Quite so but one of the places where there is a relative dearth of valuable things, and where those valuable things are of their nature difficult to date, and where constant ploughing messes with the stratigraphy on a continous and systematic basis, is in and around English villages.
Ardvark, I kind of was talking about home actually, given that we're dicussing villages which have places where people live in them. And specifically about more valuable metal objects. I still reckon that if you lose something precious in your own home, you tend to look hard for it and therefore have a better chance of finding it than if you'd dropped it on a path say, or in a field. ( What's that bible story about the housewife who loses a coin (?) and doesn't rest until she finds it? ) That's human nature. And anyway, I reckon that if I lived a thousand years ago and had to pay a visit to the cess-pit, I'd be very careful about the precious objects of the shop - doubly careful with my brooches. And my money.
Pray where? Why, pray, Sedgeford, Aardvark, Sedgeford. Celebrated, as I'm feel sure you know, for it's Iron Age hoard. And not much else on the metal-work front, given that , according to you, the people who lived there for all that time in their throw-away societies, were continually dropping and losing things like there was no tomorrow.
Originally posted by M J Harper: Quite so but one of the places where there is a relative dearth of valuable things, and where those valuable things are of their nature difficult to date, and where constant ploughing messes with the stratigraphy on a continous and systematic basis, is in and around English villages.
Ploughing within villages! Ploughing would not destroy the material evidence or artefacts buried in features such as cess pits or pits. Funny how we find all the evidence of all that stuff in the heavily ploughed countryside but not in villages!
Ploughing is bad enough (first 8 to 10 inches) the worst thing is the power harrow, closely followed by the de -stoneing machine, terribly destructive things. km.
Originally posted by Caedbaed: Ardvark, I kind of was talking about home actually, given that we're dicussing villages which have places where people live in them. And specifically about more valuable metal objects. I still reckon that if you lose something precious in your own home, you tend to look hard for it and therefore have a better chance of finding it than if you'd dropped it on a path say, or in a field. ( What's that bible story about the housewife who loses a coin (?) and doesn't rest until she finds it? ) That's human nature. And anyway, I reckon that if I lived a thousand years ago and had to pay a visit to the cess-pit, I'd be very careful about the precious objects of the shop - doubly careful with my brooches. And my money.
Pray where? Why, pray, Sedgeford, Aardvark, Sedgeford. Celebrated, as I'm feel sure you know, for it's Iron Age hoard. And not much else on the metal-work front, given that , according to you, the people who lived there for all that time in their throw-away societies, were continually dropping and losing things like there was no tomorrow.
Yes, but villages are also made up of open spaces, grass verges, ditches, nettle patches, animal paddocks, pounds, lanes, ponds, streams etc. If you lose something in a house you are clearly more likely to find it. My point was that there are plenty of places within a village where you can lose an object and have much less chance of finding it. I agree you were talking about coins and brooches, but they were just part of my original post along with pottery etc. You simply cannot have hundreds of peolpe living continuously in one place without them breaking things, losinig things or throwing things away.
I happen to know quite a lot about Sedgeford. The coin hoard you cite is v interesting, but is not directly related to a settlement. Neither are either of the fragments of torc excavated. Where areas of Saxon and medieval settlement have been excavated they have been associated with diagnostic pottery , bone and metal artefacts, because people lose things. Interestingly Sedgeford is one of the examples of the settlement shift in the Late Saxon period, wth the Mid-Late Saxon christian cemetery located on the other side of the valley to the Late Saxon church
Aardvark, just keeping to Innocent Bystander's point about metal. Presumably it was a relatvely precious resource - wether for coinage, tools or decoration. You'd look after it or recycle it. And you might occassionally lose it in the field, paddock or derelict sited - places where, incidentally, you might get a bit of ploughing,( not that many people I know who work the land encumber themselves with stuff they could lose). But anyway, it seems to me to be as reasonable an explanation as saying it wasn't there in the first place and certainly worthy of a bit of due consideration.
Let's pool our resources and explore this general problem. I'll kick off by diving into Aardvaak's cesspits, a real treasure trove for "lost" artefacts. We know what happens to rural cesspits: they are very temporary and when they come to the end of their useful life...you plant a tree in it. The modern tradition is a cherry tree. Newly planted trees have a curious effect on small objects -- the root ball pushes them down.
But cherry trees don't last long and are relatively shallow-rooted (are they native to Britain even?) so not much use. But what if yew trees were used for the purpose? And what happens to an old yew site. Do people re-plant a yew? If so we ought to be urging English Heritage to do some rescue archaeology every time a yew dies.
Sunken lanes. Now there's a place to lose things on the way home from the pub (memo: get the forum onto pub names and their link with antiquity). What's the record on excavating sunken lanes?
Or you could do us the courtesy of answering the points raised.
Why, when the replies are constantly misinterpreted wither wilfully or through ignorance?
Please bear in mind a) we are trying earnestly to dispel our ignorance and believe a dialogue is the best way to do it, if you are amenable, and b)misinterpretation is not really the issue: we do want to be clear on what you mean by what you say, but we are not hiding the fact that we are also trying to see it another way, looking for the thing that makes the alternative view impossible.
One of the first things you learn in archaeology is that people are messy, and lose things regularly.
Since you're uneasy about or outright reject the idea that "what is is what was", this can not be the conclusion of any modern study of how often people lose their belongings. I take it, therefore, that it is based on archaeological finds. But then, how do you now that it will always appear to be true? Is this not the premise "what was is what was before"?
Sunken lanes. Now there's a place to lose things on the way home from the pub
I feel your paradigm begs to be challenged.
May I offer this as a basic formula for explaining the distribution of random lost items
Propensity to lose (holes in pockets, worn thread on buttons, use of the object etc) X Propensity to obscure (length of grass, existence of mud, nature of subsequent farming etc) X Frequency of location visitations X Perceived interest to subsequent finders = Distribution.
I'm sure similar formulae rule other types of finds, but the significant reality is that the unknown variables are such that such formulae are well nigh useless as a predictive tool in local contexts such as "sunken lanes". However, I suggest it holds true for explaining finds en masse and it would certainly lend credibility to the paradigm you wish to attack - that where there is absence of evidence there probably wasn't any evidence to be absent.
"Saxon cores" sounded like something substantial that I would have liked to hear about... But the crux of the matter is that we don't find general detritus of an Iron Age character equivalent to the stuff we find with reasonable regularity from Saxon times onwards. Is that right?
Leaving aside the logical inconsistency of this being an application of "what is is what was" that is elsewhere rejected on principle, I would request again an exploration of the character of this evidence. What happens if, instead of dismissing the notion of continuity of villages with a wave of the site report, we start with a peasant population (substantial but smaller than at any time since) distinct in class, and usually ethnicity, from the ruling types represented by the vast majority of archaeology found so far, living in essentially the same place for, perhaps, thousands of years? Who possesses what? What care do they take of it? How does the opportunity to clear up after yourself, rebuild, redig, replant on a continual basis, which was not possible in any abandoned site, affect the deposition of future finds? What is the statistical chance of coming across these finds? This picture can be taken apart by common sense, not repeated appeals to current, top-level interpretations.
If the 100,000-or-so settlements were scattered randomly and so are the 10,000-or-so villages, shouldn't the signs of Iron Age domestic life pretty well coincide with villages 1 or 2 times in 10? If instead there is a systematic discontinuity between villages and Iron Age finds, doesn't that suggest something has "gone wrong" somewhere?
I like your formula, Silaction, is anything like this used systematically in archaeology?
Sunken lanes would certainly qualify on most of your factors multiplied by a co-efficient you left off, "length of time feature existed". A factor that does occur to me though is that of compression. We are looking for reasons why village archaeology is not "telled" and sunken lanes might give us some clues. Are they really sunken or is the village-and-fields (as it were) raised? Do animals compress or do their droppings raise?
What about village duckponds? If they are ancient features marine archaeologists ought to be hauled away from their gaudy treasure galleons and put to some proper work.
This very late reply to PMB’s post of 13/5/07 is prompted by finding some information on archaeological find from Weklice Poland (1)
The Aesti, who have the same customs and fashions as the Suebi, but a language more like the British (Tacitus - Germania, Ch. 45) The Aestii/Aeati/Haesti are “are the only people who collect amber” - this involvement in the amber trade, most likely, places the Aesti near the Vistula delta. The most probable location being in the vicinity of Lake Drużno on the eastern side of the Vistula delta ( Wulfstan of Hedeby - 9th century - talks of the people of Estum at Truso, near modern day Elbląg).
This only one of the two classical references I know which explicitly mention the language spoken in pre-Roman Britain (the other found in Agricola Ch 11: The Britons - Tacitus) (1) iaepan (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Germanic (3) "Dating the division between High and Low Germanic: A summary of arguments", in: Toril Swan, Endre Mørck and Olaf Jansen Westvik, eds., Language change and language structure: Older Germanic languages in a comparative perspective (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 73), Berlin (Mouton de Gruyter), 271-303, 1994
Originally posted by Phyllisve: ....therefore suggests that one of the languages spoken in pre-Roman Britain is a North Germanic language.
Goodness, more Neo-Kossinnism (and some awful 'text-driven' archaeology now to boot). I don't really know where to begin with this farrago ...
Tacitus tells us NOTHING about where "on the right shore of the Suebian sea" the Aestii were, you select SOME "factoids" from his account of this people (just after mentioning where Apollo rises from the sea) but ignore others (eg. how can the Wielbark Culture be the archaeological correspondent of a culture which the written source says used little iron?). In any case don't you think the Wielbark culture should (if it IS to be associated with any barbarian group of the written sources but that's another story) be associated with an entirely separate group, whose literary reflection is (the text-driven archaeology acolytes say) found in Tacitus as the Gutones? And if they are who most culture-historical retro-archaeologists assert (ie "the Goths") then they'd be an East Germanic speaking group. The hydronyms of the area are generally classified as East Germanic by those who enjoy playing these word-games, I am not aware of any specific claims that North Germanic hydronyms are present in any of the area occiupied by the Wielbark Culture and its subsequent mutations (Cherniakhovo and Sintana de Mures etc).
If you are attracted by the "only people that gather amber" reference and ignore all the rest, then how do you get the mouth of the Vistula? Yes, amber is found there (I've gathered it there myself from the beaches) as it is over a very large area of the north of central Europe (including the Kashubian forest) but you will not find anything near the quantities required for an export trade from those beaches. And certainly you will not find ANY in the "Vistula delta" as these are later deposits washed from inland Poland not deposits deriving from the floor of the Baltic. On the other hand, further up "on the right shore of the Suebian sea" and actually opposite the "Suiones" (if they WERE the Swedes as some people suggest) is the Sambian peninsula (Kaliningrad region) which not only has the stuff in large deposits, but also has an Early Roman culture with rich imports showing "something" was going south on the so-called "amber routes". Its stuff washed from the underwater extent of these deposits which is one of the components of what is found on Gdańsk's beaches. Why do you want to write the name Aestii on your historical atlas anywhere else? On what basis do you want to make Weklice a cemetery of the "Aestii"?
I leave aside the tangled issue of the trans-Baltic cultural similarities in Oksywie and Wielbark Cultures, that's another kettle of fish, and totally irrelevant to this question once you accept that you simply CANNOT treat the written sources in this way!!
Tacitus wrote about a tribe beyond Germania (Suebia) whose language was NOT anything like the Suebian one(s) but - he says - the British, the point I was making was that he is implying British was not perceived as a Germanic language. It was just ONE of a number of points I made early on in this sorry trail of obfuscation (twenty pages back) against Harper's "what ifs". I dont place any weight on it as it seems the Harper theory has shown itself to be utterly baseless anyway and its adherents in reality were not seeking proper discussion using proper evidence. So I really don't think this is the place to continue an extended exposition on the niceties of archaeological taxonomy of the Early Roman cultures of central Europe. I am sure there are other forums for that, but that's not the kind of "archaeology" I have much sympathy with (from an epistemological point of view you understand), so I would not know what the Neo-Kossinnists are saying there.
Originally posted by Innocent Bystander: "Saxon cores" sounded like something substantial that I would have liked to hear about... But the crux of the matter is that we don't find general detritus of an Iron Age character equivalent to the stuff we find with reasonable regularity from Saxon times onwards. Is that right?
Yes, but not just Iron Age, we are missing evidence for Roman and Middle Saxon activity for your model to work
quote:
Originally posted by Innocent Bystander: Leaving aside the logical inconsistency of this being an application of "what is is what was" that is elsewhere rejected on principle
No, the two are not compatible. On the one hand you are making a general assumption that 'what is is what was' without any recourse to the evidence. All I was saying is that where we excavate settlements of any period, they are inextricably linked to the remains of the material culture of that period. In other words, where people live they lose things, break thigs and throw things away. they go to the toilet on an almost daily basis, eat food and throw the remains away, they farm they worship and they even die. All of these activities can and fo leave traces in the archaeological record. [/QUOTE]
quote:
Originally posted by Innocent Bystander: I would request again an exploration of the character of this evidence. What happens if, instead of dismissing the notion of continuity of villages with a wave of the site report, we start with a peasant population (substantial but smaller than at any time since) distinct in class, and usually ethnicity, from the ruling types represented by the vast majority of archaeology found so far, living in essentially the same place for, perhaps, thousands of years? Who possesses what? What care do they take of it? How does the opportunity to clear up after yourself, rebuild, redig, replant on a continual basis, which was not possible in any abandoned site, affect the deposition of future finds? What is the statistical chance of coming across these finds? This picture can be taken apart by common sense, not repeated appeals to current, top-level interpretations.
We have been over this before. We do find the peasant's. They are living in small hamlets of between 2 - 4 houses. When we find their burials, they often show signs of occasional episodes of malnutrition and bad health. these are not the elite ruling classes. They use less fancy pottery, have less metalwork and have far fewer imported or high status goods. Why then do we need to invent a new 'invisible' underclass? As for the cleaning up, redigging tc, you are missing the fundamental point. It is almost impossible to systematically erase the remains of earlier archaeological settlement on a site, particularly if it dates to the Iron Age or Roman period. Not sure where you are going with the ethnicity argument either!
quote:
Originally posted by Innocent Bystander: If the 100,000-or-so settlements were scattered randomly and so are the 10,000-or-so villages, shouldn't the signs of Iron Age domestic life pretty well coincide with villages 1 or 2 times in 10? If instead there is a systematic discontinuity between villages and Iron Age finds, doesn't that suggest something has "gone wrong" somewhere?
But why should the 10,000 villages or the 100,000 settlements have similar distributions. You are not comparing like with like, nor do you have any understanding of the choices made in the location of villages or Iron Age farmsteads, even if either or both had simple rules to their location or foundation. A quick glance at any book on the development of villages will clearly show thatthere are a pletora of reasons behind these
and to speak a North Germanic language. North Germanic languages are distinct from the Continental Germanic language spoken by the Suebi (2). The date of the separation between North and Continental Germanic is associated with the occurrence of the Second Consonant shift, Theo Vennemann argues that this dates from before 50 BC (3).
Hi Phyllisve,
It doesn't follow that Wielbark culture burials identify those inhabitants as the Aestii. The Wielbark culture is most usually identified with the east germanic speaking Goths. The similarity between these graves and those in Jutland gives rise to yet another contentious issue, ie. that the Geats were Goths.
The dating you mention is highly contentious and the degree of separation between the north and west germanic branches even as late as say 400 AD is not understood. From what scant runic evidence there is, the areas you mention, including Schleswig and the area known as Angeln, but not Holstein, do appear to form part of a common linguistic area. However, there may have still been a good degree of mutual intelligibility between the two at that time and as Tacitus was writing some 300 years earlier, we really have no idea about the degree of separation during his time. Tacitus however does identify the Angles as part of the Suebic federation so it does seem likely that they understood each other.
But this is all quite a separate issue. What reason is there to place the Aestii in a north, west or east germanic speaking group, let alone suggest that their origins are in the danish islands?
I suggested that the quote “quibus ritus habitusque Sueoborum, lingua Britannicae propio” can be interpreted as contrasting the languages of two Germanic tribes one of which is closer to the language spoken in Britain. (I agree that the date for the separation of the North and Continental Germanic languages is still contentious; however Vennemann gives credible arguments for an early date.)
Tacitus regards the Aesti as a Germanic tribe (“They cultivate grain and other crops with perseverance unusual among the indolent Germans.”; “amber - glaesum is their own word for it”; “amber …is the substance the Germans called glæsum” Pliny The Natural History)
The Aesti are the only tribe Tacitus connects to the Amber trade (a subject dear to the heart of Roman writers).
The cemetery at Wielbark shows a people with Scandinavian culture at one of the centers of the amber trade routs from the mid 1st century AD.
I agree that any identification of a location for the Aesti must be speculative. Placing them near the banks of Lake Drużno is manly based on the reference to amber trading but is not inconsistent with Tacitus’s description. The Aesti have been linked to the people of Estum (Wulfstan in the 9th centaury) at Truso, however this is 800 years after Tacitus. Jordanes in the 6th century writes “But on the shore of Ocean, where the floods of the river Vistula empty from three mouths, the Vidivarii dwell, a people gathered out of various tribes. Beyond them the Aesti, a subject race, likewise hold the shore of Ocean”
Phyllisve did you actually read or understand what I wrote above about this? And yet you simply ignore it all to restate the same again, though I see that your original post has now been substantially edited to read differently from when I answered it.....
> a subject dear to the heart of Roman writers Which "Roman writer" please writes of an "amber route" (fondly or not)?
"a people with Scandinavian culture at one of the centers of the amber trade routs" Why is Weklice a "centre" on that route? There is nothing that necessarily makes it a "centre". And why do you refer to the Wielbark Culture as "a Scandinavian culture"? There is nothing that marks it as a specifically Scandinavian culture. And even if it was, does using a particular shape pot or ornament mean you have to speak a language of a particular linguistic group? (Do all worldwide wearers of Levi jeans eating a Big Mac in their Ford car while listening to their iPod speak English or anything remotely like it?)
If Tacitus counts a tribe as part of his Germania, it says nothing about their language. Quite apart from the interpretation of the reference to the Aestii we have his Cotini for example. Most scholars see his "Germania" as a geographical rather than ethnic or linguistic label.
quote:
Originally posted by Phyllisve: I agree that any identification of a location for the Aesti must be speculative. Placing them near the banks of Lake Drużno is manly based on the reference to amber trading but is not inconsistent with Tacitus’s description.
Well, it jolly well is since (as I pointed out) the place where amber was undoubtedly gathered was far to the north, so if the Aestii were indeed the "only" people to do this, then by logic you must place them there - which is entirely consistent with what Tacitus actually says. Why do you ignore Sambia which has many cemeteries containing the same wealth of stuff as Weklice plumping instead for the area right by the Vistula mouth?
The Vidivarii are neither here nor there, they are not recorded as being there in Tacitus' time. And as you say the first author to refer to them 450 years later (probably Cassiodorus in fact) says the Aestii are BEYOND them... So if you ARE going to treat te evidence from these two sources as comparable to each other (which I would question, they were written under completely different conditions and for completely different purposes) then again you can only place your Aestii on the map away from the Vistula mouth.
There really is absolutely no evidence which interpreted impartially would place Tacitus' Aestii where you wish to place them to fit an imagined "Scandinavian" culture at the mouth of the Vistula.
I am sorry to say so, but you are just bending a few selected pieces of the evidence to fit a preconceived idea and simply ignoring what does not fit, rather than drawing conclusions from what an impartical interpretation of the entirity of the evidence might tell us. More special pleading to bolster another improbable theory which itself flies in the face of other evidence.
