Professor Mike Fulford at the dig in Silchester. The latest find is an olive stone that dates back to Iron Age Britain. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Posted on 07/21/2012 7:25:39 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Iron Age Britons were importing olives from the Mediterranean a century before the Romans arrived with their exotic tastes in food, say archaeologists who have discovered a single olive stone from an excavation of an Iron Age well at at Silchester in Hampshire.
The stone came from a layer securely dated to the first century BC, making it the earliest ever found in Britain -- but since nobody ever went to the trouble of importing one olive, there must be more, rotted beyond recognition or still buried.
The stone, combined with earlier finds of seasoning herbs such as coriander, dill and celery, all previously believed to have arrived with the Romans, suggests a diet at Silchester that would be familiar in any high street pizza restaurant.
The excavators, led by Professor Mike Fulford of Reading University, also found another more poignant luxury import: the skeleton of a tiny dog, no bigger than a modern toy poodle, carefully buried, curled up as if in sleep. However it may not have met a peaceful end...
Fulford has been leading the annual summer excavations at Silchester, which bring together hundreds of student, volunteer and professional archaeologists, for half a lifetime, and the site continues to throw up surprises. It was an important Roman town, but deliberately abandoned in the 7th century, its wells blocked up and its buildings tumbled, and never reoccupied. Apart from a few Victorian farm buildings, it is still open farmland, surrounded by the jagged remains of massive Roman walls.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Professor Mike Fulford at the dig in Silchester. The latest find is an olive stone that dates back to Iron Age Britain. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry CunliffeExtraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry Cunliffe
“Fulford now believes that the town was at its height a century before the Roman invasion in 43AD, with...paved streets...drainage...enjoying a lifestyle in Britain that, previously, was believed to have arrived with the Romans.”
This is serious stuff, dude. It turns my whole opinion on Europe back then on its head. I had always thought that the non-Romans were simply barbarians, as far as lifestyle went (i.e., nomads in tents) - and the idea of paved streets and drainage only existed because of the Romans and then disappeared with them (for many hundreds of years) after they fell.
Extraordinary Voyage
of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry CunliffeExtraordinary Voyage
of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry CunliffeExtraordinary Voyage
of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry Cunliffe
There was a topic or two along these lines during the past year or two; the Romans still excelled at civil engineering, able to cherry-pick the best ideas from a large number of conquered peoples. There’s another current article (I’m not going to post it, at least not this week, and something like it may have already appeared) about water engineering in Roman Palmyra.
One area that the Romans were never exactly great at was navigating the seas. They weren’t bad, in time — they turned the seven seas into pirate-free lakes for centuries — but the Roman army just didn’t like the idea of sea battles. During and after Augustus Rome got serious about standing navies and built five major naval bases, including one on the North Sea and one on the Black Sea.
Seagoing trade in Roman times was enormous, and spread out in all directions, including India (no doubt about it) and other areas outside the Empire, including Ireland, China, and the Baltic. But that was not due to some kind of official merchant marine, it was the free market at work.
Roman engineering resulted in some of, if not *the*, largest wooden seagoing vessels ever made. Those Egyptian obelisks in Rome were moved — each in one piece — from Egypt during the Roman Empire, and those weigh 200+ tons, some perhaps 300 tons. The columns for some of the temples on the forum were quarried — each in one piece — in Egypt and transported by sea to Rome.
OTOH, the British Isles have been inhabited for many thousands of years, and the big break with the continent was a long time ago. Since then, no one has gotten there by walking overland. :’)
The Romans had everything except the peppers and tomatoes. :’)
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Trade with Mediterranean Europe preceding the Roman conquest of Britain -- no real surprise there, though. :') |
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* Chocolate
* Tomatoes
* Potatoes
* Coffee
* Tobacco
* Hot Peppers
* Turkey
And so on.
Pretty bland I'd say.
(All the hot peppers in the world have their origins in the Carribean.)
Awesome!! Thanks for the all the info and the link. You make Wikipedia look like a children’s book.
“Pretty bland I’d say.”
Blam, Bland is a relative word. I remember visiting some people I knew that lived in Michigan (near Detroit). They were convinced they had the best pizza in the world. Having lived in the Northeast for a time, I just felt very sad for them.
And what seven seas would those be?
I heard the word taco for the first time when I was about 19.
Pray you make it to 90 before discovering Haggis.
A little further in:
It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved.
isn’t haggis a disgusting scottish food?
I wouldn’t put rule that out, at all. But from a archeology perspective, when you stumble on to ruins in Rome, it is natural to think that they were the achievers. It’s only when you can start accurately dating and sequencing stuff that the perspective me start to change.
It’s disgusting and it’s Scottish... the last is up for debate.
One problem with the article though:
“The Roman contribution to mathematics was little more than nothing at all.”
If that were the case, I’d expect the public schools to pounce on that and use it as their curriculum. Since they’re not doing so, there may have been some merit to their mathematical skills.
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