Moor butter

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A wooden jar of peat butter from near Portadown , County Fermanagh from the 15th / 16th centuries. Century in the Ulster Museum
15th / 16th century peat butter from Enniskillen, County Fermanagh Century in the Ulster Museum
Peat butter produced experimentally archeologically

Moor butter is the name given to waxy substances found in peat bogs . The majority of the finds have their origins in milk fat , the others are slaughter fat such as lard or tallow . The most common and largest finds of the masses were made in Ireland and Scotland . A smaller number, exclusively small quantities, come from Norway , the Netherlands , Schleswig-Holstein , East Frisia and Pomerania .

British Islands

Finds of peat butter from Ireland and Scotland have been documented since the 17th century. They were made in peat cuttings, especially in the 19th century , when the peat was increasingly extracted. The peat cutters had an extra income by selling the peat butter, which was used as a vehicle lubricant or as a remedy for external application.

So far, nearly 500 peat butter finds have been documented. The sizes of the individual finds start with small quantities of 100 to 150 g, but often reach more than 20 kg, in one case even 50 kg. More than half of all moor butter finds were packed in wooden vessels such as barrels, buckets or beakers. Other finds were wrapped in plant leaves, animal skins or cloths or packed in pig bladders or wicker baskets. Around a third of the finds were found without any recognizable packaging. The oldest Irish find investigated so far comes from Knockdrin (Irish: Cnoc Droinne ) in County Offaly , Ireland , which dates from 1745 to 1635 BC by means of radiocarbon dating . BC could be dated. One of the best-known finds is the find from Gilltown , County Kildare , weighing around 35 kg and wrapped in an oak barrel, which dates back to the 1st millennium BC. Chr. Dated. According to radiocarbon dating, the oldest Scottish finds date from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. In the 1990s, a research group from the University of Bristol examined the composition of the fatty acids in Scottish moor butter. Of nine samples examined, six were made on the basis of milk fat, the others from slaughter fat. Butter finds are exhibited in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh .

European mainland

In the moors of continental Europe, only minor finds of butter have been documented so far. These were mostly interpreted as sacrificial or grave goods . The controversial archaeologist Alfred Dieck mentioned butter as an addition to a bog body found on the island of Fehmarn in 1879 in Günzer See near Stralsund , as well as to a bog body. However, these two finds cannot be confirmed due to the non-verifiable sources.

interpretation

Why the butter was buried in the bog has not been conclusively clarified. The most likely variant is that excess butter was preserved in this way in the absence of air in summer. Possibly it was also a kind of flavor enhancement. In the 17th century, William Petty mentioned that the Irish ate “strong butter”, a rancid butter that had been made ripe by storage in the bog. His contemporary, the poet Samuel Butler , also reported that in Ireland butter was buried in the bog for seven years. In Ireland, it is widely believed that the habit had a religious meaning. Since butter has been found in Ireland in containers made of wood, bark, skin and cloth and basket, one leans towards this theory, on the other hand, historically, apart from ceramics or the very valuable metals, there were hardly any other materials for making containers for butter. With very few exceptions, the butter finds from the Bronze Age , which were packed in ceramic vessels, were deposited as food additions at burials. Compared to the otherwise well-researched hoard or sacrificial finds of metal objects at the same time, the known moor butter finds have little in common, which would rather speak against a sacrifice theory than in favor of the conservation theory. In 20 of the 46 or so Iron Age moor butter finds, the depots were located near historical political or natural boundaries , a phenomenon that has also been observed in Irish bog bodies and is seen in a ritual context.

literature

  • Jessica Smyth, Robert Berstan, Emmanuelle Casanova, Finbar McCormick, Isabella Mulhall, Maeve Sikora, Chris Synnott & Richard P. Evershed: Four millennia of dairy surplus and deposition revealed through compound-specific stable isotope analysis and radiocarbon dating of Irish bog butters . In: Scientific Reports . No. 9: 4559 , 2019, doi : 10.1038 / s41598-019-40975-y (English, current dating of finds).
  • Liam Downey, Chris Synnott, Eamonn P. Kelly, Catherine Stanton: Bog Butter: Dating Profile and location . In: Archeology Ireland . No. 20 , 2006, ISSN  0790-892X , p. 32–34 (English, issue 1).
  • Hermann Van Aken-Quesar: Moor and peat in the folk culture of the Styrian Ennstal in comparative European references . Graz 1995, p. 227–229 ( literature.at - dissertation, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz).
  • Bog butter test . In: New Scientist . March 20, 2004 ( online [accessed December 8, 2011]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Liam Downey, Chris Synnott, Eamonn P. Kelly, Catherine Stanton: Bog Butter: Dating Profile and location . In: Archeology Ireland . No. 20 , 2006, ISSN  0790-892X , p. 32–34 (English, issue 1).
  2. ↑ Bog Butter find from Co. Offaly. In: Irish Archeology. April 28, 2011, accessed December 8, 2011 .
  3. ↑ a b Jessica Smyth, Robert Berstan, Emmanuelle Casanova, Finbar McCormick, Isabella Mulhall, Maeve Sikora, Chris Synnott & Richard P. Evershed: Four millennia of dairy surplus and deposition revealed through compound-specific stable isotope analysis and radiocarbon dating of Irish bog butters . In: Scientific Reports . No. 9: 4559 , 2019, doi : 10.1038 / s41598-019-40975-y (English, current dating of finds).
  4. ↑ Lisa Leander: 3000 year old butter. In: epoc . September 1, 2009, accessed December 8, 2011 (a nearly 3,000 year old find from Ireland).
  5. ↑ a b David Prudames: Experts Get To The Bottom Of Ancient Bog Butter Mystery. In: Culture24. March 23, 2004, accessed December 8, 2011 .
  6. ^ Alfred Dieck : The bog body from Günzer See near Stralsund from the summer of 1879 and the problem of moor butter . In: Greifswald-Stralsund yearbook . tape 1 , 1961, pp. 26-39 .
  7. ↑ Alfred Dieck , Otto Stöber : Moorbutter - A cultural-historical study . In: Series of publications by the "Austrian Moor Research Institute" Bad Neydharting . tape 22 . Landesverlag , 1962, ISSN  0075-2932 , p. 96-106 .
  8. ↑ Sabine Eisenbeiß: Reports on bog bodies from Lower Saxony in the estate of Alfred Dieck . Hamburg 1992 (Master's thesis, Hamburg Archaeological Institute).
  9. ↑ Facts About Bog Butter. (No longer available online.) Irish Peatland Conservation Council, archived from the original on September 27, 2011 ; accessed on December 8, 2011 .
  10. ^ William Petty : The political Anatomy of Ireland . London 1691, p. 82 ff .
  11. ↑ Bog butter. (No longer available online.) MovilleInishowen, archived from the original on October 24, 2011 ; accessed on December 8, 2011 .

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