Unless you are obsessed with fishing, or have devoted your life to a water god, building in a lake is bit odd, especially in what we think of as an agricultural economy. Putting a timber building in an inherently damp environment presents problems, it is ideal conditions for fungi, and mould and rot has the potential to damage both buildings and content. So lets look at the positives of building on a lake, since the builders had clearly found some:
- Protection against predation by other humans.
- Protection against animal predators, vermin, and some species of insects.
- Good communications by water, often easier than by land
- A tailor-made flat piece of building land in a predetermined location.
- Availability of particular key resources, such as fish.
All these assume that your site is inhabited, and did not have some other function, and many modern archaeologists are keen to look beyond the obvious and interpret sites as ‘ritual’, that is to do with religion and ceremony. There is little doubt that prehistoric peoples, particularly in the Iron Age, made offerings in watery places. A significant amount of the finest pieces of ancient metalwork comes from rivers, lakes, and pools. Ritually murdered individuals are also found in waterlogged locations, but we should be careful about this connection, since these are the only place bodies are preserved in northern Europe.
The waterlogged conditions often preserve an abundance of piles and ancient timber from the lower part of structures, but superstructure rarely survives, and many waterlogged sites have proved difficult to understand structurally. It is an inevitable consequence of not understanding built environments that this void should be filled by something, and ‘ritual’ has become a useful and interesting explanation for unexplained human activity.
The preservation of wooden artifacts, worked timber and other organic objects, not normally found, make these sites very important from the point of view of understanding material culture. Understanding the meaning of material culture is central to archaeology, and a century and half of careful cataloguing allows archaeology to produce maps showing its distribution, but just exactly what these maps mean in the real politics of the ancient tribal world is entirely another matter.
Some of the earliest archaeological sites to be recognised and explored were waterlogged, and the work done on a few of these sites gave us the first framework chronological development of material culture. One of the most significant sites for the study of European prehistory was discovered in 1857 at La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. A local man Hansli Kopp noticed timber piles in the lake bed during a drought, and began finding metalwork in the vicinity, particularly swords.
An Iron Age wheel excavated at La Tène
Exploration of the site and shore during the seceding decades produced a large assemblage of finds, including hundreds of pieces of metalwork, and the site gave its name ‘La Tène’ to a whole style of material culture, characteristic of the European Iron Age from 6th to the 1st century BC. This culture was extensive throughout western and central Europe, and much of what is popularly referred to as ‘Celtic’ art, in a Pre-Roman sense, with its interlace and spirals, is more properly ‘La Tène’ style. However, the use of the word ‘Celtic’ is probably best avoided, since it plunges us into a deep and intractable debate about who or what was a Celt, and even if such a thing ever existed.
The site at La Tène, and its material culture, is a good illustration of some of key issues at the heart of archaeological interpretation.
Firstly, there is the simple confusion that can arise if you name a ‘culture’ after a particular site, in that the ‘La Tène’ culture was not centred on Switzerland, and the site is not necessarily even typical of the culture that bares its name.
It’s predecessor, the ‘Hallstatt’ culture, (8th to 6th Century BC) was named after a lakeside Settlement, near Salzberg in Austria. Halstatt’s Early Iron Age inhabitants had grown wealthy from the local salt mines and in 1846 burials with fine grave goods were found. 
C19th illustrations of graves of Hallstatt
While some rare organic objects were preserved by conditions in the local salt mines, the Hallstatt cemetery was in use for 300 years, and more than 1000 graves of affluent locals, well equipped for the afterlife, were excavated. This gave archaeology one its first views of the development of material culture in this period. However, these prosperous salt miners were not necessarily typical of Hallstatt culture as a whole.
An Iron Age shoe from the salt mines at Hallstatt
There are many deeper problems, such as the extent to which ‘culture’ can be identified from its material components, how does material culture spread, whose culture is it, and who spreads it?
‘Celtic’ horned helmet from the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge, London, decorated in La Tène style and dated 150–50 BC. Then there is the problem of comparing objects, - what constitutes similarity is somewhat subjective, and, since metals can be recycled, even tests on chemical composition are not necessary straight forward to interpret. However, when archaeologists do find a group objects where the use of particular materials, techniques, or tools indicate they have come from the same workshop, this can be an immensely valuable insight, introducing a human scale to the problem.
Elite gold jewelry in the La Tène style from a 'chieftain's' grave at Waldalgesheim, in the Rhineland, Germany.
Consider hypothetically how an individual object may be acquired:
- Traded
- Stolen/looted and taken as booty
- Gifted as a present, reward or dowry
- Inherited
- Made by the owner
When an object is found in a grave it was not put there by the occupant - “the dead don’t bury themselves” is the sort of truism beloved of modern archaeology.
Since archaeologists find interesting objects in graves, this type of material, and burial practices are often very much part of the cultural ‘package’ they define. The question then arises as to precisely whose graves we are looking at. Naturally, those graves containing material culture are of most interest to archaeologists, and these are often those of the ‘elite’, in other words the rich and powerful, who are not necessarily typical of wider society. Its not that archaeologists are unaware of this problem, but the bias exists in the material culture we study. It is simply that the elite had more and better stuff – that’s what defines them as an elite. The same bias exists in the arts, music, architecture, and of course history where it is mostly the elite who left a written record of their doings.
When we consider early medieval history, not withstanding the role of religion, it is very much concerned with the activity and politics of an elite, namely the nobility, and their efforts to control land, the principle source of wealth and power in the this period. The ruling class behaved very differently from the rest of us, and in many ways had an entirely different culture. The complexity and geographical range of these medieval ‘politics’ is frightening to an archaeologists, if nature of power a thousand years earlier in the Iron Age, was half this complex, then we have little hope of understanding its dynamics simply by studying material culture.
In 1066 England was one of largest and richest countries in Europe with a with a population of at least 1.5 million, and what is so shocking about the Norman conquest, is that it was achieved with an army of less than 9000 men.
A map of the Norman 'Empire'
In one year England had 3 different rulers, narrowly escaped being part of Norway, but ended under the control of a French provincial aristocracy, which also controlled Sicily and southern Italy, and later still parts of the Levant. The early Norman ‘Kings’ and nobility were absentee landlords; they remained vassals of the king of France, spoke french, and were mostly concerned with their estates in Normandy and continental power politics.
This sort of complexity is all very worrying for archaeologists, there is no simple explanation or logic for the geographical spread of Norman power, and the cultural impact of such a small group of individuals seems quite disproportionate, but this is the lesson of history.
However, what made all this history possible was a hardworking agricultural majority whose surplus production supported the elite. Control of a system of landholding designed to channel produce and labour to the advantage of an ‘Owner’, was a franchise worth fighting for. While archaeology might conceivably model the agricultural system that supported an elite, how they contrived to use this wealth is a far more complex problem.
Thus, given culture may change as result of the mass movement of people or through the actions of a few, archaeologists studying the spread of material culture like Hallstatt or La Tène, face a complex series of possibilities. In trying to resolve these problems, non-material evidence like the spread of language, religious belief, and genetics have also to be considered.
Excavation of a bridge structure at La Tène
However, there is one site found in a lake at Biskupin in Poland [2] , where the superstructure was so well preserved, and there is absolutely no ambiguity about its function. This we shall look at next.
Sources & further reading
Halstatt:
http://www.salzwelten.at/cont/salzwelten/en_salzwelten_hallstatt.aspx
http://www.athenapub.com/hallstatt.htm
La Tene art: http://www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/uj/ujk.html
References:
[1] http://www.crannog.co.uk/
[2] http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/muzeum/muz_pol/Arena/Biskupin/index_eng.html
http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/muzeum/muz_pol/Arena/Biskupin/index_eng.htmlhttp://www.biskupin.pl/index_en.php
1 comments:
An excellent, well documented article. I enjoyed reading it.
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