The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII: Quotidian Huelva

 Let's round up this quotidian technology-reconstructed-from-debitage (and other garbage) thing. 

I have it on the good authority of Carolina Lopez-Ruiz that in the early Antique period, Gadir (Cadiz) issued coins with tuna emblems. But then I said to myself, "That's what Google Image Search is for!"

Who's the cutest fishy fellow? Who? She also mentions its reputation as a prodigious exporter of ancient Roman fish sauce, but I don't know if I want to make anything of that because everyone talks about garum and it seems like maybe it was some kind of byproduct industry? It's not like oily fish  are hard to preserve, at least within a reasonable timeframe, and we have plenty of evidence of the Phoenicians moving fish, in the form of storage amphorae recovered from shipwrecks. I feel like I might be accused of monomania, but let's talk about "Tartessia" and marine resources, and not purple dye.

It has been estimated that the Black Sea receives roughly 390 cubic kilometers of fresh water  a year, of which two thirds escape to the Mediterranean through the Straits, and that the Mediterranean receives 502 cubic kilometers of fresh water, 70% through European rivers (the Ebro, Rhone, Po, and Drava). High evaporation means that the Atlantic is a net donor to the Mediterranean, supplying an annual average of 1000 cubic kilometers per year. However, there is substantial seasonal variability, with influx rising to 2660 cubic kilometers/year in August through September, and an efflux of 400 cubic kilometers/year in April-May. Complicating this is a stratification, with an efflux of notably saline water, the "Mediterranean Salt Tongue" underlying an influx of fresher water closer to the surface. Since the Mediterranean basin is divided roughly two-thirds/one-thirds East versus West by the Strait of Sicily, there are significant fluxes through those waters, the Strait of Otranto, and in the  northern Aegean, although the Aegean has a considerable abyssal volume, and this may explain why the high whale population of the upper Gulf of Lyons and the Strait of Gibraltar  are not replicated in the northern Aegean, although there is a significant cetacean population in the barrier islands at the mouth of the sea. 

I'm not saying that there was a significant whale or even seal fishery in the Straits when Phoenician settlements show up there, but strandings must have had some economic significance! Perhaps one day we'll hear about whalebone artefacts. Speaking of which, isn't it weird to read that the copious ivory detritus at Huelva signifies ivory moved from Africa. I mean, I get it. Elephants must have gone extinct in Europe in the way old days because civilised continents don't have elephants. But the Straits are only 8km wide at the narrowest, and, not surprisingly on this here water world of ours, elephants can swim a long way in search of un-elephanted forage. I'm not an archaeology dude. I don't even have a fedora. But I would be really surprised if there were no elephants in southwestern Iberia in 800BC.  

So none of this should be surprising. In the historic period, planting labour contracts stipulated overwintering, because the logistics are easier, and what are you going to do all winter if not practice your artisanship --starting, one assumes, with transport amphorae. Digging around the local Huelvan pottery we find handmade amphorae, on the one hand, and wheel-turned and high-temperature glazing, which sure sounds like technology transfer.  The whole viticulture/arboriculture thing might fit in here in that pushing up the temperature of kiln firing has as much to do with fuel as anything else, and substituting charcoal and oilpress dregs for wood might be a reason for getting into olives. (Wine seems self-explanatory?) I won't go round the timber cutting/ash/iron/lye (olives/soap/glass) angle again except to ask, who better than the people of the cedars of Lebanon to transmit this technology?

One of the weird things about Huelva is that it is outside the Phoenician/Iberian "core." There is no evidence of an architecturally Phoenician city at Huelva, and for that matter further north and west into Portugal. It is also in this area that such Tartessian texts as we have are found. We have a weird constellation of local alphabets across the Mediterranean, which is perhaps not as attended as it could be since there is a clear cline from intensive to superficial adoption as we move from Greece to Etruria to Tartessan territory. On the other hand there are intermediary areas that didn't take up the alphabet (Sardinia), a lightly used Sicul alphabet on Sicily, and mysteries like North Africa in total and non-alphabetic Eteo-Cypriot. Lopez-Ruiz is by inclination a cultural historian with a great deal to say about scripts, texts, and "Orientalising" art, although seemingly no discussion of Ugaritic literature.  

Hope is overrun with these things, which is a major
improvement on the other main form of public art,
reminders that First Blood was filmed there a million
years ago, if you ask me. 

To get back to the Pacific Northwest, the vivid three-dimensionality of iron-enabled woodcraft art raises the question of whether the carvers elaborated and developed the cosmogony it embodies. There's a bit in Thucydides about how the politicised destruction of a bunch of wooden phallic sculptures turned into a whole thing with a purge of alleged perpetrators that sounds like it was pretty scary to live through, especially if you didn't have powerful friends. 

Were these art? In fact, was there some kind of runaway status competition due to the sudden ease with which they could be made? Woodcarvers were a big deal in the Early Iron Age, mentioned alongside diviners, doctors, and epic poets as the kind of distinguished visitor with an unquestionable claim to guest right, a picture of the Iron Age Mediterranean which has gone mainstream enough to generate its own pushback, so I'm not sure why I'm even bringing it up. But if you ask me, woodcarving and embroidery might be the missing links, and now here's a theory about why southwestern Lusitania is different --more rain, more wood, more carvers! Yeah, I know, wild speculation, but it does bring us back to the geographical quotidian. Western Iberia, and for that matter western Greece and the Levant themselves benefit from something that I'm sure has a technical name, which thank you Google, turns out to be orographic lift. Obviously, the wetter an area is, the harder it is to clear and farm with stone and bronze tools, which is a pretty good explanation for why the changes in the Western Mediterranean with the coming of iron are so significant in the first place.  If plastic (wood) art from southwestern Iberia had a significant cultural impact (I feel like I should post a public engagement poll so readers can rate the speculativeness of the speculations in this post, but it's Blogspot, so "public engagement" ha ha ha), then that would help to explain why the Phoenicians pushed so far west so quickly.

I mean, besides marine resources, obviously.