A vast quantity of vessels used for feasting, many of them imports, have been unearthed from Celtic settlements and graves. The large numbers, origins and distribution of the feasting vessels have primarily been interpreted as evidence that the Celtic elite was imitating the Mediterranean practice of wine banquets, mimicking the lifestyle of southern elites north of the Alps. To determine what the Celts were actually consuming in those fine imported vessels, a research team led by scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the University of Tübingen embarked on a large-scale examination of organic residues inside the feasting vessels.

The team focused on artifacts found at one the most significant Early Iron Age sites in Western Central Europe: Vix-Mont Lassois in Burgundy, France. The site is best known for the intact princely grave unearthed in 1953 that contained the Vix Krater, an imported Greek bronze volute krater of such gargantuan proportions that at 5’4″ high, 450 lbs in weight and with a capacity of 1,100 liters, it is the largest surviving metal vessel from antiquity. Excavations have recovered hundreds of fragments of Mediterranean pottery, mainly Attic black- and red-figure, amphorae from the Greek colony of Marseille and a broad variety of other imported Mediterranean vessels.

Organ residue analysis was performed on 99 vessels, 16 imported and 83 locally made. Of the local production, 68 are fine ware, high quality vessels on a par with the imports, and 15 are coarse ware. The vessels include both low forms — drinking cups, bowls and beakers — and high forms — amphorae and kraters used for transporting or mixing large quantities.

 The finds included pottery and bronze vessels that had been imported from Greece around 500 BCE. “This was a period of rapid change, during which vessels made in Greece and Italy reached the region north of the Alps in large numbers for the first time. It has generally been assumed that this indicates that the Celts began to imitate the Mediterranean lifestyle, and that only the elite were in a position to drink Mediterranean wine during their banquets,” says LMU archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer, who led the project. “Our analyses confirm that they indeed consumed imported wines, but they also drank local beer from the Greek drinking bowls. In other words, the Celts did not simply adopt foreign traditions in their original form. Instead, they used the imported vessels and products in their own ways and for their own purposes. Moreover, the consumption of imported wine was apparently not confined to the upper echelons of society. Craftsmen too had access to wine, and the evidence suggests that they possibly used it for cooking, while the elites quaffed it in the course of their drinking parties. The study shows that intercultural contact is a dynamic process and demonstrates how easy it is for unfamiliar vessels to serve new functions and acquire new meanings.”

Chemical analysis of the food residues absorbed into the ancient pots now makes it possible to determine what people ate and drank thousands of years ago. The group of authors based at the University of Tübingen analyzed these chemical fingerprints in the material from Mont Lassois. “We identified characteristic components of olive oil and milk, imported wine and local alcoholic beverages, as well as traces of millet and beeswax,” says Maxime Rageot, who performed the chemical analyses in Tübingen. “These findings show that – in addition to wine – beers brewed from millet and barley were consumed on festive or ritual occasions.” His colleague Cynthianne Spiteri adds: “We are delighted to have definitively solved the old problem of whether or not the early Celts north of the Alps adopted Mediterranean drinking customs. – They did indeed, but they did so in a creative fashion!”

That is more than borne out by the combination of and customization of the vessels found in elite graves, most recently the princely tomb unearthed in Lauvau, Champagne, in 2015. Among the exceptional grave goods were a wine feasting service that included an Attic black figure ceramic oinochoe. The oinochoe was made in Greece, rimmed with gold decorated in Etruscan motifs and silver elements with Celtic designs. The bronze cauldron found in the Prince of Lavau’s grave is of Etruscan manufacture and is the second largest known surviving metal vessel from antiquity.

The study has been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Archaeologists excavating a historic site in downtown Granada unexpectedly discovered a lead sarcophagus from the Roman era. They were excavating under the Villamena building, a modern structure next to Granada Cathedral that was built after a 14th century building on the site was demolished in 1938. Under the Nasrid dynasty (1228-1492) Emirate of Granada, it was the Alhóndiga de los Genoveses, a warehouse used by Genoese merchants to store trade goods like silk and sugar. After the Reconquista, their Catholic Majesties turned the building into a prison. It would remain one for four centuries until all the inmates were moved to the new, much larger provincial prison in 1930. Dilapidated and on the verge of collapse, the Alhóndiga was demolished in the last year of the Second Spanish Republic. Only the front gate was left standing. It still stands today, integrated into the modern structure which houses a bank.

When excavations began, therefore, archaeologists expected to find remains from the Middle Ages, at most. They were doing an archaeological survey as required by law before underground construction work. They did find a few minor remains from the Emirate and Christian eras, nothing of particular significance, and decided before the excavation ended to go down a little deeper. Eight feet below the surface under a slab of muddy sandstone, they unearthed a grave. That wasn’t necessarily exceptional in and of itself, but when the slab was removed, head archaeologist Ángel Rodríguez was stupified to see a lead sarcophagus

Rodríguez believes the sarcophagus dates back to the 2nd or 3rd century AD, a time when lead sarcophagi were not at all common. In Andalusia, they were expensive as well as difficult to obtain, because the industry only existed in Córdoba, over 200 kilometers away. “Córdoba is the only place where they made lead sarcophagi,” Rodríguez explains. […]

The lead sarcophagus … weighs between 300 and 350 kilograms, and has the same dimensions of a classic coffin: 1.97 meters long and 40 centimeters high. It is slightly wider at the head (56 centimeters) than at the foot (36 centimeters). On first inspection, Rodríguez says there is no sign of an inscription, but adds that “it still has a lot of clay and sand,” and “we’ll see when we clean it.” The outside of the sarcophagus has already given researchers many insights, and the inside is expected to give many more when it is opened in a few weeks.

It had to have belonged to a wealthy person as lead sarcophagi were extremely expensive even in places where they were made locally. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, what is now downtown Granada was the countryside outside of the Roman town. The Albaicín district, where the Alhambra is located, was the center of a modest Roman settlement. While it was out of town, there was no cemetery on the site either. The lost river Darro ran through it. Another lead sarcophagus was reportedly found by workers at the site in 1902, but it was looted to nothingness before archaeologists could get there. It’s possible the riverside held some funerary significance for the residents of the Roman settlement and its Iberian founders.

The sarcophagus is now being cleaned and conserved at the Archaeological Museum of Granada. Researchers are deciding how best to approach opening the coffin with the least amount of damage. A team of anthropologists, restorers and archaeologists will attend the opening to document its contents.

Because lead preserves its contents very well, it’s possible the sarcophagus still holds human remains, grave goods, perhaps even textiles which will shed new light on funerary practices of Roman Granada. Any human remains found at the opening will be transferred to the forensic anthropology laboratory at Granada University. The sarcophagus itself and contents will remain in the museum for further study.

Must Farm quarry in the Cambridgeshire fens near Whittlesey, southeast England, is the site of a Late Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement so well-preserved that it the press gleefully dubbed it the Pompeii of the Fens. Like all of the myriad “Pompeii of the X” out monickers out there, it’s an entirely inaccurate comparison, but the site is unprecedented on its own terms. The excavation of the 3,000-year-old settlement unearthed the largest group of Bronze Age artifacts ever found in Britain, and that was just the beginning. Beyond the thousands of objects — textiles, beads of amber, jet and glass, fineware and coarseware pottery, spear points, a bronze sickle or bill hook, swords, tools, weirs, eel traps, a wooden bowl with the remains of nettle stew, eight intact log boats, an absolutely incredible intact wooden wheel, and much more — the structure of the settlement itself was revealed in the remains of collapsed roundhouses built on stilts, complete with wattle walls, a large wooden platform and a wooden palisade.

Organic materials were exquisitely preserved in the waterlogged river-silt of what is now the Flag Fen Basin, making the Must Farm settlement the site of the most completely preserved prehistoric domestic structures in Britain. Only the Neolithic lake-dwellings of the Circum-Alpine can compare with Must Farms’ diversity of artifacts, surviving architecture and clear definition of how the settlement was organized.

When excavations ended in 2016, archaeologists had a rough idea of the settlement’s timeline based on their field work. The first stages of construction took place around 1300 B.C. in the channel of the ancient Nene River. This was not a settlement, but a causeway used to cross the channel and for fishing. As groundwater levels rose, the causeway was flooded and in around 1000 B.C. new piles were sunk and the palisade added to help keep water out. Then, between 920 and 800 B.C., the settlement was struck by a catastrophic fire which put an end to human habitation of the site.

In the first publication since the end of excavations, archaeologists from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit present a new, much shorter window of time in which Must Farm was occupied before its destruction by fire.

The oak piles discovered in a 2006 archaeological survey of the site pre-date the pile-dwelling settlement. They were the supports for a causeway across the southeastern end of the Flag Fen Basin. By the time the settlement was built, all that would have been visible of the causeway were the rotted tops of the oak piles showing above the water.

The pile-dwellings were constructed during a period when the river, still active, was shallow and wide from silt build-up. The settlement consisted of at least five buildings on stilts, four circular, one trapezoidal, a palisade and a raised walkway. They were built over deep-set concentric rings of piles strong enough to support heavy roof timbers. The floors were relatively lightweight, built using slim poles and hurdle panels. Pathways of mortis-jointed timbers connected the structures and lined the inside of the palisade.

The thin stratigraphy, architectural clarity and highly structured artefactual and biological assemblages all suggest a brief occupation. The settlement’s limited life span is most vividly expressed by the close stratigraphic relationship between the woodchips from construction and the collapsed, charred structural remains of its demise, with the latter resting more or less directly on top of the former.

The emerging evidence suggests that one year is a reasonable estimate for the length of settlement occupation. Ongoing dendrochronological analysis of the structural timbers reveals that the settlement was built in a single construction phase, using wood of a similar felling year. The same analysis also shows differential sapwood shrinkage on areas of individual oaks protected from, and exposed to, the fire, which suggests that the timbers were still green, or unseasoned, when the settlement was destroyed by fire. Oak timber is broadly accepted to require one to two years to season under natural conditions in Britain. This would provide a terminus ante quem for the duration of occupation, if confirmed by experimental charring of green oak. During excavation, it also became clear that wood-boring insect damage was nearly absent on the structural timbers, despite the retention of sapwood and bark on many elements, including the hurdle gangway. Insects are known to colonise timber structures rapidly; this includes synanthropes, which are also absent in the Must Farm assemblage.

So instead of decades of occupation, it seems the settlement was active for less than a year when disaster struck. The density of artifacts, some of which could not have been locally sourced and must have come from impressively extended trade networks, in dwellings that were only occupied for a matter of months attest to the remarkable richness of daily life in an entirely routine Bronze Age fenland settlement.

The study is fascinating and exceptionally readable and has been published in open access form so everyone can enjoy its contents free of charge. I highly recommend it.