Burnt Mound
Burnt Mound ( . English for burnt hill, even deer roast - called Hirsch roaster, Ireland: ancient cooking place or Irish Fulacht fia or Fulacht fiann ) called on the British Isles , including 200 on Orkney (Hawell, Meur , Liddle burnt mound ) and the Shetland Islands (Ness of Sound, Bressay), a special type of site from the Bronze Age . Many are known from Ireland ( Ballyvourney Burnt Mound ) and some from Scandinavia ( called Skärvstenshögar there). In 1990 the first results on Bronze Age burnt mounds on the coast of Sweden were published.
The first systems were recognized by archeology during excavations around Ballyvourney in County Cork and in neighboring Killeen. A 1.8 m long and an average 1.0 m wide rectangular or trapezoidal trough is typical . In the southwest part there was a hearth enclosed by upright stone slabs, at the other end there was a secondary hearth. In the northeast was a stone-lined pit two meters long, which narrowed in width on one side towards the front end from 1.8 m to 0.8 m. It has been identified as an oven or a roasting pit. A possibly non-simultaneous irregular hut, reconstructable through post holes, contained traces that became known as the “butcher's blocks”. Sometimes log boats were part of such cooking areas, as in Teeronea, County Clare and Derrybrusks, County Fermanagh . Cooking pits are very common if you include places like Ballycroghan, County Down . In rare cases, fire mounds contain permanent structures. Cruester is one of the few excavated sites. Many others have also been discovered in the Shetlands. Only a few specimens have been found on Orkney and the Outer Hebrides . Very few have been excavated.
interpretation
They are interpreted as the remains of breweries, cooking areas, textile production facilities or saunas. However, the remote location and the lack of use of these places after the Bronze Age cannot be explained. Approximately 1,600 mounds of fire are on the Scottish National Monument Lists. Anne-Marie Denvir reckons with 20,000 such places for Ireland. There are more than 2,000 on County Cork alone. Anders Kaliff has drawn parallels to ancient fire cults and suggested that the places should be viewed as altars (sacrificial places).
Demarcation
In Scandinavia and Northern Germany , the Gargruben (Danish Kokegroper, Swedish Kokgropar med Skärvsten, English Pit Alignments) first recognized in 1906 (by Wilhelm Deecke ) are also a phenomenon of the younger Bronze and Iron Ages . The more recent research calls such sites as cult fire or fireplace sites. They are often much smaller than Burnt Mounds and show no structural features above ground, but are also located away from settlements. Outside the British Isles, Burnt Mounds are only found in Sweden, also on Gotland , Öland and the Åland Islands. However, they do not have the typical shapes of the British Isles' hills. Skärvstenshögar can be found in settlements and are an important indicator when looking for farms in arable land. It is unclear why Brang mounds were formed during the Younger Bronze Age. Anders Kaliff has suggested that the heights should be viewed as an altar.
Appearance
Normally burnt mound consist of a horseshoe-shaped wall of feuergerötetem rubble stone , which is mixed with charcoal and earth. In Ireland there are sometimes also low stone walls described as pine or crescent-shaped. Their clear width is between three and 20 m. Similar structures were discovered in the north-east of Ireland under dunes that were only recently surrounded by storms . These places, called Coastal Dwelling Sites , are said to have been in use from the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages .
In the center of the stone wall there are mostly rectangular troughs made of wood or stone slabs. The structures, which are always in the vicinity of a spring, are associated with cooking processes in which heated stones thrown into the water trough are said to have cooked the meat. But the heating of bath water and its use as a sauna have already been discussed.
research
The places were first mentioned by Geoffrey Keating (ca.1634) in his History of Ireland Foras Feasa ar Éirinn . He describes them as places that the Fianna used to cook meat on their hunts during the summer months of the festivities from Beltane (May) to Samhain (November). The first systems were recognized by archeology during excavations around Ballyvourney in County Cork and in neighboring Killeen.
Example Clare Island
By far the most numerous prehistoric monuments on the tiny island of Clare Island in County Mayo are the Fulachta fiadh, or mounds of fire. They are not found in this density on any other of Ireland's offshore islands. Of the original 53 Fulachta fiadh, 23 still exist in an intact or largely intact condition. Their distribution is uneven and shows a preference for the eastern side facing the main island. It is not known whether this is due to topographical factors.
distribution
Burnt mounds are particularly common in the British Isles , but also in Scandinavia (Åland Islands, Gotland and eastern Sweden) and parts of the continent. There are currently more than 1900 burnt mounds in Scotland, with the highest concentrations in Caithness and Sutherland , Dumfries and Galloway, and Orkney and Shetland. Hedges believes this distribution is representative of the original distribution. While burnt mounds were recognized as monuments in their own right in Ireland early on, this was not the case in Scotland, although some Scottish burnt mounds have been the subject of research (Black 1857, Hunt 1866). They have been identified as burial mounds. The first explicit reference to a “burned hill” did not come until the late 1860s (Mitchell 1870). In 1873, Anderson made a link between the hills of Caithness and Shetland and Irish tradition. But there were still doubts as to its function and the ongoing interpretation in many of the early accounts is that they form part of a funeral tradition. After the early period, there was little research from Scottish burnt mounds (Hedges on Orkney 1977) to Hodder and Barfield (1991) who wrote about burnt mounds.
Dating
Some burnt mounds date to the late Neolithic, such as Watermead in Leicestershire . Most of them date from the Bronze Age (2300–850 BC), most of them from the middle to late Bronze Age (around 1750–800 BC). Some did not emerge until the Iron Age (800 BC – 43 AD). In Ireland, there is written evidence suggesting that they - or similar structures - were also used during the historical period. Glassery Wood, a site excavated in 1998 in the Kilmartin Valley, found a mean date of 2800 ± 300 BC. The result corresponds to an increasing number of early dates in Scotland. The Irish sites in County Cork have the following usage periods (partly due to the discovery of bronze axes):
- Killeen (Cork) , (2 places) early Bronze Age,
- Millstreet , Middle Bronze Age
- Drombeg Stone Circle 5th Century AD
- A late Bronze Age primer was found in Balla , County Mayo .
- Burnt Mound by Caherweelder 1 Radiocarbon dates from the Late Bronze Age
See also
literature
- Seán P. Ó Ríordáin: Antiquities of the Irish Countryside (5th edition 1987) Methuen London ISBN 0-416-85630-6 p. 84 ff
- MA Hodder / LH Barfield (eds.): Second International Burnt Mound Conference 1990, Sandwell (West Midlands): Burnt mounds and hot stone technology: papers from the Second International Burnt Mound Conference, Sandwell 1990. Sandwell (West Midlands): Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council 1991.
- Alan Hawkes: Fulachtaί fia and Bronze Age cooking in Ireland: reappraising the evidence In: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archeology, Culture, History, Literature Vol. 115C, Food and Drink in Ireland (2015), pp. 47-77
- Victor Buckley (Ed.): Burnt offerings: international contributions to burnt mound archeology . Dublin, Wordwell 1990.
- TB Larsson: Skarvstenshogar The Burnt Mounds of Sweden . In Burnt Offerings: International Contributions to Burnt Mound Archeology, compiled by V. Buckley, pp. 142-152. Wordwell Ltd., Academic Publishers, Dublin, Ireland. 1990
- IMC Anthony, DCW Sanderson, GT Cook, D. Abernethyb and RA Housley: Dating a burnt mound from Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland 2000
- Michael J. O'Kelly: Excavations and Experiments in Ancient Irish Cooking-Places In: The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Volume 84, No. 2 (1954), pp. 105-155
- John Ó Néill: Burnt Mounds in Northern and Western Europe : A study of prehistoric technology and society. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. ISBN 978-3639206098 .
- LH Barfield: Hot stones: hot food or hot baths? Burnt mounds and hot stone technology. Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council. 1991
- LH Barfield, MA Hodder: Burnt mounds as saunas and the prehistory of bathing? Antiquity 61. 1987.
- Martin Rundkvist: Skärvstenshögar med gravgömmor i east Mälarområdet. In: Fornvännen, Volume 89, Stockholm 1994, pp. 83-89 ( digitized version ).
- Anders Kaliff: Fire, Water, Heaven and Earth: Ritual Practice and Cosmology in Ancient Scandinavia: an Indo-European Perspective 2007