Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

If we assume that the colour-coding on the map actually means something, there are three distinct groups on Orkney (Orange, Purple and Lime-Green). This is presumably the startling "no-shit sherlock" proof that some families tend to stay put and live close together?

But it is interesting that the Lime-Green group is in the south of Orkney, where the best harbours and ports are. The only other clusters of Lime-Green seems to be on Islay and Mull of Kintyre. Proving something else?

[TisILeclerc]

Regarding wheat the link from Borry takes us to another article which discusses the use of flour by ancient people.

Not flour as we know it, but flour made from 'cattails' and 'ferns'. These finds date back to at least thirty thousand years ago so the technology was already in place for grinding grains.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Longo and her colleagues started analysing unwashed stone tools from a 28,000-year-old human settlement in central Italy called Bilancino. Patterns of wear on the sandstone tools suggest that they were used for grinding, like a mortar and pestle. The stones were also coated with several kinds of microscopic starch grains. Longo and her colleagues identified the grains based on their shape as belonging to the root of a species of cattail and the grains of a grass called Brachypodium.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/ ... 0.549.html

Apparently cattails are very nutritious and were a staple for American Indians.



http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants ... tails.html

Perhaps roast aurochs and yorkshire pud were a stone age delicacy after all.

[Boreades]

Perhaps roast aurochs and yorkshire pud were a stone age delicacy after all.

I'm happy with that, I wonder what they used for Horseradish?

[Boreades]

Here's another curiosity.

It's said that

A broch is an Iron Age drystone hollow-walled structure of a type found only in Scotland.

Fairy'nuff.

Except that on Sardinia we have the Nuraghe

The nuraghe [nuˈraɡe] (plural Italian nuraghi, Sardinian Logudorese nuraghes / Sardinian Campidanese nuraxis) is the main type of ancient megalithic edifice found in Sardinia, developed during the Nuragic Age between 1900 and 730 BCE. Today it has come to be the symbol of Sardinia and its distinctive culture, the Nuragic civilization. More than 7000 nuraghi have been found, though archeologists believe that originally there were not less than 10,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe

A Broch:



A Nuraghe:



Here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe - it says

The nuraghes were built between the middle of the Bronze Age (18th-15th centuries BCE) and the Late Bronze Age. This clearly rules out any possible cultural correlation with later towers such as Scottish Brochs (dating mainly to the 1st centuries BCE and CE).

But, for that, we have to take their words for when they were built.

Oh, and as usual, when the orthos are confused...

There is no consensus on the function of the nuraghes: they could have been religious temples, ordinary dwellings, rulers' residences, military strongholds, meeting halls, or a combination of the former.

... there's an opportunity for TME to offer a better explanation.

[Boreades]

One summer holiday long ago, I learnt to sail in Salcombe (not responsible for that shipwreck)

Would you like to go sailing there again?
The SS Golden Rivet is now seaworthy.

[Boreades]

On a related page...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuragic_civilization

..it's said that:

The first verifiable smelting slag has come to light; its appearance in a hoard of ancient tin confirms local smelting as well as casting

And at the very end, almost as a passing footnote, it says:

Sardinia was rich in metals such as lead and copper. Archaeological findings have proven the good quality of Nuragic metallurgy, including numerous bronze weapons. The so-called "golden age" of the Nuragic civilization (mid-2nd millennium BC) coincided perhaps with the apex of the mining of metals in the island. Sardinian copper ingots have been found in Spain, France, Turkey and Greece. The widespread use of bronze, an alloy which used tin, a metal which however was not present in Sardinia if not in a single deposit, further proves the capability of the Nuragic people to trade in the resources they needed. A recent study (2013) of 71 ancient Swedish bronze objects dated to Nordic Bronze Age, revealed that most of copper utilized at that time in Scandinavia came from Sardinia and the Iberian peninsula.

But then they fail to join the dots and figure out how bronze from Sardinia gets to Sweden. The TME position might be the same people worked the Baltic Trade routes, from the Sardinian Nuraghe/brochs via the Scottish brochs.

[Mick Harper]

There's a big problem though about the dating of the Sardinian nuraghi. I am exploring Centuries of Darkness to get to the bottom of this.

[Boreades]

The study of 71 ancient Swedish bronze objects dated to Nordic Bronze Age, originally reported here,
http://www.shfa.se/Include/UltimateEdit ... efacts.pdf

Snippets from the 27 pages:

The first part of this research published previously proved without doubt that the metals dated to the Nordic Bronze Age found in Sweden were not smelted from the local copper ores. In this second part we present a detailed interpretation of these analytical data with the aim to identify the ore sources from which these metals originated. The interpretation of lead isotope and chemical data of 71 Swedish Bronze Age metals is based on the direct comparisons between the lead isotope data and geochemistry of ore deposits that are known to have produced copper in the Bronze Age. The presented interpretations of chemical and lead isotope analyses of Swedish metals dated to the Nordic Bronze Age are surprising and bring some information not known from previous work. Apart from a steady supply of copper from the Alpine ores in the North Tyrol, the main sources of copper seem to be ores from the Iberian Peninsula and Sardinia.

In the light of the presented observations, and that the inferred source areas for metals are widely apart, we will argue for the possibility of two major systems of metal flow from Europe to Sweden in the Bronze Age); one Atlantic (maritime) and one via Central and south east Europe (amber routes, overland/riverine).

An important observation in the context of the connections between British Isles and Scandinavia is the consistency of the lead isotope composition of the tin ingot from Vårdinge in Sweden (T1:60) with the ores from Cornwall. Actually, the availability of tin might be the reason why several copper pro-ducing areas directed their copper routes to pass the British Isles during the Bronze Age. Probably, traders were in many cases not searching separately for tin and copper, but were receiving the two metals from nearby ports, stressing the possibility that ports in the British Isles acted as transit centres for copper from other parts of Europe as well as providing local tin ore.

But where's the tin from?

Only once in all the 27 pages can I find mention of where the tin came from:

However, amongst the artefacts from period V site of Vårdinge there is a very unusual find of pure tin ring-shaped rod (T1:60) that is fully consistent with the lead isotope compositions of ores from Cornwall, and a copper melt (T1:71), nearly free of impurities, that also could be from Cornwall, if copper was smelted then in Cornwall.

[Mick Harper]

Most valuable. Note that our own view -- that there were two distinct routes, one up through the Irish Sea and one up the Elbe -- is confirmed. Note also that they are obsessed with metals (which tend to survive in archaeological evidence) rather than with the even more important salt (which tends not to).

[hvered]

A Wiki article on nuraghi discusses the etymology along with dating and function. First up is our own inestimable OED:

"The word is perhaps related to the Sardinian place names Nurra, Nurri, Nurru, and to Sardinian nurra 'heap of stones, cavity in earth' (although these senses are difficult to reconcile). A connection with the Semitic base of Arabic nūr 'light, fire, etc.' is now generally rejected."

followed by
"An etymological theory suggests a palaeo-Basque origin by the term *nur (stone) with the common -ak plural ending;[5] the Paleo-Sardinian suffix -ake it's also found in some indoeuropean languages such as latin and greek.[6] Another possible explanation is that the word Nuraghe came from the name of the mythological hero Norax, in this case the root *nur would be an adaptation of the indo-european root *nor."

Just across the way to the north of Sardinia is Corsica, once colonised by Phoenicians/Carthaginians, which has similar structures known as torri, plural of torre i.e. tower.

The reference to Norax seems to be an 'explanation' of the Nora Stone "still considered the oldest Phoenician inscription yet found in Sardinia and the oldest inscription in the western Mediterranean"....dated rather conveniently to coincide exactly with the supposed age of the nuraghi, i.e. probably ninth-century BC.



The town of Nora was built in the south on a peninsula by the Phoenicians, whether or not nuraghi were already in situ isn't known but it is believed to be the oldest town in Sardinia.

According to legend, Nora was founded by a group of Iberians from Tartessus led by Norax, a mythological hero son of Eriteide and the god Hermes.[2] It is believed to be the first town founded in Sardinia and to have been settled by the ancient Sherden or the Nuraghi people, and later colonized by Phoenicians.

"Sherden" is one of several names that vaguely refer to 'Sea Peoples'. Even less is known about 'Nuraghi'.