A New Point on the Bucket List. A Cauldron with Cross-Shaped Attachments from an Iron Age Grave at Castaneda, Canton Grisons, Switzerland

Local and regional distributions of Thymus serpyllum, in the southeastern part of Sweden, were examined by combining experimental studies of recruitment limitation and germination, and descriptive studies of distribution range in relation to habitat and management history. The spatial pattern at a regional scale in the county of Södermanland was examined in relation to semi‐natural pastures and graves from the Iron Age. The distribution of T. serpyllum was also examined in two parishes. Thymus serpyllum was exclusively found in managed, unfertilized areas, mainly semi‐natural pastures and to some extent in road verges, and almost always in dry parts. Populations of T. serpyllum were found in 32 of the 42 pastures that contained Iron Age graves, but only in 5 of 42 pastures without graves. The distribution of T. serpyllum was also more or less congruent with the distribution of Iron Age graves, in both parishes. The seed sowing experiment showed that the germination rate, winter survival and recruitment were significantly higher in disturbed (removal of ground cover) plots, for both dry and mesic vegetation. Since the establishment of T. serpyllum occurred both in dry and mesic parts of semi‐natural pastures, whereas T. serpyllum is confined to dry parts, the local limitation of distribution may be due to poor dispersal or due to effects acting on later life cycle stages. The results showed that the regional distribution of T. serpyllum is likely to be dispersal limited recruitment after seed sowing was equally good at sites with or without established populations. Seeds survived and germinated after heat treatment, with temperatures at 60°C. 80°C and 100°C, but germination rates were not higher than in the control. The results of this study indicate that the distribution of T. serpyllum is dependent on human activities, both for dispersal and for the maintenance of established populations. Long, continuous management by grazing is obviously important for the maintenance of these populations. The association with Iron Age graves may reflect either long continuity, or accidental or intentional dispersal by humans.

Pollen studies of textile material from an Iron Age grave at Hammerum, Denmark

In summer 2015, during the preliminary survey to identify the tombs of Gahvāre district, about ten cemeteries were recorded including Mar Khāmūsh, Gawraǰūb, Berya Khāni, Safar Shāh, and Chenār. Structurally the tombs of these cemeteries have similar features. In their constructions, large stone slabs had been used in four sides. After putting the dead body, the cap stone was placed on it and then it was covered with a pile of small and large stones. Most of the tombs were plundered which makes them difficult to date. Therefore on the basis of few pottery found from Mar Khāmūsh cemetery as well as comparative studies with other graves of central Zagros, the date of Iron Age II and III is suggested. The aim of this paper is to increase our knowledge about the Iron Age's graves in the central Zagros. Furthermore, some potsherds from Gawraǰūb cemetery have been found which were comparable with Parthian pottery based on forms and technical features. It seems that the pottery is likely to be intrusive or its presence suggests reuse of the graves in the Parthian period. The archaeological excavations are needed to clarify this chronology and to achieve more precise results.

Seeds of weeds as food in the fore-Roman lron AgeAmong the objects found in 1949 in the ruins of a burnt house on Gørding Heath was a small pottery vessel containing, in addition to sand and earth, about 95 ccs of burnt grain and seeds. The house site can be dated by means of its ceramic contents to the second division of the Celtic Iron Age. A statistical investigation of the vegetable remains showed there to be 65 ccs of barley and 30 ccs of seeds of weeds.The barley is the naked type of six-row nodding barley, Hordeum tetrastichum Kcke., which predominated in Denmark and presumably in the remainder of northern and western Europe throughout the period up to approximately the commencement of our era. At that time this type of barley appears to have been gradually superseded by the husked type, which had achieved some degree of importance in Denmark even as early as the Later Bronze Age. Naked barley has never since regained its supremacy among Danish barley types, although it is known to have been cultivated in the 18th century. That it is still possible to grow it in Danish latitudes is shown by the fact that it has been cultivated - rather experimentally than commercially -in Jutland during the last few decades. For example the author saw a field of ripe naked barley in Central Jutland in 1937. The size of the grains of the Gørding barley is much less than that of modern barley, while even compared with other Iron Age barley it is small, suggesting that the ploughland belonging to the village was very poor.Vessels of the size of the one here described, which hold about a quart, occur regularly in Iron Age graves and must be looked upon as table vessels as they are too small for storage of foodstuffs. The seeds found in this vessel must therefore be considered as a meal, or as the remains of one. When it is taken into consideration that certain of the species of seeds found belong to plants which do not occur in cornfields, and when it is further recalled that only quite small quantities of weeds would be harvested together with sicklereaped corn, the conclusion cannot be avoided that the weeds were gathered for their own sake and the seeds deliberately added to the corn. That the seeds of certain weeds have been gathered is shown by the discovery of unmixed stores of Pale Persicaria, White Goosefoot and Corn Spurry in burnt Iron Age houses in Jutland. The impressions of the seeds of these plants and of Black Bindweed are similarly frequently found in Iron Age pottery. The seeds of the seventeen other species are presumably only present because these plants grew together with those collected. No large quantity of seeds of weeds could be collected from corn fields, but rather from these fields after the harvest or, perhaps most likely, from first year's fallow, where the annuals would have favourable conditions for growth until the grasses and other perennials reached a sufficient predominance in numbers to squeeze them out.The stomach contents of the two bodies found in the bogs at Borremose and Tollund show that their meals had consisted partly of seeds of weeds. In those two cases there was no evidence of the quantitative relationship of corn and seeds; but here we have an example which suggests the probability that uncultivated plants supplied about a third of the meal. Together with the evidence of the bodies this little find gives a basis for the conclusion that the gathering of weed seeds played a very important role in the Iron Age in Jutland. Circumstances made it necessary for the population to supplement the insufficient yield of their ploughlands by a partial reversion to the ancient practice of food-gathering, which up to the discovery of agriculture was the only way in which mankind could furnish itself with vegetable food.Hans Helbaek

Widening and diversifying trade networks are often cited among the boom and bust of Bronze and Iron Age worlds. The great distances that goods could travel during these periods are exemplified here as the authors describe the spectroscopic identification of Baltic amber beads in an Iron Age cremation grave at Hama in Syria. Yet these beads are not unique in the Near Eastern record; as the authors show, comparable finds and references to amber or amber hues in contemporaneous texts illustrate the high social and economic value of resinous substances—a value based on perceptions of their distant origin.

Stories about the un-dead are more popular today than ever. At the same time fewer people than ever before have touched or even seen a deceased person. Every society must choose a way to deal with their deceased. In some societies certain actions must be taken to avoid the dead from returning. In the Icelandic saga about Eyrbryggarna the dead come back to haunt the living. The un-dead were tried at the court of the dead and sent away. When excavating a farmstead at Hunnavik we were faced with ghost stories. We found the stories amusing but when the osteological analysis was carried out the probable source of the ghost stories was revealed. The cremated bones found in the floor of a house were the fragmentary remains of a human being. But how did they do to avoid the dead from returning to the land of the living in prehistoric Småland? Which physical actions leave traces for archaeologists to find? One probable trace of such actions is knives thrust into graves as a part of the death ritual. Knives in such a position are found repeatedly in Iron Age graves.

The main reason for this study are the bronze objects found on the body of a woman (supposedly a “priestess”) from an Iron Age grave (VII century BC) from Marvinci in the Republic of Macedonia. There has also been a bronze statue recently presented in a public space in Skopje, as a contemporary art interpretation of this archeological finding. The main focus of this article is a semiotic analysis of arch-shaped bronze elements from this grave. Based on the form of similar finds from Europe they are defined as cheek-pieces i.e. elements of the reins for horse riding, but in Macedonia they have been used in another function – as female jewelry or as handles of a specific ritual implement. The study suggests overcoming of these contradictions through the following semiotic relations: a girl/mare + equipment for riding = a harnessed mare/wife, i.e. the use of these objects as symbols of a “wild woman” who is transferred from the sphere of “natural” to the sphere of “cultural” through the act of marriage, becoming a “tamed/a domesticated wife”. Within the same relationship the following paradigm is proposed (husband = ruler: wife = subject). Several facts are stated in the argumentation of this relationship: the mythological and ritual traditions based on ancient written sources; a ritual tradition of Slavic and Balkan folklore; a Slavic and ancient Greek lexeme with the meaning husband and wife whose etymology is based on the meaning of harnessed. This semiotic relation offers a possible key for the interpretation of the twenty bronze statues of horsemen placed in the last three years in the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, as part of the project “Skopje 2014”.

Note on Some Iron Age Graves at Odugattur, North Arcot District, South India.

During the last twenty years, the category ‘grave’ has been the subject of increasing debate in Swedish archaeology. It has been recognized that monuments commonly regarded as graves are sometimes also found in cultic contexts other than those associated with death and burial. In many cases, for instance, monuments similar to graves have been erected at cult sites, and seem to have been used in sacrificial practices rather than for burials. According to archaeological, textual and onomastic sources, it was common practice in Old Norse religion to suspend sacrificial victims from trees of from upraised posts, or to deposit offerings at the base of sacred rocks and boulders. In all these cases, the trees, posts and boulders seem to be representation of the World Axis, depicted in cosmological myths as a Cosmic Tree, Pillar or Mountain. I argue that these various representations of the World Axis are also incorporated in the architectonic symbolism of several forms of grave monuments in pre-Christian Scandinavia. The architectonic shape of these monuments could thus be used in several different contexts, since they represented a ‘Cosmic Center’ and a ‘doorway’ to the Other World.

Alpine cattle management during the Bronze Age at Ramosch-Mottata, Switzerland

The question of the origin of Alpine farming and pastoral activities associated with seasonal vertical transhumance and dairy production in the Silvretta Alps (Eastern Switzerland) has recently benefitted from renewed interest. There, pastoral practises began during the Late Neolithic (2300 BC), but alpine dairy farming was directly evidenced so far only since the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age (1300–500 BC). The vegetation development, timberline shifts at 2280 m a.s.l. and environmental conditions of the subalpine Urschai Valley (Canton of Grisons, Switzerland) were reconstructed for the small (8 m2) Plan da Mattun fen based on palynological and geochemical analyses for the last six millennia. The X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses are among the first ones performed on a European peatland in such altitudes. A high Rb/Sr ratio in the fen peat sediments revealed an increase in catchment erosion during the time when the forests of the Upper Urschai Valley were steadily diminished probably by fire and livestock impact (2300–1700 BC). These landscape openings were paralleled by increasing micro-charcoal influx values, suggesting that prehistoric people actively set fire on purpose. Simultaneously, palynological evidence for pastoralism was revealed, such as pollen from typical herbs indicating livestock trampling, and abundant spores from coprophilous fungi. Since then, vertical transhumance and pastoral activities remained responsible for the open subalpine landscape above 2000 m a.s.l., most probably also in the context of milk and dairy production since 1300 BC, which is characteristic for the European Alps until today.

In November of 1935, a uniquely puzzling inscription in Etruscoid characters was discovered among the remains of an Iron Age necropolis west of the church at Castaneda in Canton Grisons (Graubünden, Grigione). The inscription is engraved along the spout of a bronze oinochoe (Schnabelkanne), and apart from a solitary chi inscribed on another find from this necropolis, is the only evidence of alphabetism to have been unearthed from the site. Castaneda is a hamlet strategically perched some 780 meters above sea level along the northern slope of the Calanca Valley (Val Calanca) as it opens onto the Misox Valley (Val Mesolcina), an age-old trade and communication artery that leads northward to the Lesser Saint Bernard Pass. The necropolis is, therefore, situated about 11 kilometers (seven miles) northeast of Bellinzona, which lies just across the cantonal border to Ticino (Tessin); see Map 1 and Nagy (2000a, 2000b) for a site history.

Three Iron Age cremation graves from south-eastern Estonia and four graves including cremations as well inhumations from western Estonia were analysed by osteological and palaeodemographic methods in order to estimate the age and sex composition of burial sites, and to propose some possible demographic figures and models for living communities.
 The crude birth/death rate estimated on the basis of juvenility indices varied between 55.1‰ and 60.0‰ (58.5‰ on average) at Rõsna village in south-eastern Estonia in the Middle Iron Age. The birth/death rates based on juvenility indices for south eastern graves varied to a greater degree. The estimated crude birth/death rate was somewhat lower (38.9‰) at Maidla in the Late Iron Age and extremely high (92.1‰) at Maidla in the Middle Iron Age, which indicates an unsustainable community. High crude birth/death rates are also characteristic of Poanse tarand graves from the Pre-Roman Iron Age – 92.3‰ for the 1st grave and 69.6‰for the 2nd grave. Expectedly, newborn life expectancies are extremely low in both communities – 10.8 years at Poanse I and 14.4 years at Poanse II. Most likely, both Maidla I and Poanse I were unsustainable communities.
 According to the main model where the given period of grave usage is 150 years, the burial grounds were most likely exploited by communities of 3–14 people. In most cases, this corresponds to one family or household. In comparison with other graves, Maidla II stone grave in western Estonia and Rõsna-Saare I barrow cemetery in south-eastern Estonia could have been used by a somewhat larger community, which may mean an extended family, a larger household or usage by two nuclear families.

The sea as a point of view: A maritime approach to the Iron Age landscape in Vestvågøy, Norway. Vestvågøy, an island in the Lofoten archipelago, is well known in Scandinavian archaeology due to two massive Iron Age buildings at the Borg farm. Borg has been a popular subject for Iron Age research. Research has mainly focused on agricultural aspects of the Iron Age society on Vestvågøy. Nevertheless, a large number of Iron Age graves are located on islets and headlands. These are not often considered in earlier contributions. In this paper, I explore how a maritime perspective can contribute to a new understanding of Iron Age Vestvågøy. The main premise is that the presence of the sea affects how people structure their landscapes. I view the Iron Age sites and the landscape from the sea: the main transport route in prehistoric coastal Norway. Although interpreted as a central place, Borg is located by a hidden bay north on the island, excluded from maritime communication lines. While some researchers suggest that the Buksnesfjord area was the location for another central place, the layout of the Buksnesfjord area differs from Borg. Through a GIS-based quantitative spatial study of Iron Age graves, I outline an alternative view of the Iron Age landscape.

The Beginning of the Early Iron Age in Jutland The date of the beginning of the Early Iron Age in Denmark is one of the most disputed problems in Scandinavian archaeology. The oldest finds from Jutland (1) have been placed by various authors, in the period between 600 and 400 B.C. (2-3) and discrepancies in dating are mainly due to different conceptions of the relationship between the Central European and North European chronology (4). A few finds, however, can reasonably be employed in a more precise dating, for example the Early Iron Age grave from Ulbjerg in Jutland (5). The grave (fig. 1), a earthgrave, contained an urn, a double spiral brooch, a lug wheel and two fibulae. The urn can be placed with certainty in Period I of the Pre­Roman Iron Age, where similar types are found in both graves and settlements (6). The same dating applies to the lug wheel (7) and the double spiral brooch (9), both being local forms in Jutland in the first Pre-Roman period (8 and 10). The two fibulae are, however, unique, having no parallel either in Denmark or the other Scandinavian countries. Both have an imitation spring and are presumably modelled on foreign pieces. As a type, they belong to the North European Certosa fibulae (II), distributed (fig. 2) in two main areas ­around the Oder- Warthe in Poland and along the middle and lower Elbe in Germany. The type originated in Italy (12), spread to Central Europe and thence northwards to Poland and North Germany. There, a number of local variants are recognized (13-16), some of which resemble the Ulbjerg fibulae very closely (15). The type has a wide distribution in Central Europe in the Early Iron Age, which begins at a point corresponding to the Nordic Bronze Age, Periods V and VI (17). In Period VI, the whole of the Polish and North German lowlands exhibit a remarkable uniformity in certain artefacts, for instance needles, toilet equipment and jewellery. This uniformity is based on influence from the Central European Hallstatt Culture. ln Poland, the Late Bronze Age groups from Period VI are followed by the Pommeranian Culture, a group which is primarily characterized by face urns (18). Further west, in Saxony, the Billendorf Culture (19) occurs in Period VI, though its last phase falls outside true Period VI (20) and is probably contemporary with the Pommeranian Culture further east. Further north, along the Elbe, the period VI inventory shows striking similarities to Danish Period VI (21), and via these regions the latest Nordic Bronze Age Culture had had a connection with the Central European Hallstatt Culture. After Period VI, these regions display the Jastorf Culture which maintains contact with Jutland in the first period of the Pre-Roman Iron Age (22).If the dating of the Certosa fibulae is examined, it appears that in the east they belong to the Pommeranian Culture (23), which has metal forms resembling in certain respects those of Period l of the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Jutland. Further west, Certosa fibulae are found in Saxony in the last phase of the Billendorf Culture (26), i. e. that part of it which is later than Period VI. In the north, Certosa fibulae occur in the earliest phase of the Jastorf Culture (27). Sometimes this phase exhibits fibulae with the foot shaped as an animal head (28). Certosa fibulae are thus in Poland, North Germany and Denmark placed in the first Pre-Roman period.How, then, are Certosa fibulae dated in relation to the division which hes been made of Ha D (30)? Certosa fibulae and fibulae with animal-head feet are sometimes found together in integral finds (32) and the latest investigations seem to show that both types begin before true La Tene A (33), i. e. at a point corresponding to the transition between Ha D 2 and D 3. In the absolute chronology (34), Certosa fibulae would then be dated c. 500, and this should largely correspond to the beginning of the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Denmark. This is a confirmation of the date given in the latest survey of the Early Iron Age in Jutland (35).Jørgen Jensen.