Ballyvourney Burnt Mound
Ballyvourney burnt mound ( burnt mounds - even deer roasts , ancient cooking places or Irish fulachta fia called - German "scorched hills" ) are references to the late Bronze Age , on the British Isles , including the Orkney - and Shetland Islands but also in Denmark and Scandinavia spread are.
One of the first sites was Ballyvourney ( Irish Baile Bhuirne ), in County Cork , where two of these plants were found, excavated in 1951 by M. O'Kelly and described in 1954. Anne-Marie Denvir reckons with 20,000 such places for Ireland. There are more than 2,000 listed in County Cork alone.
Typical is the (here somewhat wedge-shaped) trough of around 1.8 × 1.0 m in the center of the facility, which is formed here from planks (but mostly from stone slabs) that are bedded in clay. In the south-east and north-west there are flocks made from upright slabs. In the northeast there was a stone-lined trapezoidal pit 2.0 m long and 1.8 m wide, which was identified as an oven or roasting pit. An irregular oval hut, defined only by post holes, contained traces that were interpreted as a butcher's block of meat.
Burnt mounds are interpreted as the remains of bathing areas, breweries, cooking areas, textile production facilities or saunas. However, this does not adequately explain the remote location and the lack of such places at the end of the Bronze Age. An excavation in Assynt showed that the sites were used again after an interruption of more than 1000 years. Nor is it explained that sometimes hollowed out tree trunks, so-called logboats ( dugouts ), were part of the Burnt Mounds, such as those found in Teeronea in County Clare and in Derrybrusks in County Fermanagh . Its use as a hotplate was experimentally tested by the excavator with apparently satisfactory results. Stones were heated on the stoves and red-hot thrown into the pit filled with water to cook meat (a leg of lamb was used), and more glowing stones were added. Piles of burned stones are often found in the context of such cooking areas. A continuation of the uses of this type could be the more recent pit alignments .
literature
- Laurence Flanagan : Ancient Ireland: Life Before the Celts. Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 1998.
- 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? In: Antiquity 61, 1987.