Study on Ritual wood burning in Iron Age Ireland.

[pango]

For those of you interested in such things, a fascinating study has developed from an archaeological dig in Ireland containing a ritual fire-pit. Dating of consecutive burning events, and types and proportions of various woods identified from charcoal analysis throw up some quite evocative patters which suggest purposeful selection of wood types.

I hope I'm not breaking protocol by posting this paper published by Connor Newman, et al, National University of Ireland, Galway, as it is freely available in Academia.edu Weekly Digest. https://www.academia.edu/about

Report as follows;

https://www.academia.edu/25622623/I...l_site_in_eastern_Ireland_a_holistic_approach


Thanks, and enjoy,

Pango.

 

[Toddy]

Hmmm, aye.
Thank you for the link; interesting to read through.

I wonder if he'd considered that the 'everybody bring a branch' type thing might have occured ? Like the Beltane fire ?

atb,
M

 

[boatman]

I wondered that Toddy. Nice simple explanation.

 

[Robson Valley]

pango: thank you for the link to the research. Wood anatomy has been/is a personal and professional career interest of mine.
I've done charcoal and it's really hard to work with. From an accidental excavation revealing a 10K yr old camp fire, fire and some mammoth remains.
The firewood was spruce (Picea sp), all broken, none deliberately cut. As the most recent of the glacial ice ages melted back, the boreal forest
retreated with the ice margins, now some 600 miles to the north.

From the link, even just the abstract is worth a read. When compared with the pollen analysis, the burnt wood was not randomly selected nor for it's availability or combustibility. Some ring radii indicated very large branches or trunk wood. Seems to have been purposeful meaning to what they were doing.

 

[boatman]

Can't judge by sizes of wood really. Family had a fire on a beach near us yesterday. They broke up round wood, gathered drift wood and hauled a great bit of fallen trunk to their fire. If most of the wood was brash and offcuts then probably not chosen specifically for their thermal qualities either yesterday or way back.

 

[Robson Valley]

The process for estimating trunk size from the radius or curvature of growth ring fragments is very tedious but straight-forward. They describe what they did. I agree.
It allows you to say they burned pieces from very large diameter trunks and smaller pieces. The species variety was so limited that the investigators surmise that the woods were selected by deliberate choice. For me, the paper was a good read. Very densely written as I expected.

 

[Toddy]

….how about adult taking large limbs, and children carrying small branches ?

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Ah. The voice of practical solution. Works for me.

 

[Tengu]

How do we know it was ritual? Maybe they were having a BBQ?

 

[Toddy]

We don't, but…. how often do you find a spot with the same sized bonfire on it, time after time….but with many years between burnings ? and then a piece of human skull on the top of it ?
The 'standing stone' is an anomaly until you read the rest and it points out that that's the dividing / marker for three different lands. It was normal in the past to put a stone up where we would use a trig point or a marker post.

But, all on the exact same spot ?

Personally I think he's belabouring the point, and it might simply be the site where the locals, from the three different areas, all sat down and discussed matters. Finally they just stuck up a big stone on the top.

Where the bit of skull came from though ? there was a burial on the wider henge site though. Did anyone check the bones there ?

M

 

[Robson Valley]

I always try to not get any of that speculation on my shoes, hard to scrape off.

All over North America, isolated features of geographic or geological notice were used as common ground for "summer meetings."

Mistaseni, the Sleeping Buffalo Child, was a 45(?) ton glacial erratic stone, a meeting site for thousands of years.
In the 1960's, the gov't sent a crew to blow it to pieces, claiming that it would be a navigation hazard in the new lake which
would form behind the Diefenbaker Dam.
The remains sit on the bottom in 70' of cold, dark water.
My brother led the rediscovery dive just a couple of years ago.
I have a small piece of the remains.

I'll hazard a guess that there's much more to come around that standing stone.
I'll guess that their get-together meetings lasted for weeks. Why not visit?

 

[Toddy]

The thing about Archaeology is though, that there's no explanation until interpretation. Interpretation is subjective even if it is based on objective findings.

M

 

[boatman]

Picnic site above Uffington White Horse in use for about 3,000 or so years. Irregular meet up to scour the horse approximately every 5 years.

 

[Robson Valley]

First Nations summer meetings in North America have lasted well into recent recorded history, photographs and all.
Purposes, timing and functions all documented. The meetings at Mistaseni lasted 6-8 weeks with a mile or more of family teepees.
Tyrone Tootoosis (Poundmaker) is the curator of plains Cree archives, the photographs are fascinating.
Ponder the issues of food, water and waste for a hundred families for 6 weeks.

To address the issues of artifacts lying on the surface of the ground, Canadian anthropologists
have concluded that it takes no more than just the ants (yeah, simple ants) to make a 10cm soil
turnover in a century. Everything gets buried even if there was little or no wind-borne soil erosion (eg the "Dirty Thirties.").

I'm happy to postulate that other social groupings all across the world have done the same.
Intermarriage is a well-tried mechanism for trade and political solidarity.

 

[Macaroon]

I'm following this with great interest - fascinating discussion.

 

[LostViking]

Very interesting paper.

I always love it when modern folks try to interpret what primordial folks were doing.


If I'm cooking meat, I usually use cherry or apple.

If I want a fire with not much smoke or popping, I use beech or ash.

If I'm trying for coals in the morning, I go with moderately seasoned oak or hard maple.

My ritual fires, which occur quite often, usually involving alcohol. Are mostly a hodge podge of anything I can drag out of the woods that will burn. They tend to be somewhat larger than my cooking fires

Any way you slice it. It would have been very cool to share some fire time with those folks from long ago.

 

[Janne]

Yes, archeology and the interpretation of it can be not more that an educated guess.
But in this case, after I have read the article, there must be some deeper meaning to that fireplace that simple cooking and warmth.

 

[Janne]

What is quite interesting is that after the ritual/religious fires 9 which are NOt interesting, quite common all around Europe), they used parts ( or whole?) of a skull more than a century old.

Skulls did not just lie around, so the people must have known about a burial place of (maybe) somebody important/holy/wise.
Maybe a chieftain or priest?

But something we will never know is WHY. Why the ritual burns. Why the skull.
Making the place more holy like we Christians used to do with relics of Saints deposited in churches, so pilgrims would come and spend some cash??
Making the site "purified" and fit for worship?
Maybe the place was not a place of worship, but a defensive post, and the skull used to belong to a famed warrior? So his spirit rubbed off on the other warriors?

Or maybe a case of " crap, we dug up greatgranddad, what she we do with him? - Just toss him in !" ?

 

[Toddy]

Loads of examples world wide of the use of skulls.

Andaman islanders for instance…clear anthroplogical evidence, in situ, of the wearing of the skulls, as well as their use as 'cures' for disease and illness.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...lative,_Andaman_Islands_Wellcome_M0005248.jpg

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...#v=onepage&q=andaman islanders, skull&f=false

Or how about our own Stuart Goring's experience as he was tattoo'd….underneath a net full of skulls, by people who well mind being headhunters.


I've not taken a picture of the completely finished tattoo; I suppose because I see it every day now, so I've not really felt any urgency to.

Here are some extra pictures (not from the magazine) in which you can see the design

This image shows some of the outline before filling in

Andil doing the filling in:

Another view of 'the audience':

M

 

[Janne]

Yes, skulls have been perceived as the center of the human, mind, spirit and so on.
In some cultures, taking the enemie's skull is nit only defeating his spirit, but also getting some of his strength and bravery.

The Gods know why the Insular Celts (in Ireland) did it.... No such custom has been found in mainland Europe or Iberia so far.

The article did not mention if the skull has traces of being burnt?