Bronze Age Britons Threw Massive Ragers With Food and Friends From Far Away
upstart writes:
Researchers investigated giant prehistoric trash piles to reveal where animal remains came from:
You can learn a lot about people by studying their trash, including populations that lived thousands of years ago.
In what the team calls the "largest study of its kind," researchers applied this principle to Britain's iconic middens, or giant prehistoric trash (excuse me, rubbish) piles. Their analysis revealed that at the end of the Bronze Age (2,300 to 800 BCE), people-and their animals-traveled from far to feast together.
"At a time of climatic and economic instability, people in southern Britain turned to feasting-there was perhaps a feasting age between the Bronze and Iron Age," Richard Madgwick, an archaeologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study published yesterday in the journal iScience, said in a university statement. "These events are powerful for building and consolidating relationships both within and between communities, today and in the past."
Madgwick and his colleagues investigated material from six middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley via isotope analysis, a technique archaeologists use to link animal remains to the unique chemical make-up of a particular geographic area. The technique reveals where the animals were raised, allowing the researchers to see how far people traveled to join these feasts.
"The scale of these accumulations of debris and their wide catchment is astonishing and points to communal consumption and social mobilisation on a scale that is arguably unparalleled in British prehistory," Madgwick added.
[...] "Our findings show each midden had a distinct make up of animal remains, with some full of locally raised sheep and others with pigs or cattle from far and wide," said Carmen Esposito, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at the University of Bologna. "We believe this demonstrates that each midden was a lynchpin in the landscape, key to sustaining specific regional economies, expressing identities and sustaining relations between communities during this turbulent period, when the value of bronze dropped and people turned to farming instead."
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