{"id":1614,"date":"2012-12-31T19:15:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T02:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=1614"},"modified":"2012-12-31T19:18:18","modified_gmt":"2013-01-01T02:18:18","slug":"5102-bc-carpentry-and-sorcery-also-something-about-loess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2012\/12\/31\/5102-bc-carpentry-and-sorcery-also-something-about-loess\/","title":{"rendered":"5102 BC: Carpentry and sorcery, also something about loess"},"content":{"rendered":"

From this\u00a0article<\/a>, news of a fascinating archaeological\u00a0find near Leipzig, Germany from the Linear Band Ware<\/a> (aka LBK) period of the Early Neolithic. \u00a0The find can be dated exactly because the site includes — besides nearly 100 LBK longhouses and two dozen graves — four wells lined with oak wood with known tree ring series. The wood comes from thirteen individual oak trees, with 1m DBH, felled in 5102 BC.<\/p>\n

The excavation report itself<\/a> (and details<\/a>, .pdf) are worth reading. \u00a0Besides the spectacular wooden wells (the excavation of which is really exemplary), the sites yielded the usual LBK pottery<\/a> and cultivated crops. \u00a0These include\u00a0emmer and einkorn wheat, lentils, and peas; but also plenty of\u00a0poisonous black\u00a0henbane<\/a>, a nasty plant which was either used in small quantities as a psychoactive agent<\/a> (Germans were putting witches to death up until the middle ages for using henbane in gruit for flavoring beer<\/a>) or as a medicine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"German<\/p>\n

This map is a little bit confusing, but worth the effort. \u00a0The four time bands are an attempt to date the spread of the LBK toolkit. \u00a0The coloring is an attempt to illustrate one of the prevalent theories about the spread of the LBK — their association with a particular landscape, fertile loess,\u00a0a type of\u00a0rich, dust-like soil composed of wind-blown sand and silt. \u00a0The sites referred to in the article are numbers 5,6,8, and 9 on the map. \u00a0The general aim, then, is to show the spread from east to west on a particular soil type, of this LBK material culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From this\u00a0article, news of a fascinating archaeological\u00a0find near Leipzig, Germany from the Linear Band Ware (aka LBK) period of the Early Neolithic. \u00a0The find can be dated exactly because the site includes — besides nearly 100 LBK longhouses and two … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-q2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1623,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions\/1623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}