#early bronze age

[thelonelybarrow]

sundown at solstice (2223BCE)

merry midwinter folks!!

[misscromwellsmonocle]

"Stargazer", a statuette of a woman (c. 3300–1200 BCE) from Western Anatolia

(more info)

[contremineur]

Neolithic or Early Bronze Age thin-butted axe from Denmark (flint, c. 2400-1000 BC)

from here

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

My pottery (part of it, from one box). i'm faster now and can do 70 fragments in 4 hours - thats still not very fast

very beautiful handwriting. nobody writes so neatly today :(

my pottery was found by the father of polish archaeology Erazm Majewski in the last decade of 19th century (or rather by peasant children who were given money to look each year gor artefacts uncovered by wind on sand dunes - he wanted to make a map of all sites in that area). surprisingly it survived both world wars - it's almost a miracle, bc the majority of artefacts in collection of archaeological museum was destroyed during the uprising.

inside the boxes there are small pieces of paper with notes written in ink by Erazm Majewski himself, i suppose. it's really cool. field notes written on fragments of packs of really old cigarettes

4100 years in the ground, 130 years in museum storeroom, and now it's in my hand :)

[phoenix-joy]

Author: Sonja Anderson Publication: Smithsonian Magazine Timestamp: April 30, 2024 Word Count: 515 Estimated Reading Time: 1.5 to 2.5 minutes

[Note: I left the physical description out, so click through to the article if you want to read that information]

Extracts (Word Count: 289, Estimated Reading Time: 1 to 2 minutes)

A structure [with a unique shape has been discovered] in France …

[The] French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) unearthed the monument while excavating a prehistoric site in… Marliens. …

“This type of monument seems unprecedented,” notes INRAP… “As of now, it has been impossible to make a comparison.”

Researchers [used] a “plethora of artifacts” found at the site [to estimate its date]. These include a bundle of seven stone arrowheads, a couple of protective armbands worn by archers, a flint lighter and a copper-alloy dagger.

[T]hese items may date back to the time of the Bell Beaker culture, which originated in the Iberian Peninsula and spread across Europe some 4,500 years ago. …

[E]vidence of human occupation from later periods, including several wells thought to date to the Early Bronze Age, [has also been discovered at the site]. …

[T]he Middle-Late Bronze Age … is [also] represented on site by a necropolis consisting of five circular enclosures. None of the [bones of those buried at the site have survived except those that had been cremated]. But five [copper alloy] pins … and a[n amber] necklace … found nearby suggest … date[s] … between 1500 and 1300 B.C.E.

[A] second necropolis [at the site contains] six urns holding cremated remains, [and] a cache of bracelets and rings. Researchers believe this burial ground dates to the First Iron Age …

…

[S]cholars are … studying the remains to learn … about the funerary practices of the[ir] society ….

The … monument remains this site’s oldest and most unique feature. Researchers have … made no determinations about the structure’s purpose or exact date of creation.

““…radiocarbon analyses are underway to clarify the chronology of this monument.” [the statement says]

[thesilicontribesman]

North Ferriby Bronze Age Boat Archaeological Site, North Ferriby, River Humber, Yorkshire

It was from this site that the oldest known built boat in the UK to date was launched 4000 years ago.

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 52: Medievalish and Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions a the previous iteration. This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.

We already did the burnings which lost their bracket, but the culture lasted a long time across a big area, and people keep suggesting it.

[clepysdra]

Knossian Board Game

This is modeled after an ancient bronze age artefact unearthed at Knossos, believed by archeologists to be an early board game.

The game is a chess clone and playing it will increase the logic skill.

Make sure when you are placing the object in build mode, you first attach chairs to the board game itself, and then place a table of your choosing underneath the game (using the commands testingcheats true and then bb.moveobjects on). If you do not follow these steps, the sims will not be able to sit and play!

BOARD GAME DOWNLOAD - Dropbox (no ads)

[irish-dress-history]

Irish dress history sources online:

A list of sources for Irish dress history research that free to access on the internet:

Primary and period sources:

Text Sources:

Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT): a database of historical texts from or about Ireland. Most have both their original text and, where applicable, an English translation. Authors include: Francisco de Cuellar, Luke Gernon, John Dymmok, Thomas Gainsford, Fynes Moryson, Edmund Spenser, Laurent Vital, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn

Images:

The Edwin Rae Collection: A collection of photographs of Irish carvings dating 1300-1600 taken by art historian Edwin Rae in the mid-20th c. Includes tomb effigies and other figural art.

National Library of Ireland: Has a nice collection of 18th-20th c. Irish art and photographs. Search their catalog or browse their flickr.

Irish Script on Screen: A collection of scans of medieval Irish manuscripts, including The Book of Ballymote.

The Book of Kells: Scans of the whole thing.

The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne by John Derricke published 1581. A piece of anti-Irish propaganda that should be used with caution. Illustrations. Complete text.

Secondary sources:

Irish History from Contemporary Sources (1509-1610) by Constantia Maxwell published 1923. Contains a nice collection of primary source quotes, but it sometimes modernizes the 16th c. English in ways that are detrimental to the accuracy, like changing 'cote' to 'coat'. The original text for many of them can be found on CELT, archive.org, or google books.

An Historical Essay on the Dress of the Ancient and Modern Irish By Joseph Cooper Walker published 1788. Makes admirable use of primary sources, but because of Walker's assumption that Irish dress didn't change for the entirety of the Middle Ages, it is significantly flawed in a lot of its conclusions. Mostly only useful now for historiography. I discussed the images in this book here.

Chapter 18: Dress and Personal Adornment from A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland by P. W. Joyce published 1906. Suffers from similar problems to An Historical Essay on the Dress of the Ancient and Modern Irish.

Consumption and Material Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland Susan Flavin's 2011 doctoral thesis. A valuable source on the kinds of materials that were available in 16th c Ireland.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy Volumes 1 and 2 by William Wilde, published 1863. Obviously outdated, and some of Wilde's conclusions are wrong, because archaeologists didn't know how to date things in the 19th century, but his descriptions of the individual artifacts are worthwhile. Frustratingly, this is still the best catalog available to the public for the National Museum of Ireland Archaeology. Idk why the NMI doesn't have an online catalog, a lot museums do nowadays.

Volume I: Articles of stone, earthen, vegetable and animal materials; and of copper and bronze

Volume 2: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities of Gold in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy

A Horsehair Woven Band from County Antrim, Ireland: Clues to the Past from a Later Bronze Age Masterwork by Elizabeth Wincott Heckett 1998

Jewellery, art and symbolism in Medieval Irish society by Mary Deevy in Art and Symbolism in Medieval Europe- Papers of the 'Medieval Europe Brugge 1997' Conference (page 77 of PDF)

Looking the part: dress and civic status and ethnicity in early-modern Ireland by Brid McGrath 2018

Irish Mantles, English Nationalism: Apparel and National Identity in Early Modern English and Irish Texts by John R Ziegler 2013

Dress and ornament in early medieval Ireland - exploring the evidence by Maureen Doyle 2014

Dress and accessories in the early Irish tale, ‘The Wooing of Becfhola’ by Niamh Whitfield 2006

A tenth century cloth from Bogstown Co. Meath by Elizabeth Wincott Heckett 2004

Tertiary Sources:

Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia edited by Sean Duffy published 2005

Re-Examining the Evidence: A Study of Medieval Irish Women's Dress from 750 to 900 CE by Alexandra McConnell

[queen-mabs-revenge]

i am obsessed with how fixated spideyblr is with the comics coffee bean gang and iterations of it — like we're objectively correct, but it's wild how other corners of the spider-man fandom see that part of the canon as ancient, obscure, and cringe?

[contremineur]

Neolithic or Early Bronze Age thin-butted axe from Lolland, Denmark (flint, c. 2400-1000 BC)

from here

[elancholia]

(via) This paper (preprint) essentially argues that the Indo-European expansion into Europe was accompanied by zoonotic plagues which arose in the Steppe, to which the IEs were adjusted (gently, via "long-term continuous exposure") and the Early European Farmers (the neolithic inhabitants of Europe) were not. They analogize this to the plagues which afflicted the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, correlating it with "increased genetic turnover" (population replacement) in Europe.

(So, two instances of Indo-Europeans conquering a continent in the wake of apocalyptic plagues. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.)

Their method is to check for microbial DNA in samples of human remains. What they demonstrate, afaict, is:

a) Zoonotic diseases first appeared around the time of the IE migrations, being first detected in samples from 6,500 BP and peaking around 5,000 BP.

b) IEs are consistently more likely to be infected with zoonotic diseases than non-IEs. (This greater incidence of infection seems to persist throughout the period.) This "suggests that the cultural practices and living conditions of the former might have been more conducive to the emergence of novel zoonotic pathogens." (14)

So they don't directly demonstrate that EEFs were ultimately hit harder by these illnesses, they just say that it would make sense for IEs to have adapted to them. As far as I can tell, this is fair; they cite a paper which claims that increased disease pressure may have resulted in adaptations to multiple sclerosis in the Steppe and another which suggests a similar trend among Amerindians after the Columbian Exchange.

Things I don't know:

In a population being ravaged by epidemics, would you would expect the infection rate to remain lower than that of a (more) immune population, or would you expect the infection rates to equalize? Would you expect to see spikes in one population and a more consistent line in the other, or some other indicator of differential impact? I suppose you'd just need comparative evidence, presumably from the Americas.

As lifestyles equalized (until you're comparing an 80% IE and a 40% IE guy who live in adjacent villages in Italy 500 BC), why would the IE effect persist? Wouldn't you expect the correlation to fall over time?

Do pastoralists we can directly observe have higher rates of zoonotic disease than animal-having agriculturalists or animal-eating hunter-gatherers? That seems to have pretty direct bearing on their lifestyle hypothesis.

Is there a similar effect in other places where IEs migrated during the Bronze Age (say, India or Iran), or other places within Eurasia where agriculturalists came into contact with Steppe peoples? They have a couple of data points in Iran and Anatolia and a bunch in SE Asia (for some reason), but everything else is in Europe and central Asia/Siberia.

There's also an odd effect where the two major genetic contributors to the IE population have different effects, Caucasus hunter-gatherer descent being associated with all the zoonotic diseases and Eastern HG being associated mostly with black plague, which is sort of odd, if these are one population with similarly disease-fostering lifestyles.

[sisaloofafump]

The 1962 Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane Annual 1 had a competition for Lois's new hairstyle (which they waiting another 5 years before integrating). This came after decades of her wearing her hair the same way in basically every issue since her conception (occasionally changed for fancy in-story events, and gradually shortening through the golden/silver age transition). After years of constant letters to editor complaining about her "old fashioned" and "stagnant" look, they put it to a vote...

The one they went with back then (after 5 more years of her classic look):

This was the first page of her new look in Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane #75 (July 1967), and some other examples from Kurt Schaffenburger (resident Lois artist):

And here are some other artist's interpretations of her base style in the years that followed!

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

fascinating

[alpaca-clouds]

Goat, Wolf, Raven - How we might've gotten gods

Okay, let me quickly talk about another very interesting mythology thing. I brought this up when talking about Pan, but it is very much worth an entry on its own.

People in the Stray Gods fandom have wondered, why Pan has so many animal features. And the answer is: Because he is a super early god predating most of the Greek pantheon. But of course for that to make sense, you also need to understand something else: The fact that most gods have started out as animals. Probably, at least. It is what we are guessing, but there is in fact a ton of evidence for it.

If you have ever ventured in any sorts of indigenous mythology - be it American, be it African, or be it South Asian - you will find that a lot of the characters are actually animals. There might be some humanoid deities around, but some deities or at least characters comparative to deities are animals.

We also know that this holds true for the cultures that first started building stuff. Because at those archeological sites we can find tons of animal idols, with good evidence, that some of those were worshipped.

In fact it is on those archeological sites that we also can at times see some of the animals taking on more and more humanoid features, often ending up as beings that are part animal, part human.

The probably widest known example of this is the Egyptian mythology with all the animal-headed gods. Which fits very well with this idea, given that indeed the creation of the Egyptian mythology falls into the timeframe during which we assume that this change took place in some places (between 5000 and 3000 BC).

As that autistic kid with a massive obsession on Egyptian mythology I can tell you: It was so weird to me back then, because I obviously lacked the comparative understanding, as my only reference points were Christian mythology and some smitherings of Greek and Roman stuff.

It was only much later that I started to understand this.

The thing is, that the probable reason why we got mythology and religion in the first place is, that our human brains just love pattern matching and they love trying to understand intent. Because we are just so well evolved for that. So, we watched nature and we saw patterns and intent.

A very probably understanding is, that we then also saw behavior in certain animals linked to stuff like weather events and the like and were like: "Yo, do you think that animal has something to do with that draught happening?" And hence turning those animals into characters and on the long term deities.

Why those animal deities got more human? Well, that is hotly debated. The explanation I find most likely is... Well, we see that shift into more humanoid deities around the time that more and more humans settled down, meaning that the societies people lived in also grew. While before those large settlements humans lived in groups ranging in size between a few dozen people to maybe three hundred, suddenly there were settlements with thousands of people creating the need for more complex tools of organizing human cohabitation. And... I think the shift from animal gods that were more forces of nature to more humanoid godly characters happened partly as a form of political tool.

But that is just me speculating. But it would explain the rise of more humanoid gods being linked to larger settlements. It would also explain why a lot of cultures that did not create large settlements had fewer humanoid gods. Don't get me wrong, they often had some humanoid deities... but also a ton of just animals doing their thing.

Funnily enough... We actually can find some of that stuff still in the Abrahamitic texts. Contrary to popular believe the snake in the garden of eden is never stated to be Satan or... anyone really. It's just a snake. So that snake actually might just be a leftover trickster character. Just as we have a couple of references in the Abrahamitic texts towards some people actually worshipping animal deities.

So, why is Pan part-goat? Well, because he is one of those transitional characters and people were like: "He is fine, we will just continue to worship this part-goat character. :D"

Fun fact: There are a ton of hints that at least one aspect of (so one deity merged into) Apollo was a wolf-trickster :D

[thesilicontribesman]

Iron Age Seeds from Southern Britain

These 2300 year old Iron Age seeds were only preserved because they were partly burnt or charred. The bacteria that cause decay could not feed upon the burnt seeds. They tell us what crops were grown in Britain during the later Iron Age. They include cultivated wheat, six rowed barley, oats and broad beans.

Fifield Down, Wiltshire; Meare, Somerset

Manchester Museum, Manchester University