The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: More From the Shimmering Sky

 

Nine years ago, so in 2014, some vaguely professional media people up in Nebraska decided that these six young people had something going on, and arranged some venues leading to six (I think?) videos, most with at least slightly wonky sound. No-one watched them, and teenagers grow up quickly, so I assume that these kids quit music, joined a space mission, were exposed to cosmic radiation, gained superpowers, and now fight crime. Or something. 

Probably not that, actually. Anyway, point is, the Youtube algorithm proceeded to sit on these videos for eight years while all this was going on before suddenly pushing it into everyone's feeds, leading to 200,000 views and 2000 upvotes in the last year or so. This being a lot, but not, as the kids say, not a lot of a lot, it's possible that no-one involved in making these videos knows that they have been picking up views. It's algorithm archaeology! Also, it's me sharing a video that I enjoyed. (Speaking of which, I speed read through Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries this week. Its good!) 

Also some more, Sidestone Press, has launched a new initiative where you can read their books for free online. Like, for example, Lorenzo Zamboni, Manuel Fernandez-Goetz, and Carola Metzner-Nebelsick, Crossing the Alps: Early Urbanism between Northern Italy and Central Europe (900--400BC (Sidestone, 2020)! It's got the latest from the Heuneburg excavations, so I'm not going to argue about the financial viability of their business model, even if I'm pretty sure that "giving stuff away for free" does not work.  

The Goldberg and Ipf are two hillfort/Fuerstensitzen near Nordlingen, a significant way down the Danube by German standards from Heuneburg, but the sites are spectacular and my teacher, Chris Friedrichs, did his thesis research at Nordlingen, so there's that. 

Dirk Krause, Leif Hansen and Roberto Tarpini describe the Heuneburg as "one of the most important centres of power during the Early Iron Age north of the Alps." Located on the Danube between Ulm and Sigmaringen in Baden-Wuerttemberg only eighty miles east of the river's head of navigation and convenient to both portages and prehistoric trans-Alpine routes communicating with the Piedmont and Milanese, the site consists of a series of hilltops thrusting out into the  river valley where a substantial barrow field survived into the is still yielding impressive finds.  The Heuneberg has a history of intermittent occupation going back to the Middle Bronze Age, but from about 700BC was more substantially occupied and fortified, and in 600BC a spectacular mudbrick fortification  perimeter, ashlar footings,  plastered walls and a spectacular gate, with an 800m perimeter was built around an interior that was razed and rebuilt as a planned city at the same time. Seventy years later, the wall was razed in turn as part of a "fiery destruction event," after which it was rebuilt as a more locally-appropriate earth-and-timber defensive structure, a phase which lasted until about 400BC, at which time a general deurbanisation event is proposed for transalpine Europe, with built-up areas returning to meridional Europe only about 200BC. Archaeology has established a lower town extensive enough to support a population of 5000 people.

As significant as the Heuneburg  clearly is, I have talked about it before around here, and there is a limit to the amount of closure that archaeology can give us as we try to map our heads around the place that might have been Herodotus's "Pyrene," and which certainly have quite a story to tell, if only enough archaeologists put enough analytical power into re-examining old artefacts and interpreting new finds.

It happens that we do have new finds. In 2005, an child's burial associated with spectacular gold jewelry was found at the Bettelbuehl necropolis across the river, and in 2010 this led archaeologists to a waterlogged burial chamber which had formerly laid below a mound, levelled by ploughing.  The entire chamber was removed in situ in a block weighing 80t, and dismantled in laboratory conditions. The timbers of the burial chamber provide a precise date of 583BC. The grave had been robbed, but the body of a woman aged 30 to 40 was left, as was a belt of bronze plaques and amber pendants, solid bronze foot rings. A necklace of gold, tubular pearls and amber beads, and a single gold earring, two boar's tusk pendants, several amber and gold fibulae, and seven bracelets of Dorset black stone. A secondary burial in the chamber, of a young girl, yielded bronze arm rings and a bronze headdress, while skeletal remains of a pig, various horse fittings including a chamfret, not previously found in Hallstat contexts, some cloth and textile remains, glass objects, and an ammonite.

The jewelry found is reminiscent of both ritual images of women from Hallstat contexts and the "constrictive" body jewelry which Niall Sharples has tentatively interpreted as showing the constrained nature of society in the Wessex Bronze Age. Elements, notably the chamfret, are suggestive of trans-Alpine connections with the Golasecca Culture of northern Italy. In contrast to traditional interpretations which make Massilia and the Rhone valley the route by which Mediterranean culture penetrated southwestern Germany, the authors now suggest a direct transalpine route into northern Italy.

600BC is a bit late to speak of "bronze age civilisation," but this would not be the only place where bronze age paradigms survive and great chunks of polished bronze are worn as part of a solar cult.  

This new paradigm, entirely congenial to this blog, is extended in several other papers in this collection. The Ipf sites are linked with Venetia, archaeologically, but this is not enough. Following the old principle that when archaeologists are afraid to speculate boldly, they can always turn to a historical linguist, Ruediger Krause finds someone willing to claim that "Ipf" is the linguistic fossil of Illyrian-Venetic. and a  series of articles focussing mostly on rescue excavations in a park overlooking Como, at Spina just east of Comaacchio, in and around Bologna, in the Venetia, and, most systematically, Verruchio in the Romagna. A minor highland site on a tributary of the Tiber just 15km from the Adriatic and a hypothesised "landing-stage" at Rimini, Verruchio was abandoned from Roman times down to the Renaissance, making it much more recoverable than the other sites. That said, the excavators are more-or-less uniform in seeing these sites as evidence of a precocious urbanisation in northern Italy beginning c. 800BC and connected with southern Germany, the Czech lands, and France, during the 700--400 period.

The central themes here are:

--The precocity but also transience of urban development in central Europe;

--A reorientation of their perceived routes of diffusion of Mediterranean culture from Massilia to northern Italy, and from there via various outlets onto the Adriatic to Greece;

--The presence of goods produced locally in Mediterranean styles, indicating the emigration of Mediterranean craftspeople to the region;

--The prominence of female burials and grave furniture indicating Mediterranean connections, and by extension, cultural influence via "female exogamy." This last seems like a bold claim on the basis of jewelry, but we're going to have to trust the finger-tip's feel of the excavators if we're going to get anywhere with this. 

--One single, solitary piece of historical-linguistic evidence, take it for what it is worth. (This is it: the real route by which Indo-European spreads across Europe!!!!) 

--A repeated emphasis on equestrian culture, oddly under-emphasised given its ubiquity. Excavators active on sites in Venezia are willing to concede that the culture here was horse-mad, with elites heavily involved in horsebreeding, while excavations at the Heueneberg have turned up evidence of an equestrian or chariot racing circuit on one summit. Again, trans-alpine mercenary cavalry are well-attested for the Punic Wars period and later; I am really not seeing why mercenary cavalry and charioteers cannot be vectors of cultural influences at an early date. Presumably, the "exogamy" is them returning home with their wives. There's a question about how one transfers wealth in 600BC, but I notice a paper on the contested question of whether standardised bronze axes have a monetary role.