The Hoard of the Rings. “Odd” annular bread-like objects as a case study for cereal-product diversity at the Late Bronze Age hillfort site of Stillfried (Lower Austria)

Abstract

Cereals, in addition to being a major ingredient in daily meals, also play a role in the preparation of foodstuffs for ritual purposes. This paper deals with finds that may correspond to such ritual preparations retrieved from the hillfort site of Stillfried an der March. The site, spreading across an area of ca. 23 ha, held a very important position among settlements of Late Urnfield period (particularly during the 10th– 9 th c. BCE), acting as a central place where large scale storage of grain as well as textile and metal production took place under the control of local elites. Three incomplete ring-shaped charred organic objects, found together with 14 rings and ring fragments made of clay were discovered in a secondary filled silo pit, excavated among a total of about 100 pits of this kind at the site. The overall good state of preservation of the organic ring fragments suggests that they were deposited intact on the bottom of the pit and covered well so that no re-deposition or damage occurred. This could be indicate their intentional placement in this position. Light and scanning electron microscopy revealed that the charred organic rings are cereal products containing hulled barley and a wheat species. Indications that the objects were shaped from a wet cereal mixture and had been subsequently dried without baking are discussed, as well as the possible significance of the find assemblage. The annular objects are put in context with the contemporary cereal spectrum as well as other cereal preparations from Stillfried, outlining their different chaînes opératoires for handling cereal food.

Mashes to Mashes, Crust to Crust. Presenting a novel microstructural marker for malting in the archaeological record

“…Within the scope of the ERC project PLANTCULT, systematic microscopical analyses not only of entire charred "bread buns"-bread-like objects, to be more precise [58]-but also of amorphous charred objects (ACO) from a wide range of mainly prehistoric sites across central and south-eastern Europe were carried out [58,[63][64][65][66], and some finds from other regions such as Egypt were re-evaluated. The overall goal was to gather diagnostic characters of the components and operational sequences involved in the production of the cereal products concerned, and eventually to establish systematised approaches for the analysis and classification of this find category [58,63,67].…”

“…Furthermore, the material is also heavily affected by massive chemical transformations during pyrolysis [68,69], which limits chemical analyses of such materials to mostly imprecise results [70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. However difficult the situation may still be, interpretations of ACO containing ground cereal remains have still been able to approach a wide range of possible foodstuffs, ranging from porridge-like finds to others resembling precooked bulgur, to air-dried cereal preparations similar to pasta and trahanas/tarhana and also to bread and beer in the widest sense [47,63,66,67,75,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83].…”

“…Archaeobotanical studies of grain tissues have already successfully contributed to the knowledge of the ingredients and processes involved in the production of cereal-based foodstuffs, not only of entire "loaves" [58,66,122] but also of small fragments [75,79,80,82,123,124]. These studies have demonstrated that patches of aleurone tissue are not only still recognizable in charred fragments of ground food preservations from archaeological contexts (Fig 4), but the aleurone tissue's structure [86,87] has also successfully been used for the differentiation of barley (Hordeum vulgare) from other Old World cereals and grasses [58,66,80,82,122,125,126].…”

Dig out, Dig in! Plant-based diet at the Late Bronze Age copper production site of Prigglitz-Gasteil (Lower Austria) and the relevance of processed foodstuffs for the supply of Alpine Bronze Age miners

“…A major group of cereal remains (n = 76, ubiquity 28%) was represented by amorphous charred objects (ACOs) containing fragments of cereal bran or glumes embedded in their matrix, and which are commonly interpreted as cereal products [ 48 , 82 , 120 , 143 , 181 ] ( Fig 14 ). It was taken care to verify that the cereal tissue fragments were indeed contents of the chosen ACOs and were not just sticking to them.…”

The Department for Bioarchaeology at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

“…Diachronic research is underway at the ÖAI within the framework of the ongoing ERC Project PLANTCULT (PI: S. M. Valamoti, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; GA 682529; see Valamoti et al, 2017). This wide-reaching and important project is dedicated to the analysis of central European archaeologically-derived finds of processed cerealbased foodstuffs, in order to elucidate their components and the chaînes opératoires of their production (Heiss et al, 2019a;Heiss et al, 2017a;Heiss et al, submitted;Heiss and Gail, 2019). Another core research goal of this project is the development of a standardised methodological toolkit for the analysis and interpretation of this often neglected find category (Heiss, 2019a).…”