The Stonehenge World Heritage Site is globally recognized for its rich Neolithic and Bronze Age monumental landscape, but little is known of its significance to Mesolithic populations. Environmental research at Blick Mead suggests that hunter-gatherers had already chosen part of this landscape, an alluvial clearing, as a persistent place for hunting and occupation."
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Journal Reference:
Samuel M. Hudson, Ben Pears, David Jacques, Thierry Fonville, Paul Hughes, Inger Alsos, Lisa Snape, Andreas Lang, Antony Brown. Life before Stonehenge: The hunter-gatherer occupation and environment of Blick Mead revealed by sedaDNA, pollen and spores. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (4): e0266789 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266789
A multidisciplinary research group from the University of Helsinki has renewed our understanding of the history of the Uralic language family and languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian.
“Observations regarding the main prehistoric developments from linguistics, archaeology and genetics can now be legitimately combined. We have reason to believe that the spread of the Uralic languages began in western Siberia during the early Metal Age and happened quite quickly,” says Professor Volker Heyd.
The westward spread of Uralic languages happened approximately 4,200–3,900 years ago, first to the central Volga region and later to the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic.
The dispersal of the Uralic language family is connected to three episodes.
(1) A shift in the natural environment (the 4.2ka event): the air in Siberia became colder, spreading outwards to cause widespread droughts and colder winters.
(2) The cross-cultural archaeological Seima-Turbino phenomenon generated a complicated network characterised by bronze objects.
(3) Contacts with Indo-Iranian languages, which led to foreign vocabulary entering the Uralic languages. Languages formerly spoken in the area were assimilated.
With a history of approximately 4,500 years, the Uralic language family is nearly as old as the Indo-European one, which began to spread across Eurasia approximately 5,100 years ago. The spread led to contacts with Indo-Iranian language variants and the creation of a long contact zone in the area currently known as central Russia. Early loan words originating from this contact made their way into the Uralic languages that were beginning to emerge, including Sami, the Balto-Finnic languages, Mordvinic, Mari and the Permic languages. However, they are absent from the Samoyedic languages, the easternmost branch of the language family.
The early Metal and Bronze Age cultures and their networks promoted the rapid westward spread of languages. Waterways were of particular importance for this early migration, carrying also metals initially from the Ural Mountains and Siberia to the west, as well as later from the Volga to the Baltic region.
In the first stage the Uralic spread went from east to west, and in the second individual branches from south to north. The speakers of the early Uralic languages, in the area bordered by the Volga and its tributaries Oka and Kama, learned agriculture and animal husbandry from their Indo-European neighbours in Europe. As climate conditions improved, agriculture spread to the furthest reaches of the northern steppes.
“The geographically extensive area of the Uralic languages has long been explained as resulting from a spread from the centre outwards, or from inner Russia to its periphery. Now the latest data from several different disciplines establish that the spread took place almost exclusively from east to west,” says Professor Riho Grünthal.
Roughly 6,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer communities in northeast Europe produced skillfully manufactured slate ring ornaments in great numbers. While these ornaments are commonly referred to as 'slate rings', they were rarely used as intact rings. Instead, the ornaments were fragmented on purpose, using pieces of rings as tokens. These fragments were further processed into pendants.
The fragments have most likely served as symbols of the social relations of Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
Purposeful fragmentation of ornaments
As most archaeological material is found in a fragmented state, the phenomenon has been considered a natural consequence of objects' having been long buried underground. However, according to Postdoctoral Researcher Marja Ahola from the University of Helsinki, not all objects have necessarily been broken by accident. Instead, it is possible some were fragmented on purpose as part of maintaining social relations, bartering or ritual activities. The research now completed has demonstrated that a substantial number of ornaments have been found in extensive and central locations. As some of the ornaments originate in Lake Onega region and have been transported to Finland through a widespread exchange network, it is possible that they symbolise the connections established within the network.
By matching pieces of slate ring ornaments, analysing their geochemical composition and investigating traces of use and manufacture in the objects, a research group at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku demonstrated that the ornaments had not only been worn, but also intentionally broken. Because fragments from the same ornament were found in two different locations, it is possible that they were worn by two different individuals. Another indication of this is the fact that one of the fragments had been worked on more finely than the other.
"These fragments of the same object may show the handprint and preferences of two individuals. Perhaps they wore the ornaments as a symbol of a connection established," Ahola muses.
A similar link was found in slate ring ornaments created during the same manufacturing process, one of which was found in a settlement-site context and the other in a burial site investigated near the settlement.
"What we see here may be one way of maintaining connection between the living and the dead. This is also the first clear material connection between a certain place of residence and a burial site. In other words, the people who lived there most likely buried their dead in a site close to them," Ahola explains.
An X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) of a little over 50 slate ring ornaments demonstrated that some of the ornaments or fragments thereof had been imported from Lake Onega region, Russia, hundreds of kilometres from the site where they were found. XRF analyses can be used to determine the element concentrations and raw materials of inorganic archaeological materials with a very high precision. The technique can be applied as an entirely non-invasive surface analysis, which makes it perfectly suited to the study of archaeological objects.
"By comparing the elemental concentrations of the objects under investigation with findings published on the basis of international datasets, we were able to demonstrate that some of the ornaments or the stone material used in them was transported to Finland through an extensive exchange network, primarily from the Lake Onega region. There was also variation in the chemical composition of the objects, which correlates with their design. These factors indicate that the ornaments were produced at Lake Onega region in several batches, most likely in different locations and by a number of makers," says Docent Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä from the University of Helsinki
Marja Ahola, Elisabeth Holmqvist, Petro Pesonen. Materialising the Social Relationships of Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Geochemical Analyses of 4th Millennium BC ‘Slate Ring Ornaments’ from Finland. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2022; DOI: 10.1007/s10816-022-09556-8
Were Neanderthals really as well adapted to a life in the cold as previously assumed, or did they prefer more temperate environmental conditions during the last Ice Age? To answer these questions, it is worthwhile to examine Neanderthal sites on the northern periphery of their range. After all, it was there that environmental fluctuations were most noticeable, especially as a result of repeated ice advances from Scandinavia. A region particularly suitable for such investigations is northern Germany, with its numerous documented Neanderthal sites.
In a recent study, researchers from MPI-EVA, FAU, Leuphana University Lüneburg, LIAG and other partner institutions have now investigated the remains of Neanderthals at a former lakeshore in Lichtenberg in the Wendland region (Lower Saxony). Using an integrative research approach, the team has combined analytical methods from archaeology, luminescence dating, sedimentology, micromorphology with the study of pollen and phytoliths to explore in detail the relationship between human presence in the north and changing environmental conditions.
A window into environmental history
”Archaeological excavations are a window into environmental history”, says Michael Hein, a geographer at MPI-EVA. “Based on sediments and pollen grains they contain, we can reconstruct the vegetation and environmental conditions of the time. For this, the most accurate dating possible is required, which – in the case of Central Europe – is still lacking for many climatic phases of the last Ice Age." Collecting environmental information and performing independent dating is of great interest to archaeology and paleoenvironmental research alike.
"In Lichtenberg, we have now succeeded in dating quite accurately the end of a pronounced warm phase – the so-called Brörup Interstadial – to 90,000 years”, Hein adds. “Thus, the cooling of the continent would have coincided with the climate change in the Greenland ice and the North Atlantic. A direct coupling had so far only been suspected – but not proven – for northern Germany.”
Settlement of northern areas also during cold phases
The study also found that Neanderthals occupied a lightly wooded lakeshore about 90,000 years ago in a relatively temperate climate. Stone tools found at the former campsite attest to a variety of activities, such as woodworking and plant processing. Already between 1987 and 1994, the Landesmuseum Hannover excavated a site close to Lichtenberg containing bifacial backed knives, so-called “Keilmesser” – specialized cutting tools. In the excavations, the layers of this former campsite are located above the lakeshore campsite, which is associated with a temperate climate period, and date to a time about 70,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age’s first cold maximum began. The researchers were thus able to prove that Neanderthals had indeed inhabited the northern regions even during cold phases.
Flexible adaptation to environmental conditions
”Changes in stone tools indicate that Neanderthals adapted in line with changing environmental conditions”, says Marcel Weiß, an archaeologist at FAU. “In Lichtenberg, we were able to show that they repeatedly visited northern Central Europe – which developed from a heavily forested environment during the last warm period, to sparser forests of a cold-moderate climate period at the beginning of the last Ice Age, to the cold tundra of the first cold maximum.”
In this context, the stone tools, especially knives made of flint, show that the Neanderthals’ lakeshore site may have served a hunting party for a short stay. Evidence from other sites from the same time period indicates that during cold phases Neanderthals likely visited their northern dwelling grounds mainly during the summer months.
China’s mountainous southwestern area is home to one of the country’s most ethnically diverse populations. In the most comprehensive genetic analysis of the native people there to date, researchers reveal that the ethnic groups’ peopling and migration history is more complex than previously concluded. The study appears April 26 in the journalCell Reports.
The Tibetan-Yi corridor (TYC), named after two main ethnic groups in the region, on the eastern edge of Tibet Plateau in southwestern China is thought to have served as an important area for ethnic migration and diversification. The corridor’s corrugated landscape of deep river valleys and tall ridges formed natural passages and barriers for gene flow.
Scientists have previously analyzed how people in the region are genetically related to the Tibetans, who live mostly west of the region, and the Han, China’s main ethnic group. But prior studies had limited gene samples from the region, which inhabit over a dozen of different ethnic groups.
To gain a better understanding of ethnic groups in the TYC, Shengbin Li, the paper’s co-corresponding author at Xi'an Jiaotong University in central China, spent a decade collecting blood samples from more than 200 people from all 16 ethnic groups in the region.
“The steep mountains that contributed to the high levels of ethnic diversity in the area also made data collection extremely difficult,” says Li. “Most of the places were inaccessible by car, so we had to travel on horseback. And some groups were so isolated that we had to walk for hours to get there.”
The team selected individuals from each ethnic group with at least three generations of history living in a relatively fixed area. By comparing the genomes of different ethnic groups, and those of Han and Tibetan populations, the team found that all ethnic groups in the region are genetically similar, suggesting that they shared a common ancestor. But people living in the northern TYC are related more closely to Tibetan Highlanders living on the plateau, while southern TYC inhabitants have a closer genetic relationship with southeast Asians, such as Thai people and Cambodians.
Previous research suggests that the region’s earliest settlers came from the upper reaches of the Yellow River region in northern China during the Neolithic period, and the corridor was gradually populated as the settlers expanded southward. The new study, while not contradicting the previous conclusion, found that the migration pattern is more complex than a simple north-to-south movement. For example, new data suggest that the ancestors of some southern TYC populations might have originated from southeastern Asia.
“More studies are needed to further understand the origin and flow of the region’s population, especially a more comprehensive analysis that incorporates not only genetic but also archaeological, cultural, linguistic and geographical evidence,” says Shuaicheng Li, the study’s co-corresponding author at City University of Hong Kong.
Next, the team hopes to study the gut microbiota of the TYC people. “The region has no air pollution, and locals don’t eat processed food with chemicals. Their microbiota has the potential to reveal more connections between gut and health,” Shuaicheng Li says.
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The study was fully supported by Xi'an Jiaotong University.
The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea served as a launching pad for the colonisation of the Pacific – one of the greatest migrations in human history.
The new study makes clear the initial expansion of the Lapita people throughout Papua New Guinea was far greater than previously thought.
The study, published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal, is based on the discovery of a distinctive Lapita pottery sherd, a broken piece of pottery with sharp edges, on Brooker Island in 2017 that lead researcher Dr Ben Shaw said was “like finding a needle in a haystack”.
“Lapita cultural groups were the first people to reach the remote Pacific islands such as Vanuatu around 3,000 years ago. But in Papua New Guinea where people have lived for at least 50,000 years, the timing and extent of Lapita dispersals are poorly understood,” Dr Shaw said.
“For a long time, it was thought Lapita groups avoided most of Papua New Guinea because people were already living there.”
The study shows Lapita people introduced pottery to Papua New Guinea that had distinct markings, as well as new tool technologies and animals such as pigs.
“We found lots of Lapita pottery, a range of stone tools and evidence for shaping of obsidian [volcanic glass] into sharp blades,” Dr Shaw said.
“As we dug deeper, we reached an even earlier cultural layer before the introduction of pottery. What amazed us was the amount of mammal bone we recovered, some of which could be positively identified as pig and dog. These animals were introduced to New Guinea by Lapita and were associated with the use of turtle shell to make tools.”
Dr Shaw said the new discovery explains why the Lapita people colonised the Pacific islands 3,000 years ago and the role that Indigenous populations in New Guinea had in Lapita decisions to look for new islands to live on.
According to Dr Shaw, later Lapita dispersals through PNG and interaction with Indigenous populations profoundly influenced the region as a global centre of cultural and linguistic diversity.
“It is one of the greatest migrations in human history and finally we have evidence to help explain why the migration might have occurred and why it took place when it did,” he said.
“We had no indication this would be a site of significance, and a lot of the time we were flying blind with the areas we surveyed and when looking for archaeological sites, so it is very much like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
The research involved many ANU researchers and international collaborators who showed how migration pathways and island-hopping strategies culminated in rapid and purposeful Pacific-wide settlement.
“A lot of our good fortune was because of the cultural knowledge, and we built a strong relationship with the locals based on honesty and transparency about our research on their traditional lands. Without their express permission, this kind of work would simply not be possible. The Brooker community is listed as the senior author on the paper to acknowledge their fundamental role in this research,” Dr Shaw said.
The results of their research have been published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01735-w) check link, while a video on Dr Shaw’s YouTube page also documents the archaeological excavations on Brooker Island, plus fieldwork in other parts of Papua New Guinea.
A new analysis of archaeological sites in the Americas challenges relatively new theories that the earliest human inhabitants of North America arrived before the migration of people from Asia across the Bering Strait. Conducted by University of Wyoming Professor Todd Surovell and colleagues from UW and five other institutions, the analysis suggests that misinterpretation of archaeological evidence at certain sites in North and South America might be responsible for theories that humans arrived long before 13,000-14,200 years ago.
The researchers' findings appear today in PLOS One, a journal published by the Public Library of Science. The paper is the latest development in the debate over the peopling of the Americas, in which some are now questioning the long-held consensus that the first Americans were hunter-gatherers who entered North America from Asia via the Beringia land bridge up to 14,200 years ago, and then dispersed southward between two large glaciers that then covered much of the continent.
The conclusions of Surovell and colleagues are based on an analysis of buried archaeological deposits, using a new statistic called the Apparent Stratigraphic Integrity Index they developed. While the stratigraphic integrity of early archaeological sites in Alaska is high -- producing strong evidence in support of unambiguous human occupation -- the sites in more southern locations pointing to possible earlier human occupation show signs of artifact mixing among multiple time periods.
"If humans managed to breach the continental ice sheets significantly before 13,000 years ago, there should be clear evidence for it in the form of at least some stratigraphically discrete archeological components with a relatively high artifact count. So far, no such evidence exists," Surovell and colleagues wrote. "(Our) findings support the hypothesis that the first human arrival to the New World occurred by at least 14,200 years ago in Beringia and by approximately 13,000 years ago in the temperate latitudes of North America. Strong evidence for human presence before those dates has yet to be identified in the archaeological record."
Specifically, the new analysis compared the stratigraphic integrity of three sites argued to contain evidence of earlier human occupation -- two in Texas and one in Idaho -- with the integrity of sites in Alaska, Wyoming and Pennsylvania. The three sites claimed to be older than 13,000 years ago all showed patterns of significant mixing, while the others did not.
The researchers were unable to obtain detailed information about some other sites in North and South America purported to contain evidence of human occupation before 13,000 years ago.
"Sites claimed to be older than 13,000 years ago are few, and data supporting their status as sites have been poorly disseminated," Surovell and colleagues wrote. "Given the status of available data regarding these sites, we must question whether there are any sites in the Americas south of the ice sheets that exhibit an unambiguous and stratigraphically discrete cultural occupation with sufficient numbers of artifacts of clear human manufacture."
The paper doesn't completely rule out the possibility that humans colonized the Americas at an earlier date. "But if they did, they should have produced stratigraphically discrete occupation surfaces, some of which would be expected to have large numbers of artifacts.
"That they did so in Beringia but failed to do so south of the continental glaciers suggests that either there was something fundamentally different about pre-Clovis human behavior and/or geomorphology south of the ice sheets, or that the evidence indicating the presence of humans south of the ice sheets has been misinterpreted," the researchers wrote. "At a minimum, it shows that, when stratigraphically discrete occupations are not present, additional studies must be performed to demonstrate that stratigraphic integrity of association between artifacts and dated strata exist."
Joining Surovell in the research were UW colleagues Sarah Allaun, Robert Kelly, Marcel Kornfeld and Mary Lou Larson; Wyoming State Archaeologist Spencer Pelton; Barbara Crass and Charles Holmes, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks; Joseph Gingerich, of Ohio University and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History; Kelly Graf, of Texas A&M University; and Kathryn Krasinski and Brian Wygal, both of Adelphi University.
Todd A. Surovell, Sarah A. Allaun, Barbara A. Crass, Joseph A. M. Gingerich, Kelly E. Graf, Charles E. Holmes, Robert L. Kelly, Marcel Kornfeld, Kathryn E. Krasinski, Mary Lou Larson, Spencer R. Pelton, Brian T. Wygal. Late date of human arrival to North America: Continental scale differences in stratigraphic integrity of pre-13,000 BP archaeological sites. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (4): e0264092 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264092
IMAGE: FOOD LIST COMPILED DURING THE REIGN OF KING INE OF WESSEX (C. 688-726), PART OF THE TEXTUS ROFFENSISview more
CREDIT: CHAPTER OF ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL
Very few people in England ate large amounts of meat before the Vikings settled, and there is no evidence that elites ate more meat than other people, a major new bioarchaeological study suggests. Its sister study also argues that peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers. The findings overturn major assumptions about early medieval English history.
‘You are what you eat’ isotopic analysis of over 2,000 skeletons by far the largest of its kind.
Early medieval diets were far more similar across social groups than previously thought.
Peasants didn’t give kings food as exploitative tax, they hosted feasts suggesting they were granted more respect than previously assumed.
Surviving food lists are supplies for special feasts not blueprints for everyday elite diets.
Some feasts served up an estimated 1kg of meat and 4,000 Calories in total, per person.
Picture medieval England and royal feasts involving copious amounts of meat immediately spring to mind. Historians have long assumed that royals and nobles ate far more meat than the rest of the population and that free peasants were forced to hand over food to sustain their rulers throughout the year in an exploitative system known as feorm or food-rent.
But a pair of Cambridge co-authored studies published today in the journal Anglo-Saxon England present a very different picture, one which could transform our understanding of early medieval kingship and society.
While completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett gave a presentation which intrigued historian Tom Lambert (Sidney Sussex College). Now at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Leggett had analysed chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th – 11th centuries. She then cross-referenced these isotopic findings with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation. Leggett’s research revealed no correlation between social status and high protein diets.
That surprised Tom Lambert because so many medieval texts and historical studies suggest that Anglo-Saxon elites did eat large quantities of meat. The pair started to work together to find out what was really going on.
They began by deciphering a food list compiled during the reign of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688-726) to estimate how much food it records and what its calorie content might have been. They estimated that the supplies amounted to 1.24 million kcal, over half of which came from animal protein. The list included 300 bread rolls so the researchers worked on the basis that one bun was served to each diner to calculate overall portions. Each guest would have received 4,140 kcal from 500g of mutton; 500g of beef; another 500g of salmon, eel and poultry; plus cheese, honey and ale.
The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).
Lambert says: “The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis. These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”
Leggett says: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that.”
“The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”
The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.
Peasants feeding kings
These feasts would have been lavish outdoor events at which whole oxen were roasted in huge pits, examples of which have been excavated in East Anglia.
Lambert says: “Historians generally assume that medieval feasts were exclusively for elites. But these food lists show that even if you allow for huge appetites, 300 or more people must have attended. That means that a lot of ordinary farmers must have been there, and this has big political implications.”
Kings in this period – including Rædwald, the early seventh-century East Anglian king perhaps buried at Sutton Hoo – are thought to have received renders of food, known in Old English as feorm or food-rent, from the free peasants of their kingdoms. It is often assumed that these were the primary source of food for royal households and that kings’ own lands played a minor supporting role at best. As kingdoms expanded, it has also been assumed that food-rent was redirected by royal grants to sustain a broader elite, making them even more influential over time.
But Lambert studied the use of the word feorm in different contexts, including aristocratic wills, and concludes that the term referred to a single feast and not this primitive form of tax. This is significant because food-rent required no personal involvement from a king or lord, and no show of respect to the peasants who were duty-bound to provide it. When kings and lords attended communal feasts in person, however, the dynamics would have been very different.
Lambert says: “We’re looking at kings travelling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants, people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them. You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement.”
This rethinking could have far-reaching implications for medieval studies and English political history more generally. Food renders have informed theories about the beginnings of English kingship and land-based patronage politics, and are central to ongoing debates about what led to the subjection of England’s once-free peasantry.
Leggett and Lambert are now eagerly awaiting the publication of isotopic data from the Winchester Mortuary Chests which are thought to contain the remains of Egbert, Canute and other Anglo-Saxon royals. These results should provide unprecedented insights into the period’s most elite eating habits.
References
S. Leggett & T. Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a Lack of (Isotopic) Enrichment’; Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000072
S. Leggett & T Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm’, Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000084
Researchers examined skeletons from before the Romans to the early Victorians for parasitic worm eggs
Intestinal worms were a common problem for British people across a wide period of history
The magnitude of the parasite problem in the UK changed over time
Understanding how parasitic worm infections changed in the past can help public health measures in regions of the world still experiencing problems today.
New research led by researchers from the Departments of Biology and Archaeology, Oxford, and published today in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, reveals the scale of parasitic worm infections in Britain from the Prehistoric to the early Victorian periods.
This type of research provides a unique insight into the lives and habits of past populations – their general health, cooking practices, diet, and hygiene.
Understanding how parasitic worm infections changed in the past can help public health measures in regions of the world still experiencing problems today.
Humans are infected with roundworms and whipworms through contamination by faecal matter and catch some tapeworms by eating raw or undercooked meat or fish.
Infections with parasitic worms are a big problem in many parts of the world today, particularly in some tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. But in the past, they were much more widespread and were common throughout Europe.
The research team wanted to find out the size and scale of parasitic worm infections in the UK over the course of history. So they looked for worm eggs in the soil from the pelvises of skeletons.
They tested a lot of individual skeletons. 464 human burials were examined from 17 sites, dating from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution.
People In the Roman and the Late Medieval period fared the worst, with the highest rates of worm infection detected. The infection rates were similar to those seen in the most affected regions today.
Things changed in the Industrial period. Worm infection rates differed a lot between different sites – some sites had little evidence of infection, while in others there was a lot of infection.
The researchers think that local changes in sanitation and hygiene may have reduced infection in some areas before nationwide changes during the Victorian 'Sanitary Revolution'.
The co-first authors, Hannah Ryan and Patrik Flammer said: 'Defining the patterns of infection with intestinal worms can help us to understand the health, diet and habits of past populations. More than that, defining the factors that led to changes in infection levels (without modern drugs) can provide support for approaches to control these infections in modern populations.'
The team will next use their array of parasite-based approaches to investigate other infections in the past. This includes more large-scale analyses of human burials, as well as continuing their ancient DNA work.
Their ambition is to employ a multidisciplinary approach, working closely with archaeologists, historians, parasitologists, biologists and other interested groups to use parasites to help understand the past.
IMAGE: PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING AMBIENT LIGHT LEVELS AND THE POSITION OF REPLICA PLAQUETTES IN RELATION TO THE FIRE (DURING EXPERIMENT E).view more
CREDIT: NEEDHAM ET AL., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
Our early ancestors probably created intricate artwork by firelight, an examination of 50 engraved stones unearthed in France has revealed.
The stones were incised with artistic designs around 15,000 years ago and have patterns of heat damage which suggests they were carved close to the flickering light of a fire, the new study has found.
The study, by researchers at the Universities of York and Durham, looked at the collection of engraved stones, known as plaquettes, which are now held in the British Museum. They are likely to have been made using stone tools by Magdalenian people, an early hunter-gatherer culture dating from between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.
The researchers identified patterns of pink heat damage around the edges of some of the stones, providing evidence that they had been placed in close proximity to a fire.
Following their discovery, the researchers have experimented with replicating the stones themselves and used 3D models and virtual reality software to recreate the plaquettes as prehistoric artists would have seen them: under fireside light conditions and with the fresh white lines engravers would have made as they first cut into the rock thousands of years ago.
Lead author of the study, Dr Andy Needham from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and Co-Director of the York Experimental Archaeology Research Centre said: “It has previously been assumed that the heat damage visible on some plaquettes was likely to have been caused by accident, but experiments with replica plaquettes showed the damage was more consistent with being purposefully positioned close to a fire.
“In the modern day, we might think of art as being created on a blank canvas in daylight or with a fixed light source; but we now know that people 15,000 years ago were creating art around a fire at night, with flickering shapes and shadows.”
Working under these conditions would have had a dramatic effect on the way prehistoric people experienced the creation of art, the researchers say. It may have activated an evolutionary capacity designed to protect us from predators called “Pareidolia”, where perception imposes a meaningful interpretation such as the form of an animal, a face or a pattern where there is none.
Dr Needham added: “Creating art by firelight would have been a very visceral experience, activating different parts of the human brain. We know that flickering shadows and light enhance our evolutionary capacity to see forms and faces in inanimate objects and this might help explain why it's common to see plaquette designs that have used or integrated natural features in the rock to draw animals or artistic forms.”
The Magdalenian era saw a flourishing of early art, from cave art and the decoration of tools and weapons to the engraving of stones and bones.
Co-author of the study, PhD student Izzy Wisher from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham, said: “During the Magdalenian period conditions were very cold and the landscape was more exposed. While people were well-adapted to the cold, wearing warm clothing made from animal hides and fur, fire was still really important for keeping warm. Our findings reinforce the theory that the warm glow of the fire would have made it the hub of the community for social gatherings, telling stories and making art.
“At a time when huge amounts of time and effort would have gone into finding food, water and shelter, it’s fascinating to think that people still found the time and capacity to create art. It shows how these activities have formed part of what makes us human for thousands of years and demonstrates the cognitive complexity of prehistoric people.”
Art by firelight? Using experimental and digital techniques to explore Magdalenian engraved plaquette use at Montastruc (France) is published in the journal PLOS ONE and will be available here.
Residing in the hills of southern Thailand, the Maniq comprise one of the last hunter-gatherer communities in the world. Although the Maniq are geographically isolated, they share many cultural features with the Semang peoples, most of whom live over the border in Malaysia. Due to the complex relationships among the various communities in mainland Southeast Asia, anthropologists have long debated the demographic history of the area, with one, two, three, or four waves of human migration having been proposed for the region. A recent study inGenome Biology and Evolutionby Tobias Göllner, Maximilian Larena, and colleagues titled “Unveiling the genetic history of the Maniq, a primary hunter-gatherer society” provides new insight into the Maniq and their relationships with other indigenous groups in mainland Southeast Asia.
The international team of researchers from the University of Vienna in Austria, Uppsala University in Sweden, and Khon Kaen University in Thailand studied 2.3 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 11 Maniq individuals who agreed to participate in the study. While a relatively small sample, this represents over 3% of the current Maniq population of ~250 individuals. The team then compared the data from the Maniq with both present-day populations and ancient DNA samples collected in the region.
“One of our main conclusions is that the Maniq are a very secluded community and have been separated from the other Semang for quite some time,” says Göllner, first author of the study. As suggested by their cultural ties, the Maniq appeared to be most closely related to the Semang groups in Malaysia, indicating a recent shared history. Comparisons with other modern groups showed that the Maniq and Malay Semang populations shared alleles with indigenous Papuans and Andamanese, indicating “deep historical relationships among these populations,” according to the study’s authors.
The study also revealed that the Maniq exhibited similarities to ancient DNA samples associated with the Hòabìnhian, a cultural complex of ancient hunter-gatherers thought to be the ancestors of present-day hunter-gatherers in mainland Southeast Asia. In the past, Hòabìnhian-related populations were more widespread, with descendants found in Laos, southern China, and even as far as Japan. According to the study’s authors, however, “due to the recent expansion of East Asian-related groups, the Hòabìnhian-related cultural communities were either displaced, replaced, or absorbed into the larger population of farmer migrants.” The study reveals that this was not the case with the Maniq, who remained largely isolated and retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, “making them one of the few groups in mainland Asia carrying high levels of Hòabìnhian-related ancestry.”
The study did find evidence for some East Asian ancestry among the Maniq. “The most plausible model for the ancestral source of the Maniq is a combination of both Andamanese and East Asian-related ancestries,” posit the authors, with relative contributions of roughly 65% and 35%, respectively. The researchers estimated that this East Asian ancestry was introduced into the Maniq population approximately 700 years ago, likely via their Malay Semang neighbors.
The most striking finding of the study was the high degree of genetic differentiation exhibited by the Maniq, which was higher than what has been observed for the Mangyan Buhid of the Philippines and comparable to that of the Surui of Brazil, suggesting that the Maniq are more genetically differentiated than virtually any other known human population worldwide. This is likely due to a combination of genetic drift, a long history of geographic and cultural isolation, their historically small population size, and their cultural practice of marrying largely within their own society.
To validate these findings, Göllner hopes to conduct additional studies with larger sample sizes or full genome sequencing data. He notes that the current study and any future work “is only possible thanks to the participation of the Maniq and their long-standing relationship with our cultural anthropologist, Helmut Lukas.” Such studies are made more difficult however by the fact that the Maniq currently face several challenges, including intrusion from outsiders, ethnic discrimination, and most notably, the deforestation of the rainforest, limiting their ability to hunt, gather, and follow a traditional lifestyle. Says Göllner, “While solutions will have to be led by the Maniq and other citizens of Thailand, we hope that highlighting the importance of the Maniq will inspire change and help to protect their way of life.”
