Investigating fauna of Bronze Age (3000-1500 BC) according to archaeological evidence at northwestern Iran

Agerbruget i enkeltgravskultur – Senneolitikum og ældre bronzealder i Jylland belyst ud fra plantemakrofossil

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

Northwestern Iran is one of the key regions in the archaeological researches and the field of interest for many scholars, especially during the Iron Age and Proto-Historic period. The Iron Age, which covers the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. to the middle of the 1st millennium BC, is a highly scrutinized period in terms of the evolution of cultures in the archaeology of Iran. The cultural, economy, and social developments during this age underlined the emergence of the Mannaean (Iron Age II) and Median (Iron Age III) governments, which consequently gave rise to the Achaemenid Empire in Iran. Iranian and Foreign archaeological studies who focused on this period paid attention to various subjects, such as cultural continuity or change from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, the typology of material culture, settlement patterns, and the debate regarding the Indo-Iranian migration. Tepe Hasanlou is an important ancient site due to its long sequence occupation and extensive excavations, which relatively complete studies, have been conducted in its cultural materials, including architecture, metal objects, pottery, burials, seals, ornaments, and human skeletons. The subsistence economy of the site has not been studied purposefully and comprehensively. In this regard, this paper dealing with the subsistence patterns and the way of human interactions with environment, through the bioarchaeological researches at Tepe Hasnalou specifically and northwestern Iran generally. We used the results of biological anthropology, archaeobotany, and archaeozoology obtaining the given goals. The paper is attempting to synthesis the results of mentioned multidisciplinary studies with archaeological evidences and historical records in order to re-identifying the agricultural and animal husbandry systems. The acquaintance of modern agricultural and animal husbandry activities in northwestern Iran is another possibility, which is very important for the interpretation of ancient subsistence economy. Hence, the geographical landscape, the location of pastures, products of agricultural activities and livestock, and pastoral-nomadism strategies in the region to foraging the herds are introduced in the paper. Fortunately, substantial, large, and well-preserved animal remains from Tepe Hasanlu were kept and curated at the National Museum of Iran. This collection belongs to the last seasons of excavation in 1970, 1972 and 1974, which was not studied before. The floral remains and human skeletons have a better situation considering with conducted studies by physical anthropologists and archaeobotanists. These studies published in the different journals or reports of excavations could give us the general view and awareness about agricultural activities, dietary and nutrition of residence of Tepe Hasanlou, especially during the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Other evaluated evidence includes the ancient records of Neo-Assyrian Empire which are mentioned to the governments of the northwestern Iran during the 1st millennium B.C. These records indicated that, Tepe Hasanlou was a province of the Mannaean State with some cultural and political communications with northern Mesopotamia. On the basis of Assyrian records, sheep, cattle, horse, and two-humped camel were the dominant animals of the region. In the 1st millennium B.C., the ancient northwestern powers of Iran used these livestock as tribute to the New Assyrian Empire. In this regard, the current study attempts to compare this historical evidence with the results of bioarchaeological studies. The results indicate the existence of developed agricultural and animal husbandry systems at Tepe Hasanlu during the late 2nd and throughout the 1st millennia B.C. All such evidence supports the existence of a sedentary society that relied on animal husbandry and farming. The results of bioarchaeological, paleoclimatological, and palynological researches demonstrate the presence of socio-economical system of nomadic pastoralism and transhumance during the Iron Age, which probably was in communications with sedentary city societies such as Tepe Hasanlou.

The Origins of Milk and Wool Production in the Old World: A Zooarchaeological Perspective from the Central Balkans [and Comments

During the past century, numerous archaeological surveys and handbooks have been published that include summaries of the Levantine Bronze Age (fourth–second millennia BCE: ca. 3800–1100 BCE). The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant by Raphael Greenberg is the most recent and in-depth of these treatments. The ways in which such archaeological overviews are approached have evolved over time. The first of these summaries, notably by W. F. Albright (1940 and later editions), presents the results of excavations in pre-WWII Palestine. This was followed by K. Kenyon's 1960 (and later editions) publication, which integrates the contributions of post-WWII archaeology in Israel and Jordan, especially her excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem. These two books, as their titles suggest, linked the archaeological evidence to the biblical and historical record, and they had a broad appeal for both the academic community and the general public. Three decades later and following a dramatic increase in archaeological activity in the region, A. Mazar (1990) and A. Ben-Tor (1992) published updated archaeological summaries of the southern Levant. Both volumes, which served as textbooks for a generation of undergraduate students and valuable reference works, prioritize the archaeological data, examined together with the primary textual sources.Other surveys dedicated to the archaeology of this region emphasize anthropological approaches to reconstruct the social archaeology of the southern Levant (see, e.g., Levy 1995 and Yasur-Landau et al. 2019). One publication, J. M. Golden's (2009) Ancient Canaan and Israel: An Introduction, organizes the archaeological data thematically. Margreet Steiner and A. E. Killebrew's 2014 multi-author handbook is the most comprehensive archaeological treatment of this region and includes both the northern and southern Levant and Cyprus. It serves as a general resource and reference work for the broader Levant and its interaction with neighboring regions.Greenberg's 2019 monograph differs from these earlier publications in his prioritization of processes over agency. Additionally, it centers solely on the Bronze Age and focuses primarily on the archaeological data interpreted through the lens of socio-anthropological theory while minimizing the use of textual sources. As a coherent, up-to-date narrative written by a single author, it also avoids the pitfalls of earlier edited handbooks and surveys comprised of chapters of uneven quality and differing approaches.The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant appears in the Cambridge World Archaeology series, whose targeted audience comprises students, professional archaeologists, and academics in related disciplines. The aim of this series is to publish up-to-date surveys of the archaeology of a particular region that integrate findings, contemporary theoretical approaches, and intellectual trends with broader cross-cultural interpretations. Greenberg's volume is solidly situated in the socio-anthropological approach to Levantine archaeology and lives up to the goals of this series. It is written as a narrative that traces social and cultural change in the Levantine Bronze Age and how communities there interacted with the broader developments in the Near East and Mediterranean, ranging from emulation to resistance. Major transregional themes addressed include the emergence of states, international trade and elite networks, and external imperial ambitions. The author also considers the impact of landscapes and places of commemoration as reflected in the archaeological record. The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction (Ch. 1) and conclusions that summarize the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant (Ch. 7).Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the Levant and its environment. In this volume, the Levant refers to a section of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, the rift valley and the highlands bordering the valley on either side, today forming the modern entities of coastal Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, and Jordan. Greenberg outlines his rules of engagement and defines the Bronze Age as a period when key human institutions develop, subdividing these into cities, states, markets, military power, legal codes, and institutionalized religion. The fourth–second millennia BCE also witnessed the human impact on the physical landscape, including the appearance of the layered mound (tell), and the integration of the Levant into a Mediterranean world resulting in the establishment of contact networks and interaction (3). This chapter defines the geographical boundaries of the Levant and characterizes it as “a diverse patchwork of environmental affordances and potentialities” and an “ecological mosaic” with a range of microclimates that serve as a buffer to climatic change (6–7). Contrary to much recent scholarship on the importance of climatic change for settlement patterns, social organization, and economic development, Greenberg downplays its impact on the Bronze Age Levant.Chapter 1 also outlines the principal themes that form the framework for this book. They include the ebb and flow of centralization of power, which the author attributes to the tendency of people in the Levant to both emulate the political ideologies of neighboring regions and resist their practical application (13). In his approach, Greenberg begins with the material culture evidence, privileging excavation results over surveys. As contemporary texts are usually fragmentary and often not directly relevant to the material culture interpretation, he uses these texts sparingly, prioritizing the archaeological over the literary record. In each chapter, chronological parameters and the environmental setting are discussed. Main archaeological categories including settlement patterns, architectural features / built landscape, key artifact types, crafts/industries, and burials / mortuary practices are described in detail.Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to the Early Bronze (EB) I, II, and III, a period of time spanning over a millennium (ca. 3800/3600–2400 BCE) and the focus of much of Greenberg's decades-long excavation and research. Greenberg traces several trends, including the transition from the village-based world of the EB IA, the establishment of more complex mega-villages, and the beginnings of inequality, that appear in the EB IB during the final centuries of the fourth millennium. The latter period also coincides with the first significant interaction between Egypt and the Levant, which Greenberg terms the “first Egyptian intrusion” (13, 57).The following millennium represents the crystallization of fortified population centers and the appearance of “urban ideologies” (13) in the EB II and III. Chapter 3 explores the nature of EB II–III Levantine society. A key question addressed is: Can the EB II fortified cities be considered “urban”? The physical features of these settlements meet some of the criteria usually defined as “urban” (e.g., fortifications and evidence of town planning), as exemplified in contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, other commonly cited features of urbanization, such as large, clustered populations, writing, and administration, are lacking. These characteristics suggest that the EB II and III Levant represents “partial” urbanization (what some have termed “complex villages”) or, as Greenberg proposes, a uniquely local, “Levantine” urbanism.Chapter 4 investigates the Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA), a 500-year period of time that in the southern Levant is marked by changes in settlement patterns including the abandonment of mound settlements, a shift in mortuary practices, and regional ceramic assemblages based on village workshops. The retreat from urbanism during the IBA is often attributed to the well-documented climatic change that occurred between ca. 2200 and 1900 BCE. However, Greenberg challenges this interpretation, noting (140) it is difficult to evaluate the impact of climate change on microregions within the Levant and the nature of human response to it. As he points out, counterintuitively, the number of settlements in drier, more marginal regions increases in the southern Levant during the final centuries of the third millennium, coinciding with a period of a warming climate.In Greenberg's account, the picture that emerges during the IBA is one of regionally diverse cultural assemblages that are difficult to place chronologically due to the dearth of uninterrupted stratified sequences in the archaeological record and insufficient radiocarbon dates. Although the IBA is culturally distinct from the EB III, some material-culture features demonstrate elements of continuity with the EB III and overlap with the MB I. These findings suggest that, chronologically, the IBA may have partially co-existed with the EB III and MB I, a phenomenon that Greenberg (182) terms in Chapter 5 as “archaeologically coeval.”Chapter 5 examines the first half of the second millennium, conventionally termed the Middle Bronze Age (MBA). The MBA is also often understood as a cultural “regeneration” that represents the apex of Bronze Age urban culture in the Levant. Following his goal of disentangling the textual and archaeological evidence, Greenberg constructs what he terms a new “conceptual scaffolding” (184), which is grounded in the archaeological evidence and radiocarbon dates. This approach leads him to decouple the end of the MB II from the documented expulsion of the Hyksos and link it with the eruption of the Thera volcano that occurred ca. 1600 BCE and doubtlessly had a profound short-term effect on the environment in the eastern Mediterranean.The remainder of the chapter presents the archaeological evidence, mainly from the southern Levant, arranged chronologically and regionally. Greenberg (264–65) concludes, somewhat controversially, that the end of the MB II is marked by societal collapse, coinciding with the period of the Thera eruption but unrelated to disruptions that may have resulted from New Kingdom Eighteenth Dynasty accounts of a “Hyksos expulsion” from Egypt. In his view, this “collapse” is best exemplified by two phenomena: first, what he considers to be a marked discontinuity between MBA and Late Bronze Age (LBA) material culture (a statement that not all archaeologists would agree with); second, a contraction in population that led to a decrease of settlements, both in size and in number, during the LB I.The LBA is featured in Chapter 6. Greenberg outlines the two main themes that serve as the framework for his narrative interpretation of this period: the expansion of Egyptian imperialism in western Asia and the impact of interconnected regional economic networks. Several dozen pages are devoted to the concept that the Levant was “under Egypt's heel.” This view is puzzling since archaeological evidence for Egyptian interaction during the LB I and LB IIA is scant, as Greenberg himself (299–300, 309) points out. Rather, our knowledge of Egyptian engagement in Canaan during this period depends largely on textual evidence: Eighteenth Dynasty annals, which describe periodic Egyptian campaigns to Canaan, and the mid-fourteenth-century BCE Amarna letters. Except for Jaffa, there is little archaeological evidence for an Egyptian occupation during the LB I and IIA. This changes in the thirteenth century BCE, when Egyptian intervention is archaeologically visible but confined to a number of sites that served as Egyptian strongholds, as summarized by Greenberg (291–99, 302–10). Outside of these strongholds, Egyptian artifacts in Canaan are not abundant and, when they do appear, are usually imported prestige objects. Based on the archaeological evidence, there is little support for the view that New Kingdom Egypt “annexed” the southern Levant as Greenberg maintains (287). Rather, the archaeological evidence suggests Egypt appears to have exercised varying degrees of informal to administrative imperialism during the course of the LBA. Though Greenberg emphasizes the role of Egyptian imperialism in the region, when considered in its larger eastern Mediterranean political context, one may question how much Egyptian imperialistic ambitions affected daily life or controlled socioeconomic, political, and cultural developments in the LBA Levant.The second part of this chapter discusses the LB II prestige economy, exemplified by discoveries from Hazor, Megiddo, and other small towns and nodes of ritual power. In this section, Greenberg justifiably highlights the role of interconnected networks in shaping the LBA Levant. The archaeological evidence is unequivocal. The large number of imported Cypriot and Mycenaean objects at Levantine sites and elsewhere reach their apex during the LB IIA and testify to the Levant's integration in LBA global networks. This coincides with a period during which direct Egyptian imperialistic control seems to have been minimal. Not discussed is the central role of copper from Cyprus and long-distance trade in tin in this imperial and elite-controlled exchange system. Unlike many scholars of this period, Greenberg (341–42) does not consider the end of the LBA and transition to the Iron I period, or what he terms the Terminal Bronze Age (ca. 1200–1100 BCE), to represent a period of societal collapse or significant disruption.In his final, seventh chapter, Greenberg considers the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant, asking “what changed, what stayed the same, and what was passed on to the following eras” (354). The first signs of early state formation can be discerned in the EBA. EB II and III polities, which can be described as “just short” of being towns and states, are, in Greenberg's view, the foundations for MBA, LBA, and later Levantine political entities. Another development is the Levant's unique ability to adopt innovations from neighboring cultures and its willingness to absorb technologies, peoples, and ideas. One of Greenberg's more interesting observations is the linear rise in the “capacity for violence” (355) over time, best evidenced by the increase in weapons and human-induced destructions during the course of the Bronze Age. As Greenberg concludes, ultimately it is the geographic characteristics of this region that shaped the Levant and its cultures, creating a uniquely Levantine idiom. Its diverse landscapes, microregions and climates, and lack of unifying geographic features tended to suppress the ability to accumulate great amounts of surplus or wealth (which, in turn, would have required the development of large bureaucracies). These tendencies also encouraged exploitation of the region by imperial powers. The result is the resilience, creativity, and flexibility to adapt to new situations as narrated in Greenberg's masterly, nuanced, and engaging account of the Bronze Age Levant.

On aborde ici la question de la domestication des plantes et des animaux au moment du passage du Mesolithique au Neolithique ancien au Moyen Orient L'A pose la question de l'expansion ou pas de l'habitat naturel des cereales et par consequence, s'il y a expansion, la question se pose alors des traces economiques et sociales reperables archeologiquement. Est-ce le manque de nourriture, la famine, qui a favorise le developpement de la culture intensive ?

Not far from where you live, in the rural counties outside of town, or in a village just over the border, there are people for whom dates and events like the "Fall of the Berlin Wall," "9/11," the "Great Recession," or "January 6, 2021" hold no particular meaning, or meanings quite different from those they hold for you. This is worth keeping in mind when reading the litany of catastrophes that formed a "perfect storm" for the large political and economic hubs of the twelfth century BCE—a litany that is part of our shared upbringing in an archaeology that has always prioritized civilizational cores: their texts and dynastic chronologies; their art and technology.In writing my synthesis of the Levantine Bronze Age a few years ago (Greenberg 2019), I had to take a good, hard look at the archaeological evidence on its own merits, without giving too much weight to the famously self-serving texts written by the elites of Egypt, Canaan, and other parts of the ancient Near East, which have so often been used to construct a narrative of Canaan. I also tried to set aside the received technological nomenclature that could place a particular year, say 1201 BCE, in the cosmopolitan Bronze Age and year 1199 BCE in the provincial Iron Age. Looking at the evidence accumulated in some one hundred years of excavation, I found it told a story that diverged from the one we were taught: not so much in its facts as in its tone or theme. I will condense this story here under three headings.LBA society in Canaan was socially fragmented, headed by a weak network of local elites. The dissolution of the Middle Bronze Age social contract, which allowed large, fortified towns to flourish in concert with a productive village landscape, left a vacuum in Canaan, soon filled by Egyptian imperial ambitions and by power-grabbing individuals or families. For three hundred years Canaan was characterized by great disparities in wealth, a persistently low rural population with limited productive capacity, an inability to mount collective construction ventures, and a political system that was shored up by constant threats and displays of violence. Elites kept and displayed their power—much as they do today—by virtue of a network through which they exchanged precious materials, crafted objects, and marriage partners.Egypt ruled by proxy. Apart from a thin stratum of Egyptian and Egyptianizing administrators and their representatives, Egypt maintained its interests in Canaan through manipulation of local power brokers and by threats—occasionally fulfilled—of targeted violence. Even when direct Egyptian intervention increased in the latter part of the period, many sites in Canaan were virtually untouched by the purported Egyptian occupation—a striking example is Tel Rehov, described recently by Mazar and Davidovich (2019) as subordinate to Egyptian rule, yet lacking any material manifestations of it. Even sites with an unquestioned Egyptian presence, like Bet Shean, display Egyptian-Canaanite cohabitation and cultural hybridization that sometimes outlasted Egypt's administrative control, showing that "walking like an Egyptian" does not always imply political subjugation..Internationalism did not trickle down. Imported objects feature prominently in archaeological reports, but their actual number and economic impact has been greatly overstated: Canaan's maritime commerce was restricted to small-scale retail trade in coastal craft (cabotage) and, beyond a few coastal sites, neither Cypriot nor Aegean pots or their contents appeared to play an important role in local palatial or urban economies. The exchange of low-bulk, high-prestige craft items, cosmetics, ivories, and metals was the lubricant of the one percent at the top of the social ladder but hardly trickled down below it.When, as Cline describes in detail in 1177 BC (Cline 2021), the established LBA order unraveled over the long decades between 1230 and 1130 BCE (not in a single year!), new actors began to emerge on the stage. These actors are characterized archaeologically by cultural and material continuity with the Late Bronze Age, and I therefore suggest that they be viewed as an emergent, previously suppressed expression of Canaanite culture and political creativity (sensu Graeber and Wengrow 2021). They include the rural settlers of the late thirteenth- to eleventh-century highland villages (often characterized as [proto-]Israelites), the lowland town and village sites characterized by Canaanite continuity, and the flourishing hybrid Canaanite-Mediterranean urban-village assemblage of the southern coastal lowlands that later became known as "Philistine." Whatever the challenges might have been in a post-imperial—and perhaps climatically drier—Levantine world, all three sectors flourished during the twelfth and eleventh centuries, as has been demonstrated in numerous excavations. And this would not have been the first time that Levantine settlement patterns were out of sync with purported climate change and neighboring political and societal changes: similar things occurred throughout the third millennium BCE and at the start of the second millennium, when the flowering of Middle Bronze I culture and settlement was likely correlated with diminished rainfall. I also offered an explanation for this phenomenon: "the ecological mosaic of which the Levant is composed ensures that for every niche lost, for example, to minor climate change, a new niche will be won" (Greenberg 2019: 7); subsistence security could be maintained through social and territorial flexibility.1A recent collation of radiometric, demographic, and climatic data from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia (Palmisano et al. 2021) seems to corroborate my approach. Citing extensive and up-to-the-minute sources, the authors write decisively that "population reached a peak in the Iron Age during a period of increasingly arid climatic conditions" and that from about 5500 BP (that is, the beginning of the Bronze Age), there is a "decoupling of climate and human population. The climatic and demographic trends, despite regional variations, are either negatively correlated or not correlated at all" (emphasis added). In other words, when the climate changed, people coped.But what of the evidence for famine, war, migration, and political collapse? There seems little doubt that these things occurred, but they are not serial calamities, descending on the hapless eastern Mediterranean like the tribulations of Job. Rather, they are all symptoms of one thing: when a corrupt, hollowed-out empire or international order begins to lose its grip, war and its apocalyptic companions, famine and pestilence, appear on the scene. These battles and food shortages occurred at specific places and times and cannot be placed on the same temporal scale as climatic change, which is, at the very best, measured in multi-decadal units that cannot be accurately correlated with individual events (see also Knapp 2021). Thus, rather than suffering the same catastrophes as its neighbors, the Levant might have been a haven for some of their victims.I suppose that if I were asked to sum this all up in a catchy title, it would have to be, "1230–1130 BCE, the century during which a few large imperial polities succumbed to their structural weaknesses and corruption, allowing repressed societal assemblages, especially in the periphery, to reorganize themselves and flourish." A bit dull, I admit, but it does correspond to the archaeological evidence we have in hand.

Et monumentalt midtsulehus ved Nørre Holsted i Sydjylland

Potsherds are very important for the archaeological research because they may date a site, reveal clues about art, technology, and subsistence of people. Potteries show the relationships and exchanges between people from different regions. The Kelar Hill (from now on Tapeh Kelar), Kelardasht region, is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the west of Mazandaran, in north-western Iran. Tapeh Kelar contains cultural materials from the Late Chalcolithic in the fourth millennium BC up to the Islamic Age. The Kura-Araxes context is one of the most significant discoveries of this area. Because Kura-Araxes culture originated far from Tapeh Kelar (in the Southern Caucasus), the primary concern of the present study focused on the structure of the potteries of the site in transitional phase from the Late Chalcolithic to Kura-Araxes and on finding the changes or differences. The study also tries to find the answer to the question whether the Kura-Araxes pots emerged due to exotic agents or not. Twenty five pieces of potsherds from the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age and Middle Bronze Age periods were studied by petrographic method to compare the mineralogical texture of the Late Chalcolithic and the Middle Bronze Age potsherds with those of Kura-Araxes. Studies show that the pots of Kura-Araxes at this site are local products despite some changes in their texture due to source change; therefore, the idea that Kura-Araxes tradition potteries were first brought by way of exchange or trade and then copied by local potters is negated.

We give a detailed description of burials 14 and 24, typical of the Khanghah Gilavan cemetery, discovered in 2006 near Khalkhal, in the Ardabil Province, northwestern Iran. Parallels to the fi nds are discussed, mostly suggesting the Middle Bronze Age, although similar handmade vessels, hairpins, and daggers had been common in the region since the Early Bronze Age. The most illustrative examples are Nakhchivan-type vessels, the two handles of which are decorated with buttons. The burials indicate cultural changes over the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, despite the continuity of the ceramic manufacturing tradition.

En gravhøj i Sevel sogn

This chapter separates the issues of archaeological cultures from that of linguistic theories concerning the language spoken in the north, issues not clearly articulated by Medvedskaya. Medvedskaya is convinced that she has succeeded in demonstrating that there was no cultural break from the Bronze to the Iron Age in North-western Iran, that there was a continuity in the culture. Bronze Age burials did exist below the Iron Age burials but Medvedskaya neglects to report that the Bronze Age burials were associated with architecture. They were intramural burials and thereby markedly of a different nature from the overlying burials in a cemetery dug into trash debris. The chapter concludes that Medvedskaya has not demonstrated that the EWGW/Iron I period of North-western Iran did not represent a new culture in the area. Keywords:Bronze Age; Iron Age; Medvedskaya; North-western Iran

The question of continuity or discontinuity between the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age is still unresolved and the formative phase of the Kura-Araxes culture remains elusive. This paper suggests that combined study of the settlement dynamics and the material culture of these two periods will provide a more complete perspective that includes the underlying effects of environmental factors, and socio-economic forms of organization. Such investigation would enhance our perception of the Kura-Araxes phenomenon. To understand the nature and dynamics of the Kura-Araxes horizon in North-Western Iran we have to go back into the Late Chalcolithic period, even if we see no relation or continuation between these two periods, given the fact that cultures are not formed in a vacuum. In this regard, we should investigate the nature of successive occupations of a region and the forms of their interaction.

Ancient cisterns in the Negev Highlands: Types and spatial correlation with Bronze and Iron Age sites

While oxidation products of unsaturated fatty acids, for example dicarboxylic acids (hereafter diacids), must form during the use of unglazed ceramic vessels for the processing of animal and plant products, such components have never been observed during studies of absorbed lipids. Their absence from the extractable lipid fraction is presumed to be the result of their loss from potsherds through groundwater leaching. Lipid oxidation products including short-chain dicarboxylic acids, ω-hydroxy acids and longer-chain hydroxy and dihydroxy acids have now been observed as components probably covalently bound into solvent insoluble residues of potsherds recovered from waterlogged deposits. These components were only revealed following alkaline treatment of the insoluble residues. A similar mixture of diacids was observed in high abundance in the free lipid fraction of vessels recovered from an exceptionally arid deposit where groundwater leaching would never have occurred. These results confirm the formation of oxidation and probable polymerization products of unsaturated fatty acids during vessel use and burial.