Dung Awareness Day

Yes, it’s Dung Awareness Day (and I bet you didn’t even send a card). I don’t know if this will become an annual feature – probably not – but this time around it’s been inspired by the arrival of the new issue of Environmental Archaeology. It’s a special issue devoted to bioarchaeological research on animal dung. The intention, according to the editorial, is to provide “a base for increasing the awareness of dung as an important archaeological find category and for standardisation of its study” (p.2). So, to do my bit towards this laudable aim, I’ll provide a brief review of this volume, with a focus on one particular article, looking specifically at what dung can tell us about farming in the past.

Before continuing, I should specify that we’re talking here about actual preserved faeces, not just trace evidence of dung (such as where phosphate analysis of soils is used to identify manuring or stabling – something I should write about in another post). And I don’t want to give the impression that archaeologists have only just discovered dung. Back in 1996, the very first issue of Environmental Archaeology included papers such as “Disentangling dung: pathways to stable manure” (Hall & Kenward 1996). In Viking-age York, the famously large – ahem – ‘deposit’ at Lloyd’s Bank has no doubt livened up many a school visit. I’ve even found charred dung-like pellets in my samples from Lyminge (yet to be interpreted!). Bringing us up-to-date, the current volume of Environmental Archaeology stems from an international, interdisciplinary workshop held in 2010 at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, with a view to establishing “more common methodological approaches” (p.1). If I weren’t writing this on a train, I’d dig out a copy of Manure Matters, another recent dung-related publication, for comparison (Jones ed. 2012).

Now, a cursory glance at the bewildering number of authors responsible for some of these papers (e.g. the eight people behind Kuzmicheva et al. 2013) will tell you that this is something of a sciencey volume. And sure enough, the very first paper gives us some molecular diagrams (Linseele et al. 2013). This paper’s about the preservation and recovery of archaeological dung, and the methods we can use to identify what species produced a given faecal deposit: its size and shape, its biological contents, its chemical composition, even ancient DNA. Given a good state of preservation and ample funding, we could stand a good chance of identifying the species from which some dung ultimately derived.

There then follow two experimental papers. The two Michaels (Wallace and Charles 2013), examine the dung of modern sheep whose diet is already known, in order to find out how well different plant parts survive the sheep digestive process: in short, cereal grain and chaff rarely survive, whereas various wild plant seeds survive pretty well. In this way, the authors demonstrate a crucial rule for interpreting the botanical contents of archaeological dung: “What goes in does not always come out.” In a rather different experiment, meanwhile, Valamoti 2013 compares undigested glume bases (chaff) of einkorn – a hulled wheat – with those derived from the pellets of a modern goat, and finds that goat digestion creates a “rugged” surface on the glume bases. Hence, it is possible to distinguish dung-derived glume bases from those otherwise burned, in the archaeological record.

Three archaeological case studies then follow, looking at what hyrax dung in Ethiopia can tell us about long-term vegetation history (Kuzmicheva et al. 2013) and the gut contents of elephants and other animals from a Predynastic cemetery in Egypt (Marinova et al. 2013). But it is the paper by Kühn et al. that is perhaps most relevant for Farming Unearthed – specifically, animal husbandry unearthed. They consider dung from the well-known Neolithic Alpine lakeshore settlements – famous for being waterlogged (thanks to rising lake levels) and therefore often extremely well-preserved. Two German sites on Lake Federsee are chosen as a case study. In terms of chronology, we’re talking early 3^rd millennium BC. Dung from both sites was analysed, including micromorphology of the dung itself, the parasites preserved within it, and the botanical remains too. In this way, a substantial difference is revealed between what you might call the two site’s ‘dung signatures’. At Alleshausen-Täschenwiesen, we have the pellets of sheep/goats, whose botanical contents suggest that the animals were overwintered within the settlements and fed on twigs and leaves (p.55). At Alleshausen-Grundwiesen, but contrast, we have “a huge layer of cattle manure” (p.53) from cattle which grazed, free-ranging, during the daytime throughout the year, but were brought back into the settlement at night – where they were sometimes perhaps foddered, and where they evidently also produced a lot of manure (p.55).

Clearly the wider significance of these findings will only become apparent when more analysts follow the authors’ example, and provide comparative dung studies for many more Neolithic lakeshore settlements. But this is a useful and thought-provoking contribution to a useful and thought-provoking volume. Give it a try, if you can get hold of a copy. It may not be glamorous, but it’s surely time to embrace dung-studies as an integral part of agricultural archaeology.

MJM.

References

Hall, A. & Kenward, H. (1996). “Disentangling dung: pathways to stable manure”, Environmental Archaeology 1(1), pp.123-6.

Jones,  R. (ed.) (2012). Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives; Ashgate: Farnham.

Kühn, M., Maier, U., Herbig, C., Ismail-Meyer, K., Le Bailly, M. & Wick, L. (2013). “Methods for the examination of cattle, sheep and goat dung in prehistoric wetland settlements with the examples of the sites Alleshausen-Taschenwiesen and Alleshausen-Grundwiesen (around 2900 cal. BC) at Lake Federsee, South West Germany”, Environmental Archaeology 18(1), pp.43-57.

Kuzmicheva, E.A., Debella, H.J., Khasanov, B.F., Krylovich, O.A., Babenko, A.N., Savinetsky, A.B., Severova, E.E. & Yirga, S. (2013). “Holocene hyrax dung deposits in the afroalpine belt of the Bale Mountains (Ethiopia) and their palaeoclimatic implication”, Environmental Archaeology 18(1), pp.72-81.

Linseele, V., Riemer, H., Baeten, J., De Vos, D., Marinova, E. & Ottoni, C. (2013). “Species identification of archaeological dung remains: a critical review of potential methods”, Environmental Archaeology 18(1), pp.5-17.

Marinova, E., Ryan, P.W. & Van Neer, R.F. (2013). “Animal dung from arid environments and archaeobotanical methodologies for its analysis: an example from animal burials of the predynastic elite cemetery HK6 at Hierakonpolis, Egypt”, Environmental Archaeological 18(1), pp.58-71.

Valamoti, S.-M. (2013). “Towards a distinction between digested and undigested glume bases in the archaeobotanical record from Neolithic northern Greece. A preliminary experimental investigation”, Environmental Archaeology 18(1), pp.31-42.

Wallace, M. & Charles, M. (2013). “What goes in doesn’t always come out: the impact of the ruminant digestive system of sheep on plant material, and its importance for the interpretation of dung-derived archaeobotanical assemblages,” Environ

Ploughing ahead e-booklet

Just to let you know that an e-booklet, containing titles and abstracts from Ploughing Ahead, is now available to download from the colloquium page. Happy to make good any errors or omissions – just let me know!

Autumn Conference Watch

Well, it’s supposedly spring, but as British readers will know, the weather has been distinctly autumnal of late. Not exactly cheering, but it has made me think ahead to the real autumn, when archaeologists venture out of their burrows to forage among the late-fruiting conferences for enough information to keep them thoughtful over the winter. And here’s one that may be of particular interest to Farming Unearthed readers:

“Life in the past: archaeology and rural skills” – Saturday12th October 2013

http://www.acearch.org.uk/conference.htm

As “Ploughing Ahead” has demonstrated, there is a lot to be gained by bringing theoretical experts and experienced practitioners together to discuss traditional skills and practices. This conference, organized and hosted by the ACE Archaeology Club of Devon, intends to do just that, in order to shed more light on rural activities which are often obscure to the archaeologist and historian, but which may be alive and well in rural communities around the world. This looks like “one to watch” – and not just because the webpage features illustrations of ploughing. I look forward to seeing what’s on the programme in due course!

MJM.

Exciting new publication

Hello again! Although I have been very preoccupied recently by matters doctoral and nuptial, I thought I should spare a moment to tell you about a new publication which has excited me considerably:

Cunliffe, B. (2013). The Roman Villa at Brading, Isle of Wight. The excavations of 2008-10 (Oxford University School of Archaeology: Oxford).

(distributed, naturally, by Oxbow)

This is the much-anticipated report on the new campaign of excavations at the Isle of Wight’s archaeological celebrity: known as Brading Roman villa, but close to the village and medieval manor of Morton, situated at the foot of the chalk downs that constitute the island’s central spine. The site is famous for its mosaics: some of the finest (and most mysterious) in Britain, even northern Europe. The cock-headed man alone has inspired its fair share of speculation since its discovery in the 1880s.

But my own particular interest is twofold: firstly, I wrote my undergraduate site report on the villa in 2008; and immediately afterwards, I was lucky enough to join the volunteer digging crew for Prof. Sir Barry Cunliffe’s excavations of 2008, 2009 and 2010. The first two years were spent re-excavating the north and south ranges of the villa quad which, lacking mosaics, had long been backfilled (except for a hypocaust section that I vividly remember from old school visits). The third season broke new ground beyond the carpark (!) and discovered, amongst other things, Iron Age cremation urns. Published with these excavation results is a composite geophysics survey of the all the land surrounding the villa, mostly now owned by the Oglander Roman Trust. As the great professor emeritus himself remarked at the dig, the whole project shows that much can still be learned from “old” villa sites like this, with targeted, focused research agendas. Despite centuries of antiquarianism-cum-archaeology, we cannot claim to have “done” Romano-British villas.

All very well, you may say, but where’s the farming? Well, it’s more a matter of future potential in this case. The excavated villa has corn-drying ovens, yes – one of them, scandalously, sunk into a mosaic pavement. And the apparent importance of the Celtic bean (Vicia faba) has been noted repeatedly: most recently in the study of charred plant remains by Ruth Pelling in the new volume. Animal bones and marine molluscs further fill out the picture of villa cuisine. But even more tantalizingly, the geophysics reveal a complex network of ditches and other features in the surrounding lands, some of which presumably represent enclosures and tracks/droveways; the report also flags up the potential for finding ancillary structures (stables? granaries? quarters for farmhands?).

There is a vast literature on villa mosaics in Roman Britain, a great number of guidebooks detailing the functioning of a Romano-British bath suite and hypocaust… but are there so many comprehensive studies of luxury villas in their agricultural contexts? Wouldn’t it be grand if we could tell the (relatively) complete story of places like Brading – from farm to fork to cock-headed men?

Hm… does anyone have a research grant?

MJM.

We have ploughed ahead

Just a quick post to say that the “Ploughing Ahead” colloquium ran very enjoyably, with all papers and posters making a fascinating contribution. More detail to follow soon – but highlights can already be found on Twitter, courtesy of our first speaker, Dr Richard Thomas, who tweeted throughout – fantastic!

https://twitter.com/AnimalBones

MJM.

Lyminge Part 2 – A cast of thousands

In the last thrilling instalment, I introduced my tangential involvement with the Lyminge Archaeological Project, and described how I spent a substantial slice of life examining large quantities of charred plant remains. So, what did I find?

Well, the most striking thing about my assemblage is Sample 24 which, not to put too fine a point on it, is enormous. More professionally, I might say that it is both extraordinarily abundant, and unusually dense, for a Middle Saxon archaeobotanical sample – i.e. there are lots of charred items per litre of soil sieved.

This becomes particularly clear if we plot a graph of Middle Saxon charred samples by density (number of standardized items per litre soil), highlighting those from Lyminge. As you’ll see, only two samples in this dataset are more dense than Sample 24 (those two, incidentally, do not represent my own work, but will be studied more closely in my thesis – read it and find out!). We’ll encounter one of these two samples (one from Yarnton in Oxfordshire) again in a few moments.

So, what – if anything – does this tell us? Well, as a general rule, it’s been argued that relatively dense deposits probably represent material that was deposited quickly, maybe abruptly; it’s unlikely to represent a gradual accumulation of stuff, which would produce a sparser sample (e.g. van der Veen 2007, p.987, Table 6). But I’m not saying that this sample is homogeneous. On the contary, there are significant differences in the contents of its six constituent sub-samples, suggesting perhaps that several different bodies of material were deposited here at about the same time: something like a dump of assorted rubbish.

So, then: what kind of “rubbish”? Well, firstly, there’s a relatively high proportion of culm nodes and internodes – straw, in plain English.
And that’s where the very dense sample from Yarnton (mentioned above) comes back onto the stage: for straw is unusually well-represented in that sample, too. The Yarnton material was analysed by Chris Stevens, who suggests that this sample may represent the burning of sheaves (Stevens in Hey 2004, p.361). This is a more interesting suggestion than it might sound. It suggests, perhaps, that the people of Yarnton were storing cereals as sheaves: still with the straw, straight from the harvest, not even threshed.

Now, in a seminal paper on grain storage, Sigaut describes how grain stored in sheaves is relatively well-protected against deterioration, albeit at the cost of taking up more space than ‘cleaned’ grain (Sigaut 1988, 6). Sheaves themselves are typically stored either in barns, or in open-air ricks (or bykes, stacks, etc. – terminology and forms have subtle variations) – see Sigaut’s invaluable table on p.17.

The Yarnton sample comes from a pit, within a small fenced enclosure just to the south of a building with (hints of) a line of central internal posts. The Lyminge sample comes from a pit adjacent to a building with a clear line of central internal posts, identified by the excavator as an aisled barn – with a supposed threshing floor nearby.

If you’ll allow me to be a bit fanciful, then, might I suggest that both samples represent sheaves from their nearby barns? If the Lyminge sample really does represent burnt sheaves, then that might help to explain the lack of homogeneity between sub-samples: grain, chaff, straw and associated weeds might well cluster in different parts of the deposit, depending upon how the sheaves were bound up.

Just some thoughts, anyway. And there’s more to come…

MJM.

References

Sigaut, F. (1988). “A Method for Identifying Grain Storage Techniques and its Application for European Agricultural History”, Tools & Tillage, 6(1), pp.3-32.

Stevens, C. (2004). “Yarnton. Charred plants remains,” in G. Hey, Yarnton: Saxon and Medieval Landscape and Settlement (Oxford Archaeology), pp.351-364.

van der Veen, M. (2007). “Formation processes of desiccated and carbonized plant remains – the identification of routine practice”, Journal of Archaeological Science 34, pp.968-990.

Lyminge Part 1 – Curse of the Black Spelt

It was a cold, darkling evening in winter, and the Institute of Archaeology lay safely at anchor in Oxford harbour, sheltered in the lee of the Ashmolean. As the clock struck 7 bells, a visiting Captain – I mean, lecturer – took his stand upon the quarterdeck and delivered an engaging Powerpoint presentation. The subject: buried treasure, at the village of Lyminge in Kent… buried treasure of an Anglo-Saxon variety.

After the lecture, before the attendees departed for a swig of grog and some archaeological banter, a young midshipman – I mean, doctoral student – piped up about how interested he was in the agricultural aspects of the lecture. Not least the famous plough coulter – and not least the charred plant remains which, intriguingly, contained spelt.

A few e-mails and research proposals later, I found myself in the privileged position of having 10 environmental samples from the Middle Saxon monastic site of Lyminge, just waiting for me to shove them under a microscope and starting analysing, courtesy of Dr Gabor Thomas and his team at the University of Reading, to whom I’m very grateful for the opportunity. Before I start expounding on charred plant remains, I should say that the (ongoing) Lyminge Archaeological Project is one to watch – perhaps the most exciting Anglo-Saxon excavation project of the decade. And it also has an impeccable online presence, including a blog, a popular website, and an academic profile with downloadable reports. With a monastery, a coulter, and now a great hall of Beowulfian proportions… You can’t help feeling that the Lyminge crew will hit the headlines again before too long.

One small part of this epic tale is provided by the charred plant remains, recovered through the flotation and sieving of soil samples. Commendably, the Lyminge team take samples from virtually everywhere, and preservation conditions are good, so there’s (potentially) a huge botanical dataset here. My concern, however, was with the 10 samples which, according to a prior assessment by English Heritage’s environmental expert (Campbell 2012), were the richest source of charred plant remains from the Middle Saxon monastic phase at Lyminge.

What I didn’t know at the outset, of course, was just how rich these samples would prove to be – just how many tiny black grains I’d be confronted with. Little did I know, when I first sat down in the basement of the Institute of Archaeology with a microscope before me, that I’d be counting over 10,000 of the little blighters.  That I would see burnt cereals in my dreams.

So it was that I came under the curse of the black spelt.

At times I thought I might go mad – but then I remembered that I was already an archaeologist.

Eventually, though, slowly but surely, a picture began to emerge…

~ to be continued ~

MJM – MMXIII