The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Ahousat/Huelva

 Let's see how far we can push this. 

Huelva from orbit, and a satellite map of Ahousaht from Google. The conjoint estuaries of the Odiel and Tinto have been progressively silting in, while in the post-glacial period Ahousat is located at the conjunction of two drowned valleys, or fjords. I do not see archaeologists going as far out on a limb as to tell us the situation of ancient Onoba ("Fortress of Baal"), but depending on the extent of the silting it might have been an estuarine island. Ahousat isn't technically an estuarine island, but there is significant outflow from the two fjords, both of which have productive watersheds in spite of their small size, due to the heavy precipitation of the region. 

We do not normally think of any place on the northwest coast as flat and fertile, but Ahousaht (technically Marktosis Indian Reservation 15) is almost as close to an exception as it gets:

 
The Ahousaht band is actually a confederation of eight tribal entities and has 25 smaller reserves attached, all seasonal fishing and resource extraction sites.

Linguistically and culturally, Ninth Century Huelva is not accessible to us. It is deemed to have been a 'Phoenician" settlement, which is a Greek exonym, formerly believed to reliably denote inhabitants of coastal Lebanon. This now seems a bit naive; the best we can say is that a western Semitic language was emergently hegemonic by the time we can see it in writing. Huelva is constructed as a colonial settlement because the Ancients called it a colony, and Nineteenth Century classicists tended to be a bit heedless of historicist error, and so elided what distinctions might exist between Nineteenth Century and Iron Age "colonies." In any case this allows us to talk about the language of the "natives" amongst whom the Huelvan colonists were planted, and on the basis of the earliest written evidence this is an unclassified language designated "Tartessian" because of the not uncontroversial identification of southwestern Spain with an exotic trading partner known in various Middle Eastern texts as "Tartessos." Just as there are alternative claimed locations for "Tartessos," there are a variety of less-accepted claims for the affiliation of the Tartessian language, most recently an effort to affiliate it with Celtic, in what is surely not an attempt to de-affiliate the Atlantic Celts from icky East Europeans. Just for fun I googled "Tartessian afro asiatic," and I'll take back some of my criticisms of Google's new AI, which at least smelled what I dealt, unlike the rest of the Interwebs:  "No, the Tartessian language is not Afroasiatic." I'd be interested in an exploration of how we know that!

Speaking of the "ocean garden" outpost reservations assigned to the Ahousaht Band, Hodos very briefly summarises the state of the archaeology of Phoenician coastal Andalusia by saying that there are substantive remains of Phoenician settlement on average every four kilometers along the coast at sites with estuaries, promontories, or islands with access to significan littoral resources. Four thousand meters is not a long distance, to put it mildly, and it is very hard to believe that these are permanent settlements. Many years ago, Maria Eugenia Aubet launched an effort to reassess the economic basis of these settlements with attention to advances in archaeobotanical studies and other potential means of entering into the everyday life of these micro-colonies. I do not have access to Auber's work from home, but the Bryn Mawr review by Roger Wright, then of the University of Liverpool is the kind of useful and comprehensive summary that I have come to expect:  

"The recently discovered colonies on the coast of Eastern Andalucía are described as “one of the biggest surprises of Phoenician archaeology in recent times”, a surprise largely created by the superb work of Professor Aubet herself. This suggests that there may be many more surprises to come, and the present maps of Phoenician settlements may reflect the interests of those who have looked for them rather than the whole seventh-century B.C. pattern. One surprise is that there seem to have been quite a large number of small settlements fairly close to each other, which does not seem to be the picture elsewhere. Nothing has been found further West between Cádiz and Gibraltar, for example. The Andalusian settlements all have anchorages — or rather, they all did at the time, since some are now inland — and are even described as fitting “into a self-governing and self-sufficient economic structure”. But the inhabitants were not all Phoenicians, and maybe the Phoenicians were no more than a powerful minority: some prehistoric sites in the area are exclusively indigenous, without Phoenician influence, even from this same period; on the other hand, a reader might legitimately wonder if some elements ascribed in later times to the Carthaginians could have continued from the pre-Carthaginian settlements of the years from 750 B.C., despite the apparent sixth-century break in the record."

 

In short these sound like out-stations probably raked up the murex snails and crushed them rather than renewably "milking" them, and the process came to its logical end after a century-long gold rush with the establishment of some kind of admiralty law on the beaches to ensure a permanent supply. One wonders if there was a similar transition in the eastern Mediterranean explaining the seventh century hiatus there. Byssus, or sea silk, might have experienced a similar trajectory of exploitation. 

Huelva has not been in the news for these secondary settlements/outposts/completely independent separate colonies. Their existence has been known for more than a generation without making much impression on the literature. Rather, it is the 1998 rescue excavations ahead of construction at a half-acre site on the Plaza de las Monjas which have riveted attention since their publication in 2006.

 Punicists believe (or so Aubert's account as summarised by Wright has it) that the city of Tyre proper was founded from Sidon in the late Ninth Century as a new port, based on ceramic styles at the lowest excavated levels of human inhabitation.  (This is clearly not the unanimous consensus of the literature, since there is no mention of such a late foundation date in Wikipedia apart from an attribution to the Classical historian, Justin, but see here, p.2, and following.)Ceramics of the same style (more exhaustively, 8000 fragments, of which 4703 are locally handmade, 3,233 Phoenician, 33 Greek, 8 Cypriot, 30 Sardinian, 2 Villanovan) have been found in the soil removed in the rescue excavations, giving a datable context. 

Beyond that, however, is the garbage. Furnace bricks; crucibles; copper, iron, and silver slag; lead drips from silver cupellation; a small amount of tin; weights; iron sheets, nailed with iron nails to planking for a boat; carpentry, weaving, and ceramics-polishing tools; a partial elephant tusk weighing 3.3kg; bone and horn worked pieces, fragments, and tools; cosmetic appliques; writing tools for a wax tablet; 2.23kg of ivory fragments and some finished pieces; wine grapes, figs, and esparto grass; pig, cattle, ovicaprine, horse, dog, and poultry bones; a "remarkably small" quantity of deer, wild boar, and rabbit bones; a large quantity of fish bones including meagre, gilthead, sea bream, ray, sardine, cuttlefish, crustaceans, shellfish, murex shells; amphora pieces encrusted with fish scales.

It is more than interesting to see Tyre founded as a maritime working station at the same time as Huelva at the other end of the Mediterranean. Our principal evidence for understanding the "westward expansion" of the Phoenicians and Greeks so abundantly attested to by Classical writers has been surviving architecture and ceramics, and the field has long wandered the echoing halls of reception studies, and that is fine. More of this work was wanted, we now recognise, before the Rise of the West was announced. Debitage is an entirely different matter. There are all kinds of questions we can ask ourselves about the operational chain that produced these byproducts without getting into reception studies. People can have very different concepts of what a finished ivory sculpture meant to who at a given place and time, but there are all sorts of questions we can put to an ivory fragment before we are asked to deal with culture, or Culture. 

 

This beautiful photo is by User: RomanDecket. Portfolio URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RomanDeckert

As we have seen, there is dispositive evidence in the built environment for Huelva, and, for that matter, Tyre's Phoenician identity. To this point the argument has gone beyond this to talk about the presence, or lack thereof, of a "planned urban" environment. The scare quotes signal an ongoing argument about whether or not the Greeks were different (and better, so much better) from the Phoenicians in that they exported their political order and built "cities," while the Phoenicians just built trading colonies. The Greeks are then and incidentally praised as honest sons of toil winning their living from the soil, whilst wily Semitic traders extracted the resources of the lands they visited to satisfy the rapacious demands of their Neo-Assyrian oppressors, without any intention of settling, except for the Carthaginians, who are still bad because they practiced child sacrifice. As, again, Semites are wont to do.   

 

From Germany six centuries later. Whatever. 

Mainstream Mediterranean archaeology seems to be stumbling towards  a"heterarchic" model of the origins of the city, in which different and even competing explanations for the existence of the city can be present and instantiated in rival or simply incommensurable cult. This is the kind of thing that, in the form of Nineteenth Century Christianity's "inside baseball" arguments, led Karl Marx to dismiss it all in favour of a strictly materialistic explanation. Debitage seems like a good place to start with that. Never mind new pottery forms; Huelvan workers, equipped with big, sharp knives and cleavers, would have cut the time needed to butcher and skin a steer down by a fraction and freed up labour for other uses. It is hard to imagine a more basic human task than butchering a carcass, and here we have the first significant advance since the late Neolithic, and arguably a bigger one than microliths and polished stone blades. Given the presence of a group of skilled workers fromm outside who know how to use and maintain iron tools, why not?

 In 1778, John Meares brought 70 Chinese carpenters to Ahousat. He specifically intended for them to build vessels for local trading and to build a fortress stockade and buildings, and their best documented product was the schooner Northwest America,  which, the sources agree, made its intended voyage to China, and according to most, was eventually beached at Acapulco. There is some thought that it made a trip to Hawaii along the way, which would truly make the Northwest America a typical British Columbian! 

Interest in these first British Columbian Chinese has understandably reached a high pitch in modern times, and even if there isn't much more evidence to be found, people are looking for it very  hard. although there was much searching for the lost Chinese race of Nootka Sound in the 1860s, and now again today since this is obviously very interesting for Canadian born Chinese. In a 2017 interview, Larry Wong, then Vice-President of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of Vancouver, described a visit to the BC archives in which he found a diary of a Hudson's Bay Company employee at Fort Rupert (modern Port Hardy, not to be confused with Prince Rupert). This individual went to Ahousat in 1852 specifically looking for the lost Chinese race of the West. By this time the days of the grandparents had been obscured by wars and epidemics, but the story he received was one of intermarriage and assimilation, which shows up again in the pages of The Nanaimo Times in 1860, by this time fairly obviously fantastic tales of days of yore.   

By this time, of course, the Chinese presence in British Columbia was hardly ancient history --although we only began reconstructing it a generation later, so it is ancient history. We can be fairly sure that one of the things that the Chinese did in their first years on the "modern," or post fur trade coast, was to work in canneries, and that they were associated there, as elsewhere, with their mastery of the knife. It's a cliche for a reason!

My grandfather was very clear on this: If someone comes at you with a knife, get a shield or go home.

  As I say, the earliest continuing history of the Chinese community in British Columbia is myth history, with the Chinese arriving to participate in the founding epic of building the transcontinental railroad, which is something that they did do, and moving on from there to become small business owners of laundries and restaurants, which is again something that they did do, but which may be overemphasised for reasons explored in gender studies. Other things are not so much attended to. I wonder why my father not only embraced Chinese-style cooking as part of his repertoire, but kept a separate set of "Chinese-" style kitchenware and utensils for when he was cooking Chinese-style, while my maternal grandfather, in spite of being raised in the home of a sometime China missionary. which was filled with mementos of his parents' years in China, showed no interest in "Chinese" cooking. 

The process by which Chinese, other Asian, native Northwest, and European cultures encountered each other in the first century and a half of British Columbia is worthy of some  reception studies, is what I'm saying. Archaeologists are working at a number of former cannery locations, and it is notable that one of the first search returns, a report on excavations at the Shepherd Point cannery in Alaska that operated from 1917--45, was specifically tasked to discover the racially segregated mess halls reported there, and could not find them, but did find unreported Japanese workers. In this case we find very recent history being rewritten to fit mid-century (one hopes) American mores. 

The Lady of Elche, probably c. 350BC, perhaps Tanit

Again, debitage points to work, and techne, not culture and reception. Is there cultural identity when a knife is "fit to the hand"? If so, does it come out as waste fragment, or only as finished piece? Does it appear in nails, as well as a "ritual spoon made of deerbone"? At what point do we deem the cultural reception resolved, so that we can determine the ethnic identity of the Huelvan? 

The conclusion, then, and not the beginning, might be the Classical writer's certainty that historic Huelva wa legendary Tartessos, the city of the Iberians, built generations before the Trojan War, which traded with the tyrant of Sicyon, and with Solomon of Israel and Hiram of Tyre, and even offered refuge to their distant friends of Miletus when Persian conquest loomed, all in the good old days of yore.