The British Bronze Age launched massive rages with food and friends from afar

You can learn a lot about people by studying their garbage, including populations who lived thousands of years ago.

In what the team calls the “greatest study of the gender”, the researchers applied this principle to the emblematic middens of Great Britain, or to the giant prehistoric trash (Excuse me, waste) batteries. Their analysis revealed that at the end of the Bronze Age (2,300 to 800 BCE), people – and their animals – were far from the party together.

“At a time of climate and economic instability, the inhabitants of the south of Great Britain turned to the party-there may have been an age of celebration between bronze and iron age,” said Richard Madgwick, archaeologist at Cardiff and co-author of the study published yesterday in the newspaper ISCience, yesterday. “These events are powerful to establish and consolidate relationships inside and between communities, today and in the past.”

Origin of massacred animals

Madgwick and his colleagues studied the equipment of six middens in the Wiltshire and the Thames Valley via the analysis of isotopes, a technique that archaeologists use to link the remains of animals to the unique chemical composition of a particular geographic area. The technique reveals where the animals were raised, allowing researchers to see how far people have traveled to join these festivals.

“The extent of these accumulations of debris and their large watershed is amazing and indicates community consumption and social mobilization on a scale which is undoubtedly unmatched in British prehistory,” added Madgwick.

A particularly large midden, from the village of Wiltshire de Potterne, covers about five area football fields (it is the United Kingdom, so they probably mean football fields) and includes up to 15 million bones. The researcher’s analysis revealed that here, the pork was preferred, with one or more specimens from northern England. Nevertheless, the animals came from several areas, indicating that the location of Potterne was a gathering place for local and distant producers.

The team noted that Runnymede in Surrey was also a large regional center, although the cattle was the animals that made a long trip there. On the other hand, the estimated remains of hundreds of thousands of animals in a mound at East Chisenbury, only 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Stonehenge, were mainly sheep. In addition, the researchers noted that the majority of East Chisenbury animals were local.

“Our results show that each midden had a distinct composition of animal remains, with some full of locally raised sheep and others with pigs or cattle from afar,” said Carmen Esposito, the main study of the study and archaeologist at the University of Bologna. “We believe that this demonstrates that each midden was a Lynchpin in the landscape, the key to maintaining specific regional savings, expressing identities and maintaining relations between communities during this turbulent period, when the value of the bronze has dropped and that people turned to agriculture instead.”

A certain number of these lots of prehistoric trash cans, which result from potentially the biggest festivals of Great Britain to the Middle Ages (this would mean that they even exceeded the Romans), were finally incorporated into the landscape as small hills.

“Overall, research indicates the dynamic networks that have been anchored on festive events during this period and different roles, perhaps complementary, that each minden had to the transition from Bronze Age,” concluded Madgwick.

Given that previous research indicates that the communities of the Upper Neolithic (2,800 BCE in 2,400 BCE) in Great Britain, also organized parties that attracted guests – and their pigs – by far, I think it is right to say that the prehistoric British cast successful ragers over 2,000 years.