So, three things: i) There is no way that I am not posting this ad, especially the week I read Edith Outland on "the Effingham libels." Man, did Horace Greeley know how to stick in the knife! ii) I'm off on a bonus week of vacation to see my Mom, so I'm looking for a blog post that requires more wandering-around-the-Intenet-at-the-kitchen-table than blasting away at the keyboard whilst surrounded by ancient tomes. iii) Lameen has confirmed that "there was no North African Bronze Age" is something people say.
I have academic confirmation of the commonplace that makes it a bit less bizarre, but there is a deeper problem in that there seems to be a lack of communication between research silos. Something isn' t right in the prehistory of the Maghreb.
This is a map correlating Bell Beaker Horizon artefact finds in the northwestern Maghreb with presumptively African ivories in Iberia after Schumacher (2014).
The research, and basic hypothesis is much older than Schumacher. The key discussed was discovered in 1971 and has been classified as a "Cypriot knotted head pin" and assigned a "Chalcolithic" dating, but also identified as an "Iron Age/Phoenician" intrusion into a "Neolithic" deposit of Bell Beaker pots.
Confusingly, despite the name, the pins eventually came to be associated with the Central European Beaker Horizon, and although the pin is copper (hence "Chalcolithic") the Beaker Horizon closes c. 2000BC, comfortably Early Bronze Age. Schumacher's map associates the pin with Beaker imports including bronze halberds, and here a broader review of the literature ends with an indigenous Maghrebi Beaker complex trading ivory for prestige European goods. With genomic evidence confirming a "Beaker" introgression, we have strong support for the Bell Beaker Neolithic/Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age Horizon.
While still in the realm of serious and grounded studies (shade is hereby thrown at what comes next), i want to pull out an off-hand observation made in connection with Iberia but extendable to the Maghreb, which is that much of our knowledge of Bronze Age metallurgy in Europe comes from wetland deposits. Absent these for obvious reasons, and perhaps lacking Late Bronze Age Final "Founder's deposits" for reasons to be discussed below, and we have a circumstantial explanation for small collections of North African bronzes.
II:
This synthesis of radiocarbon dates from the "Neolithic-Iron Age" period, from Lucari, Bokbot and Broodbank is intended to illustrate firstly the thesis that the period is obscure for lack of field work and that more is needed, and who can argue with that? However, there's at least implicitly a secondary thesis that farming failed to take hold between Morocco and Egypt, and that there was genuinely no Maghrebi Bronze Age
The implied interpretation is that Bokbot's incipient complex societies, recovered from Moroccan sites, but are reduced to colonial outposts of Neolithic Iberian expansion, even as Punic colonists are extruded in favour of indigenous developments at the other end of the period at a Tunisian site., Morocco is sui generis. "It remains entirely plausible that farming only reached Cyrenaica after the end if our period with Aegean colonists" and that Tunisian farming immediately predates the Carthaginian period, brought by a "southwards expansion" from Sicily. It's interesting that these "southwards expansions" leave no linguistic evidence!
Given the reputations of the authors, I am a bit disappointed, although a review of evidence is only as good as the evidence. It would be odd if the so-called "Atlantic Bronze Age," the Late Bronze Age Final(?), which was marked by extensive contact along the Atlantic seaways, did not extend into Atlantic Morocco, but Colin Burgess has been working an angle in which a precocious Iron Age overtakes the LBA Final for many years. For an example of this argument based on a typology of an LBA swordtype, see here. (Co-authored by Brendan O'Connor, I add for the sake of the search hits.)
So the Mycenaean/Levantine/Phoenician/Punic Iron Age ate the Maghrebi LBA just before the hoarding that makes the Atlantic Bronze Age so visible would have broken out. It is apparently a commonplace of Ancient history, although news to me, that Cadiz (Gadr) was paying https://planettuna.com/en/the-phoenicians-and-the-first-can-of-tuna/ eastern Mediterranean imports with "transport amphorae" packed with salted tuna, a Straits fishery. But the focus on Cadix may be overstated, and there may have been other Phoenician tuna fisheries inside the mouth of the Western Mediterranean. So that's another littoral industry to replace the now-discounted "search for metals."
I'm not sure who deserves the artistic credit, but the image is from Planet Tuna, which might be an industry-backed site, and this advertising work-for-hire?
So per my standing research practice of finding weird papers uploaded to Academia.edu and similar sites that the authors are proud if and want to get tenure from because fuck the-academic publishing/IT-as-gatekeeping nexus, anyway, here's a link to a paper on early pottery wheels in Iberia (again) by A.M. Sáez Romero and R. Belizón Aragón which gives a grounding in the literature while reinforcing the out-if-the-Levant model for the precocious Iron Age of Iberia and western Maghreb. We still unfortunately have the problem of that it is an express train model --plausible enough as long as the "quest for metals" is allowed, otherwise inexplicable.
It remains to be added that the confident linkage of developments on both sides of the Straitsis, part of the "Straits Circle" paradigm I made fun of last time as sounding like a Michigan street address. While as vulnerable to abuse as any of the other northern invasion hypotheses presented above, it does at least make the idea of a precocious Western Iron Age extending eastward to Carthage --or even Egypt-- coherent. A search for bullion, a roundup of horses, all paid for by the ambitions of the High Priests of Thebes? Wild as the notion is, it at least hands agency to the guy with demonstrably the most cash.
So here we are. No North African Bronze Age? Sustainable (outside Atlantic Morocco) but awfully suss. And that's as much as I want to hunt and peck on my Surface! Just kidding, love you Microsoft, let's talk endorsement deals!
No comments:
Post a Comment