Category Archives: archeology

Stonehenge, cows, and technology: a roundup of British archeology

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A century ago, someone found a cow’s jawbone buried beside the entrance to Stonehenge. The placement looked deliberate, and historians have been speculating about it ever since. Now, the high-tech toys available to scientists have delivered new information, answering some old questions and leaving us with new ones: the cow came from an area with Paleozoic rocks–in other words, rocks that are more than 400 million years old. The closest place that fits that description is Wales, where Stonehenge’s bluestones were quarried. 

Does that mean Stonehenge was built by Welsh cows? 

When they sober up, archeologists aren’t convinced of that, but there is speculation–sober speculation–that cows or oxen were used to drag the stones overland. It’s only recently that archeologists have found evidence that cattle were used to pull heavy loads in the Neolithic era, when Stonehenge was built, but they’re now pretty sure they were, and that fits nicely into the jawbone puzzle.

If you forgot to set your watch, the Neolithic era took place somewhere around 2990 BCE. 

Marginally relevant photo: Stonehenge it’s not, but it is a stone circle. This one’s from Minions, in Cornwall.

But cows and oxen pulling the bluestones sits squarely in the land of speculation, so let’s not commit too heavily to it. We can’t prove that the cows in general or this cow in particular helped pull the stones. We don’t even know for sure that the cow in question was brought to Stonehenge alive, although if you’re going from Wales to Stonehenge, you’ll find it’s a long way to carry a cow. Or even a cow’s head, especially in the era before refrigeration. Humans are indeed strange, but not, I like to think, quite that strange. 

What’s known for certain is that the cow was indeed a cow, not an ox or a bull. And that someone left her jawbone in a significant spot, like a note saying, “This means something,” and don’t we wish they’d told us what.

 

Cows, sheep, and pigs

Animal bones also figure in a recent article about bronze age gatherings in what’s now Britain. People traveled long distances to get together and eat. And, presumably, solidify the relationships between tribes or–well, whatever groupings we’re talking about. They would’ve known. The same techniques that inform us about Stonehenge’s Welsh cow also tell us where their animals came from before they became the feats. 

Whatever it means, at one site they mostly ate beef; at another, mutton; and at a third, pork. 

 

A Danish woodhenge

A circle of 45 wooden posts has been discovered in Denmark. It’s believed to have been built between 2600 and 1600 BCE–the late stone age and early bronze age–and it’s the second woodhenge that’s been found in the area. What experts take from this–or one of the things they take from it–is that Denmark, Britain, Ireland, and parts of northern Europe, which all have similar henges, were strongly connected. 

The axis of the newly discovered henge matches that at Stonehenge, underlining the assumption that the builders had shared beliefs and technologies.

 

The Melsonby Hoard

Someone with a metal detector found what’s described as one of the biggest and most important hoards of iron-age glitz in Britain: a collection of more than 800 objects. It was found in a field in the north of England and includes wagon and chariot parts, bridle bits, ceremonial spears, and two ornate cauldrons, all of which shows evidence of burning, possibly as part of a funeral. 

The expert who was called in after the detectorist reported his find said, “Finding a hoard of ten objects is unusual, it’s exciting, but finding something of this scale is just unprecedented. . . .

“Some people have regarded the north as being impoverished compared with the iron age of the south of Britain. This shows that individuals there had the same quality of materials and wealth and status and networks as people in the south. . . . The north is definitely not a backwater in the iron age. It is just as interconnected, powerful, and wealthy as iron age communities in the south.” 

The find also provides the first evidence of four-wheeled vehicles in use among the tribes. 

 

The Romans and the Welsh

A huge Roman fort that was in use from the first through third centuries has been found in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in an overgrown farm field. It may rewrite the history of relations between the Romans and the Demetae–the tribe that lived there. The belief had been that they were on peaceful terms, but the presence of a fort this size throws that into doubt, indicating a strong military presence.

The fort explains why the field was never worth cultivating: the farmer, and probably many before him, kept hitting stone. It was found by an archeologist from Pembrokeshire, who had often wondered whether an unusually straight road might not be Roman. (You may have to live in Britain to understand why a straight road would cause a person to wonder.) Then  he looked at a satellite image and spotted the field, which is the size and shape of a Roman fort.

He drove out to see it and as he described the moment, “Sticking out of the ground was a triangular piece that looked like a Roman roofing slate. I thought: ‘Surely not?’ I pulled it up and lo and behold, it’s an archetypal Roman roofing slate, an absolute peach. Flip it upside down and you can see underneath a diagonal line where it was grooved to fit into the one that was underneath it. It’s a real beauty. . . .

“That was the diagnostic evidence I was looking for, which is a miracle, because it’s a huge site.”

The current best guess is that the fort held some 500 soldiers.

 

England and West Africa

We’ve moved to the 7th century CE, so reset your watches if you would, and we’re poking around disrespectfully in a couple of graveyards, one in Kent, on England’s southeast coast, and one in Dorset, a long walk to the west, even if you’re being dragged by a cow. 

Sorry, no. Wrong era. Forget the cow. But in the same way that the Stonehenge story follows one cow to make sense of the Stonehenge story, this one follows two unrelated humans to get a glimpse of life in early medieval England. These burials hint at people traveling much greater distances in the early medieval period than we would’ve expected: both had a paternal grandparent from West Africa. Their grave goods show they were both buried as typical and well-thought-of members of their communities, and the ancestors of the people buried nearby were either northern Europe or western British/Irish.

That western British/Irish business is, I think, a way of saying Celtic now that it’s looking questionable that a group of people called Celts ever existed. 

The Kent and Dorset communities had very different cultures, the eastern one Anglo-Saxon and in frequent touch with Europe, the western one on the fringes of European influence and primarily–um, whatever we say if the word Celtic’s gone up in smoke. Both, though, had contact with far-away West Africa.

 

And finally, a mere 800 years ago

In Leicester–pronounced, through some miracle of English spelling, Lester–in the twelfth century, 123 women, men, and children were buried, in a short space of time, in a narrow shaft near the cathedral. That would’ve been something like 5% of the town’s population and it’s one of the largest pit burials found in Britain. 

“Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,” said Mathew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services. “At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”

Initially, the archeologists assumed the deaths were from the bubonic plague, but when the bones were radiocarbon dated the centuries were wrong. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do mention pestilences and fevers, severe mortality, and miserable deaths from hunger and famine in England from the mid-tenth century through to the mid-twelfth century. The pit burials seem to back that up.

“It is also important to note there was still some form of civic control going on,” Morris said. “There was still someone going around in a cart collecting bodies. What we see from studying the bodies in the pit does not indicate it was created in a panic. . . . There was also no evidence of clothing on any of the bodies – no buckles, brooches, nothing to suggest these were people who were dropping dead in the street before being collected and dumped.

“In fact, there are signs that their limbs were still together, which suggests they were wrapped in shrouds. So their families were able to prepare these bodies for burial before someone from a central authority collected them to take to the pit burial.”

In a roundabout way, the find is the result of Richard III’s body being discovered, minus the feet, in a nearby parking lot. His body was reburied in the cathedral and since then visitor numbers have gone wild, so the cathedral decided to build a heritage learning center in the cathedral garden, which had once been a graveyard. 

In Britain, construction like that means an archeological survey, and tha turned up what was left of 1,237 people buried between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. Below them was evidence of Anglo-Saxon dwellings below that, a Roman shrine. 

“It’s a continuous sequence of 850 years of burials from a single population from a single place, and you don’t get that very often,” Morris said. “It has generated an enormous amount of archaeology.”

***

Totally unrelated to any of that, I wonder if a reader or readers can enlighten me on something that’s happened here lately. Notes used to get 2,000 to 3,000 hits per week, but about a month ago it started getting between 10,000 and 20,000, with as far as I can tell all the growth coming from China. That’s lovely–whoever you are, welcome–but it’s also strange. For one thing, it wasn’t slow growth; all those new hits appeared between one week and the next. For another, the list of posts that get the most hits hasn’t changed: Britain’s gun laws, Britain’s native foods, the shift to metric measurements, the scone. (I know: it’s an odd list.) I’d have expected a shift in readership to bring a change in interests, but it hasn’t. So is this a bot, clicking away mindlessly and reading nothing? Or is this something real?

If you’re a new reader from China, or if you’re not but know something that might explain what’s happening, or if you just want to tell me how strange this is, leave me a comment, will you?

Thanks.

Did the Roman Empire stick its nose into Cornwall?

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When I first moved to Cornwall–the southwestern tip of Britain–friends told us, “The Romans never got this far. They stopped in Exeter.” They sounded so certain that I never thought to cross-check that with reality–or with the internet, which isn’t quite the same thing but on a good day might be in conversation with it. If I had, I’d have learned that a small Roman fort in Nanstallon–yes, that’s in Cornwall–was excavated between 1965 and 1969. I moved here in 2006 and–c’mon, my math is bad but even I can figure out which came first. 

In other words, some Roman presence has been documented since the 1960s. I mention that not to make my friends sound silly–anyone who puts up with me can’t be all bad–but to establish the common belief that Cornwall escaped Roman occupation.

More recently, three additional Roman forts have been found in Cornwall, as well as one possible Roman-influenced villa and a few random finds that indicate trade, influence, presence, or whatever you like along those lines. They change the picture, although we can argue about how if you like.

Irrelevant photo: Snowdrops–one of the very early spring flowers. Or depending on how you count these things, winter flowers.

 

What do we know about the Romans in Cornwall? 

Not much, even with four forts and one possible Roman-influenced etc. Cornwall didn’t make it into Rome’s written accounts–at least not the ones that survived–so we have to rely on archeology, which in turn relies on interpretation. However well educated that interpretation may be, it leaves gaps.

Archeology also relies on digging in the right place and a lot of Cornwall is still un-archeologized.

With all those hesitations in place, the Roman presence looks like this: they came, they saw, they left–right after they broke some pottery, lost some coins, and built some forts and one possible Roman-influenced etc. Or most of them left anyway. The exception to that is one fort and an associated civilian town, which were occupied into the third or fourth centuries, not just for a small handful of decades.

The other forts might have been abandoned because the soldiers were needed in other places more urgently–to deal with uprisings, invasions on the far borders of the empire, efforts to conquer more territory, anything of that sort.

 

What was Rome doing in Britain anyway?

Britain had minerals, and Rome wanted them. It also had good hunting dogs (yes, seriously) and people, who could be enslaved. Yeah, the good old days. Don’t you just long for them? On top of that, Rome’s emperor, Claudius, wanted a nice little conquest to puff up his CV: it would keep the Legions on his side. 

The Legions? They were the core of his army. If they weren’t happy, they’d make sure that he wasn’t either.

So in 43 CE Rome invaded, but they landed a long way to the east of Cornwall, and a number of hostile tribes and heavy fighting stood between them. We won’t slog through all of that, just say that the nearest major military base (and later Roman civilian settlement) really did end up being in Exeter, which is 45 miles from Cornwall’s border, only they didn’t have cars back then, and the highway hadn’t been built, so those 45 miles were longer than they are now. And part of the route went over moors, which would’ve been hard traveling, so stretch those miles out a little more, please. 

 

And in Cornwall?

The forts Rome did build in Cornwall weren’t just near the mouths of rivers, they were also close to some of those nifty minerals I mentioned. Cornwall’s best known for tin and copper but has a few other minerals as well. One article mentions silver. Another talks about iron. As I researched this, AI popped up to add slate to the list, and I’ll tell you just the tiniest bit smugly that slate is not now and never has been a mineral. * 

For the record: this blog is written by a human. Every so often I wonder what an AI program would come back with if I asked it to write something in my style, but I haven’t asked. I’m not sure I want to know.

Enough of that. Tin was particularly important in both the Bronze Age (no tin, no bronze) and later, when it was needed to make pewter. Add lead to tin and you can make lovely tableware, jewelry, and statuettes, all of which the Romans liked. While you’re at it, you can give any number of people lead poisoning.

The forts were also close to the mouths of rivers, where they could control (or protect) shipping. I’m going to quote Mike Baskott, an archeologist who gave a fascinating talk to the Rame History Group (Rame’s a Cornish village), “The Romans in Cornwall.”  The talk is online and the speaker’s name isn’t on it, but someone from the group was kind enough to supply it. I’ve drawn heavily from Baskott’s talk. What he said about the forts’ location near rivers is this:

“To me this indicates a strong interest in the protection and policing of maritime trade and indeed in other areas of Britain it can be shown that the Roman navy were responsible for the transport of minerals. Since time immemorial, carriage by water has always been more economical than transport by land.” 

He speculates that part of Cornwall might have been a Roman military zone “under Imperial control.”

The soldiers who occupied the Cornish forts probably weren’t legionaries but auxiliaries–soldiers from other parts of the empire, recruited from tribes Rome had already conquered. Talk about recycling, right? You conquer one people and get them to conquer (or at least help conquer) the next one. 

Why would anyone want to be part of that? Because an auxiliary got paid. And whatever was left of him after 25 years of auxiliaring got a plot of land to farm, along with Roman citizenship for himself and his family.  **

 

The Cornish experience of the Romans

We know even less about the Cornish experience of the Romans than we do about the Roman presence in Cornwall, but we can piece together a few things. The Roman pattern was to integrate the upper echelons of conquered peoples into Roman civilian and military structures, so we can assume that in Cornwall they’d have combed through those upper echelons for anyone willing to do business. 

An archeologist for the National Trust who gives her name only as Nancy (what is it with these self-effacing archeologists?) argues that the Romans ran into serious resistance in the southwest, an area that includes Cornwall. Look at Devon, the county you have to pass through to reach Cornwall unless you swim. Or sail. Compare the number of forts with the number of undefended villas. Lots more forts than villas. Hmmm. She talks about Devon as the Romans’ version of Afghanistan–a place where the army bogged down. 

Would the same have been true in Cornwall? I’ll give you a definite maybe on that. So far, we can count four forts and only one possible Roman-influenced villa, but we shouldn’t stretch that evidence too far as we reach for a conclusion.

The Cornish had traded with mainland Europe long before the Roman invasion, so this was hardly their first exposure to outsiders, although the sheer number who came with the army would’ve been a shock, as would, Baskott says, ”the Roman army’s use of prefabricated building materials up to 4 to 6 metres in height. . . . The sheer logistical power of the Army, with cartloads of timber, metalwork weaponry and provisions moving backwards and forwards from barges moored at the new dock on the river would have been amazing.” 

But let’s set Roman ruins aside and look at the Cornish ones. What they show about ordinary life doesn’t indicate big changes in the period we’re talking about. Before the Romans showed up, people lived in round communal houses set in enclosed hamlets that were probably occupied by extended family groups. They farmed and their economy was based on barter, not currency. They built massive defensive ditches and ramparts around hill forts. 

Who were they defending against? Dunno. Baskott talks about “other communities who might raid for cattle and slaves.” They also say social standing would’ve been measured in cattle or sheep.

Is this something they’ve determined from what they’ve found or are they importing the social structures of other cultures at a similar level of complexity? I don’t know, but I thought I’d toss a pinch of doubt into the recipe. 

What changed after the Romans came? Not much. Most people continued to live in the old way, although in some places their houses took on a less communal pattern. Some of Cornwall’s hill forts were abandoned during this period. Others weren’t. And some that were abandoned were re-occupied, still during the Roman occupation. 

What does any of that mean? Fuck if I know. 

Baskott adds his own dash of doubt: “When making . . .  comments about settlement patterns I am somewhat cautious, so little excavation work has gone on in the County [that means Cornwall] that where sites have been thoroughly examined . . . these are likely to set the pattern for the whole and therefore the picture can be canted or warped.” 

So let’s not pretend to know more than is actually known.

 

Fine then. What do we know? 

Less than we’d like. More than we did. The Romans did have a presence, and soldiers, in Cornwall and they were after its minerals. For the most part they didn’t stay long, and even where they did they don’t seem to have had much impact on Cornish life. That makes Cornwall very different from England, where the inhabitants became Romano-British. Cornwall’s residents continued to be Cornish, as did their language.

——————

* I don’t use artificial intelligence to research or write these posts, or for anything else, but since I’m being snooty about AI’s mistakes I should, in the interests of fairness, admit that I once edited a kids’ book whose author tried to slide corned beef in as a grain product. Since this was long before AI existed, I feel safe in assuming that the author was human. And a fool.

** A warning to anyone here who reads English as a second language and wonders why I sometimes use words that can’t be found in the dictionary. I mess around with language. It keeps me from hanging out on the street corner and getting into trouble. Auxiliaring isn’t a word, or not one any dictionary recognizes. It’s me turning the noun auxiliary into a verb to hint at the dreariness of spending 25 years in the Roman army in the hope of still being able to farm by the time you get your plot of land.

Archeology in Britain: a roundup

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Sink a shovel into the soil anywhere in Britain and–

No, I’m about to exaggerate. You won’t necessarily find an ancient artifact, you’ll probably find good old fashioned dirt, but if you scan the papers for archeological news it’s easy to believe you’ll find treasure. Let’s review a few finds:

 

The Galloway Hoard

This was found by a metal detectorist in 2014, in a plowed field in Scotland. It’s one of the richest collections of Viking-age treasure found in Britain so far. The finder was paid something in the neighborhood of £2 million, which ain’t bad for a day’s work. Even if you count all those other days, when he found nothing except the tabs from soda cans, it still ain’t bad.  

The reason finds like this are known instead of being quietly sold to rich collectors is that British laws require detectorists to report their finds to a government body, which works out the cash value and the museum that should receive it if they can raise the money. So the finder benefits. Under English law, the landowner also benefits. Scottish law leaves the landowner out. I’m not sure about Northern Ireland. Either way, though, blank spots in the nation’s history get filled in.

A hand-crafted nail. No idea how old it is, but I didn’t have to stick a shovel in the ground to find it. There’s been quite a bit of construction in the neighborhood and I’d guess someone else dug it up. All I did was walk past and kick it. It has an odd bend (I’ve bent a lot of nails in my time but never that way), and one person who looked at it figured it had been in a fire. All theories–even knowledgeable ones–will be gratefully entertained.

Experts have been working their way through the Galloway Hoard since it was found and in 2024 reported that the metal from a silver cup–okay, a silver vessel–was mined in what’s now Iran and that the vessel itself was probably made for royalty of the Sasanian empire–the last Persian empire before the Muslim conquest. They were Zoroastrian. So it traveled halfway around the known world to get buried in a Scottish field in 900 CE.

Follow the link for damn some good photos of the hoard.

Why did anyone bury it, though, and who did it belong to? An answer to the second question comes from an inscription on a decorated arm ring. (Follow this link as well for photos.)

But before I get to the inscription, let me tell you a few other things: The stash included four arm rings with runic writing. Three had what are described as elements of Old English names, presumably the original owners of the rings. But the experts all stubbed their toes on the fourth arm ring. It didn’t match any known language from early medieval Britain or Ireland. 

Then someone had an inspiration and I’d explain it to you in detail but halfway through the explanation I sank, and I’m here to protect you from that fate, so let’s just say that they made an educated mental leap and realized they might be looking at a shortened or phonetic spelling. That led them to a translation: “This is the community’s wealth,” using a word that specifically meant a religious community.

Which takes us back to the other question: Why did a religious community bury all this wealth? Possibly to keep it safe from Viking raids. Christian monastic communities were full of expensive bling and the Vikings were wise to them. They were an easy target and a rewarding one.

Why didn’t the community dig it up? That’s the problem with history. It’s so full of things we’ll never know. 

 

The Chew Valley Hoard

In 2019, seven detectorists in Somerset set out to mess around with someone’s new metal detector. They’d do a little detecting, get rained on, give the dog some exercise, have a few beers– You know. 

They ended up unearthing 2,584 silver pennies that date back to the time of the Norman Conquest. (1066; you’re welcome.) The best guess is that they were buried for safekeeping during an early rebellion against Norman rule. 

According to Lisa Grace, one of the finders and an expert in cataloguing antiquities, “The hoard may have been the result of looting or maybe the result of somebody hiding their money away because of the revolt.”

The coins have been valued at £4.3 million. Half goes to the landowner and the group will split the rest. I don’t know what the dog gets. 

 

Stone circles

The southwest is full of ancient monuments, and most of them are just sitting out in fields, where you can walk in, lean against them, and feel blown away by their age and mystery, all without paying a fee or worrying about opening and closing hours. You do sometimes have to share them with sheep, cattle, and the occasional wild pony (as well as their droppings), but if you don’t mind, they don’t either. 

A couple of Neolithic stone circles have recently been found on Dartmoor, and at least one of them adds weight to the finder’s theory that there was a circle of stone circles on the moor, which he calls a sacred arc. So far, he’s locate about half of the presumed circle.

One of the newly found circles had a ditch around it, as Stonehenge does, and they were built in roughly the same period.

If the theory’s correct, the other half of the arc is still out there, waiting to be found.

 

Dead bodies

Sorry to get gruesome on you, but when you’ve been dead long enough you stop being the much-missed Aunt Sadie or Uncle Marv and turn into archeology. In other words, your body isn’t gruesome anymore, it’s a clue to history.

People who try to piece together the details of what used to be called the dark ages and is now more respectably called the early medieval period lean heavily on clues from archeology because written records are sparse. Some were destroyed and others–um, yeah, they were never written, which makes them hard to read. 

What’s more, where written records do exist it makes sense to ask how reliable they are. Historians of the time didn’t play by the rules of our era.

With that tucked under our belts, let’s go to Norway, which I admit isn’t in Britain but does have an interesting story to tell: an Icelandic saga from 1197 tells of the siege of Sverresborg Castle. The besiegers broke into the castle and “burned every single house that was there. . . . They took a dead man, and cast him headfirst into the well. Then they piled stones into it until it was full.”

Fast forward a few centuries until 1938, when archeologists found a skeleton in a well, buried by a layer of stones. Aha! Significant! But World War II intervened, the Nazis occupied the area, and suddenly everyone had other things on their minds. The body stayed where it was. It wasn’t until 2014 that anyone got it out and identified it as belonging to a man who was somewhere between 30 and 40 years old. He’d been hit over the head before he died and was injured in assorted other ways as well. Radiocarbon dating put his death in roughly the right period for the siege, and a DNA comparison to modern Norwegians hints that he might have come from southern Norway–the home of the besiegers, not the defenders. Which says they may have thrown their own guy in the well. 

 

So much for history. Do we know anything about the recent past?

Here we’re going to abandon archeology. We can learn about our culture from the papers: in 1977, garden gnomes began disappearing from a town in England. 

You know garden gnomes: those painted plaster statues so beloved of British homeowners that even the people who hate them love to hate them. In place of the missing gnomes, the bereft homeowners found ransom notes. By way of example, one read, “Listen, your gnome has seven hours to live unless you wrap 25 pence and leave it at the car park at Safeways near the bowling green. This is no hoax.”

Time passed. No dead gnomes were spotted, and a few days later, 8 gnomes appeared, as alive as they’d ever been, at a roundabout, draining all the tension out of the story.

A roundabout? That’s an ingenious way of handling traffic without using traffic lights. It either works like a charm or backs traffic up for months, depending on time, place, and circumstance. And luck.

The 8 gnomes were accompanied by three frogs, two squirrels, two toadstools, one peacock, one rabbit, and a Snow White. The statues’ owners reclaimed them, made them a nice cup of tea, and set them back in their gardens without checking them for PTSD because the diagnosis wasn’t widely known yet. 

The perpetrator became known as the Phantom Gnome Snatcher of Formby.

And now, damn near 50 years later, the Phantom has identified himself. Sort of. His name’s Arthur, he’s 62, and he was 15 when he gnome-snatched, with the help of his 5-year-old brother. The two of them scoped out the neighborhood gnomes one night and went back the next night to collect them and leave ransom notes. They did check the locations they’d given in the notes–a phone box; a park bench–and found nothing. 

Yeah, Formby was filled with hard-hearted cheapskates who were willing to let their gnomes die terrible deaths.

“So three nights later we put them all back and thought absolutely nothing of it,” Arthur said.

Arthur was outed–sort of–by a cousin, who didn’t give his name but said on radio, “I know the culprit. . . . He tells that story most Boxing Days and each time he gets a little bit wearier, you can see the weight of his conscience on his shoulders.” 

That led Arthur to call Radio 2 and out himself–minus his last name. 

“It’s been on my conscience that I did this terrible thing,” he said. “I would like to beg forgiveness from all the families that I have caused grief to.”

If that was the worst thing any of us had done–

 

And that brings us to the present day 

Lupa Pizza in Norwich has bowed to pressure and is offering a pizza with a pineapple topping, but there’s a snag: It’ll cost you £100. (If you work in US dollars, that’s $123, give or take a bit, but you’ll have to get there, which ain’t cheap.) 

I know that says something deep and meaningful about the culture, which means it connects perfectly to the archeology theme we’re following here, but I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the connection is.

 

A few Irrelevancies

On a totally irrelevant (to this post, but not to the real world) topic, 200,000 Danes have signed a petition to buy California from the US. It reads, in part:

“Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.’ Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality. . . . We’ll bring hygge to Hollywood, bike lanes to Beverly Hills and organic smørrebrød to every street corner. Rule of law, universal healthcare and fact-based politics might apply.”

The petition’s website includes a call to “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain.”

*

Okay, this has nothing to do with archeology either. A breeding program trying to keep the northern spotted owl from going extinct had a pre-Valentine’s Day offer: for 5 Canadian dollars, you could name a dead rat after an ex–any ex–and get a photo of the rat. And the owl. The deal ended on February 13, but I’m sure they’re still accepting donations. And you could probably talk them into extending the offer just for you. And your ex. 

*

In my last post, I wrote about the problem of telling native from non-native plants. 

“Actually,” I said, to quote my own silly self, “what does native mean? How far back do you want to go? Think about it long enough and your mind will melt.”

To keep my mind from melting, my friend Helen sent me a link to a Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland website, which explains how far back to go.  

Basically, if something was introduced by humans, either deliberately or by accident, and became naturalized between the beginning of the Neolithic period and 1500 CE, then it’s an archeophyte–a fancy way of saying an old plant.

Most of them arrived in the late Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Roman and Medieval periods. Some were hitchhikers that snuck in with crops, others started out in gardens, where they were grown for food or medicine but liked the conditions and jumped the garden to go wild. 

You can break the category down into denizens, colonists, and cultivated crops if you like, but let’s leave that to the experts. Amateurs get hurt messing around with these things. 

After 1500, when Europe and the Americas were in contact–eagerly on one side, reluctantly on the other–all sorts of new plants were introduced: for food, for medicine, for forestry, or because they were pretty. Farming, demographics, trade, and industry changed. All that makes 1500 a handy place to draw a line: Anything introduced after that date is a modern introduction: a neophyte. 

A native plant is one that showed up without human assistance after the last ice age ended or got here before it and somehow survived. It sounds as if the date doesn’t matter, only whether it got here on its own.