The exceptional find of a Bronze Age votive bog offering of millet accompanied by a human sacrifice. Or was it the other way around?

Abstract

The first discovery of prehistoric human remains at the same wetland as millet plants (Panicum miliaceum), which is reported here for the Zahájí site in the Czech Republic, sheds curiously new light on the central European Middle Bronze Age. The millet and a human fingernail (both dated ca. 1400–1300 BC) were found in what was possibly a newly formed shallow lake in a small brook valley located in a fertile and continuously populated region. Their joint presence in the same layer does not appear accidental. Although a wealth of contextual information has been gleaned from multi-proxy investigations (such as sediment lithostratigraphy, geo and water chemistry, pollen, plant macrofossils, aquatic invertebrae and organic residua analyses, and aDNA of millet and the fingernail), archaeological interpretation of the find is still highly challenging. We present some possible scenarios for what might have happened, with ritual behaviour (in the sense of sacrifice or offering) being high on the list of probabilities. The find may also be related to reverence for the millet plant, a crop that had only recently become established in central Europe around the mid-2nd millennium BC following its rapid westward migration from southeastern Asia.