Why Ancient Britons threw out their most valuable possessions

Chad

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
Sounds catastrophe related to me - and they do mention the rise in sea levels and so on

www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160503-why-ancient-brits-threw-out-their-most-valuable-possessions said:
Thousands of hoards have been found dating from the Bronze Age in Britain, full of objects that seem far too important to dump

By Amanda Ruggeri

4 May 2016

Ten years ago, when metal detectorists were out near the village of Stixwould in Lincolnshire, UK, they turned up bronze fragments.

These turned out to be the remnants of not just one precious object, but many: swords, ferrules, and one spearhead after another. By the end, 129 bits of spearheads were found in the Tattershall hoard. All of the objects, researchers later determined, dated back to between 3,000 and 2,900 years ago.

Whenever anyone finds a group of prehistoric metal objects in Britain, they are legally obliged to report it to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The officer assigned to the hoard, Adam Daubney, has handled a lot of discoveries. His Lincolnshire team alone has recorded 75,000 finds over the last 10 years. But this was different.

"The Tattershall hoard was a pretty special find," Daubney says. "When we see Bronze Age finds, they tend to be a fragment of an axe found in the landscape and nothing else. When you get a hoard, it flags up that something really special has happened in that part of the landscape."

The question, of course, was what. And it is a question that researchers across Britain and northern Europe are asking, not only of the Tattershall hoard, but of groups of metal objects that have been left in the ground across Britain. Many have lain undiscovered for 4,000 years.

After all, it seems odd that people would deliberately give up valuable items, especially those that have taken hours to craft.

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The Stixwould hoard (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC by 2.0)

The Stixwould hoard (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC by 2.0)

While numerous hoards have been found from other periods of history – such as Roman coins and medieval jewellery – what is strange about the Bronze Age metal deposits is that they took off around 3,500 years ago, occurred for centuries and then, mostly, stopped.

When you get a hoard, it flags up that something really special has happened

From about 2,700 years ago to the arrival of the Romans around 43 AD – years we now think of as Britain's Iron Age – the trend for placing metal in the ground cooled off.

"We're dealing with about 30, 40 Bronze Age hoards a year. That adds up quite quickly," says Neil Wilkin, curator of the British Museum's British and European Bronze Age collections. "And that's just in England, not Wales, not Scotland. If you compare that to the Iron Age material, they probably have half a dozen [hoards] a year."

The majority of finds now come from metal detectorists, who – given the ubiquity of iron in today's Britain – often tune their gadgets to look for bronze, not iron. But even that cannot totally explain the difference, Wilkin points out, since people were still using bronze in the Iron Age.

"They just aren't depositing it a great deal," Wilkin says. "So it does seem like in the Bronze Age, compared to the eras that come after, they are depositing a lot of hoards."

But why?
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A socketed axe from the Legsby hoard (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC by 2.0)

A socketed axe from the Legsby hoard (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC by 2.0)

For decades, archaeologists believed that Bronze Age people put metal objects in the ground with the intention of taking them back out later. After all, that is the idea behind the word "hoard": a group of objects set aside for a rainy day.

Why break your objects before storing them somewhere for safekeeping?

With some hoards, this may have been part of the motivation.

For example, the largest hoard of Bronze Age objects ever found in Britain, at Isleham in Cambridgeshire, included more than 6,500 objects from about 3,000 years ago. The objects included ingots and debris from metalworking, so researchers wondered if it was deposited by a smith who planned to retrieve and recycle the bronze later.

But other objects in the Isleham hoard complicate that idea: in particular, its tools and weapons, some of which were deliberately broken before being put inside the large ceramic pot.

Deliberately breaking hoarded objects was not unique to the Isleham hoard, either. Why break your objects before storing them somewhere for safekeeping?

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Bronze Age weapons from Finland (Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bronze Age weapons from Finland (Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy Stock Photo)

Because of complications like this, researchers warn against a one-theory-fits-all method for Bronze Age depositions.

Further damage was carried out just before they were placed in the water

"It's tempting, and there are probably some overarching things we can pull out, but I'm quite sure that in different regions and occasions we had different meanings," Wilkin says.

For example, at one point it became de rigueur to put groups of ornaments in the ground. "There's a period in the middle Bronze Age when that's the thing to do, but mainly only in the south of England, and only for a couple of centuries. Then everything becomes about tools and weapons," he says.

Now that thousands of items have been found under Britain's Portable Antiquities Scheme, researchers have more data than ever before. This has led to an increasingly complex picture, but it has also showed some recurring themes.

One intriguing trend is that people often deliberately broke objects before they cast them off.

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Artist's impression of a Bronze Age village (Credit: Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library)

Artist's impression of a Bronze Age village (Credit: Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library)

Take the Broadness hoard, made up of spearheads, a knife and a ferrule, which was found in the River Thames in Kent.

"Some of the notches and nicks on the edges of the weapons may be related to their use in battle," says Eleanor Ghey of the British Museum in London, who is researching British hoards as part of a joint project with the University of Leicester. "But we also know that further damage was carried out just before they were placed in the water, and this seems to be done with some deliberation."

We always get laughed at by the public for using the term 'ritual'

That is not the only premeditated aspect of Bronze Age depositions. People also tended to separate out the types of materials in the groups they buried. Rarely do you see gold and bronze deposited together.

These materials were also dumped in different places. Bronze hoards tend to be deposited in rivers or close to settlements, while gold tends to be away from settlements or field systems.

With all the deliberation involved, it is now thought that many of these Bronze Age deposits are much more than cast-off rubbish heaps for later recycling. Rather, the process of putting them in the ground was done in an organised, thought-through fashion.

In other words: a ritual.

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A "gouge" from the Legsby hoard (Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme, CC by 2.0)

"We always get laughed at by the public for using the term 'ritual'," Wilkin says. Without knowing what the ritual was for, the term can sound empty. "But from an anthropological point of view, ritual is a fundamental aspect of most communities, a constructed set of beliefs."

What is striking is how many different kinds of deposits were associated with water

In the same way you can see a process taking place in a graveyard and immediately recognise – from the step-by-step process, the symbols and the site – that you are watching a funeral, we do not need to know exactly why people threw precious items away to see that it had some kind of ritual purpose.

But just as a graveyard gives you important context about that funeral, so too does the landscape provide clues about the ritual's meaning.

In 2010, David Yates and Richard Bradley published a study of 30 finds of Bronze Age metalwork in East Anglia's Fenland area. They found a pattern.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/624_351/images/live/p0/3s/z5/p03sz5vh.jpg

The Swinside stone circle (Credit: Michael Marten/Science Photo Library)

Individual weapons were found intact in rivers, especially rapiers from the Middle Bronze Age and swords from the Late Bronze Age. Meanwhile, groups of bronze items, still mostly weapons, were discovered instead in pools or bogs.

We know there were rising water tables, increasing flooding, the backing up of river systems

"What is striking is how many different kinds of deposits were associated with water, and just how varied those findspots actually were," wrote Yates and Bradley. "Even a major find like the Isleham hoard was buried in a ditch terminal beside a former channel and a concentration of burnt flints."

There has long been a deeply-rooted relationship between water and the underworld: think of warriors being put into ships and the ships being burnt.

Maybe, Ghey suggests, weapons were broken and deposited after a warrior's death: for example, to allow the "killed" weapons to travel along with the spirits of the dead. "There are all sorts of theories," she says. "We'll never know the answer."

But the intensification of metal being put into watery places toward the end of the Bronze Age could also point to a different kind of ritual.

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The Uffington White Horse, from the Bronze Age (Credit: Skyscan/Science Photo Library)

"There was a climactic deterioration," says Peter Chowne of the University of Greenwich in London, UK, an archaeologist specialising in prehistoric Lincolnshire. "We can see that with the dating of peat in Lincolnshire. We know there were rising water tables, increasing flooding, the backing up of river systems, all complicated in Lincolnshire by sea level change. That was definitely happening in the late Bronze Age, no doubt about it."

Perhaps the hoard's deliberately broken weapons mean it was a post-battle ritual

At the same time, many metal hoards in Lincolnshire appear specifically on the boundary spots between the increasingly flooded fens and higher ground.

The Tattershall hoard was found at one such place. Perhaps those who deposited it were trying to appease the spirit world, asking for a kinder climate.

Or, as one recent researcher of the hoard, Tobias Mörtz of the Free University of Berlin in Germany, has argued, perhaps the hoard's deliberately broken weapons mean it was a post-battle ritual.

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The Mold Cape is made of sheet gold (Credit: David Pimborough/Alamy Stock Photo)

The more data comes in, particularly now with the 20-year-old Portable Antiquities Scheme, the closer we should get to understanding why ancient Brits discarded precious objects. But we will never know for sure.

"It's like today: why do people go to church? There is a whole host of reasons. Some people have no faith whatsoever but they do so out of tradition. Others have an in-depth faith. Some go just for marriages, some go for deaths," Daubney says. "We're dealing with human beings and their mindsets, and that's never straightforward."

This story is a part of BBC Britain: a series focused on exploring this extraordinary island, one story at a time. Readers outside of the UK can see every BBC Britain story by heading to the Britain homepage; you also can see our latest stories by following us on Facebook and Twitter.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter.
 
From an article by Laura:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sitchin2.htm said:
Has Nibiru/Planet X Been Sighted?

Immanuel Velikovsky demonstrated rather convincingly that there was massive evidence of both a literary and scientific nature that great catastrophic earth changes had occurred during the second millennium BC due to cometary showers and the close passage of Venus. He settled on a date of 1450 BC, but more recent scientific evidence points to the date actually being 1628 BC. There is also evidence for a disruption circa 5200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400 BC, 16,000 BC, 19,600 BC, and by logical extension every 3,600 years previously for an indefinite and unknown period of time. What is more, if the last "return" was in 1628 BC, we are not just due, we are overdue for the next one.

The theories about Nibiru do not take into account many of the literary reports from the ancients regarding these great bombardments of comets. Velikovsky tried to account for this by suggesting that a cometary Venus was hauling around a tail of rocks. It seems that Velikovsky and his supporters, and Sitchin and his supporters, although recognizing serious worldwide catastrophes, have failed to recognize the true nature of such events. Velikovsky proposed that Venus out of orbit was a more or less one-time event rather than a symptom of a long term cycle. Sitchin came closer with his understanding of the cycle, but he failed to consider all the variables in his solution. What is more, once he settled on his idea as the one and only solution, his efforts to make the mythical elements fit the hypothesis became almost as absurd as the efforts of mainstream science to avoid them!

The confirmed linchpin for the fall of the late Bronze Age cultures, the Middle Eastern Civilizations, and other recorded disasters that are found to be "around that time," seems to be the period from 1644 BC to 1628 BC. The ice cores show the disturbances starting in 1644 (registering in 1645) and the tree rings show a big spike in 1628, though the entire period was disturbed.

Yoshiyuki Fujii and Okitsugu Watanabe's "Microparticle Concentration And Electrical Conductivity of A 700 m Ice Core from Mizuho Station Antarctic" published in Annals of Glaciology (1-, 1988) pp. 38-42, demonstrate that "large scale environmental changed possibly occurred in the Southern Hemisphere in the middle of the Holocene. (Within the last 10,000 years). Their depth profiles of microparticle concentration, electrical conductivity and Oxygen 18 at circa 1600 BC indicates a spike in readings for all of these elements. The evidence shows that this disturbance covered this designated period, but with a "huge spike" at c. 1600 BC
[...]

There's more if you follow the link.
 
Interesting find! Isn't Cambridge where the ancient city of Troy was, at least according to the Book Where Troy Once Stood by Iman Wilkins?
 
Well, that's pretty interesting.

Looking at our history database that is still in progress and by no means exhaustive, we find a few possible clues:

http://cof.quantumfuturegroup.org/events/list?order=a&sortby=events.occurrence_year

ID Category Subcategory Date Summary
5370 Archeology Climate Evidence 3900BC The 5.9 kiloyear "Bond" event; intense aridification, cooling; triggered worldwide migrations

5401 Archeology Cultural Evidence 3600BC Yamna or Yamnaya culture; Pit Grave Culture; Ochre Grave Culture, develops on the Pontic Steppes

5432 Archeology Cultural Evidence 3500BC Afanasevo culture, south Siberia, Altai mountains, mixed Europoid, wheel, metals, Tarim mummies

5058 Geology Earthquake 3300BC Earthquake Palestine

5463 Archeology Cultural Evidence 3300BC Egyptian hieroglyphs

5466 Archeology Cultural Evidence 3300BC Indus Valley Civilisation; urban planning, metallurgy, wheeled transport, trade network, writing

5462 Archeology Climate Evidence 3250BC Piora Oscillation sudden cooling: volcanic eruption or a meteor or an asteroid impact event

5442 Archeology Mass Migration Evidence 3200BC Ancient Irish ancestors came from Middle East, Pontic steppe

5193 Celestial Tunguska-like event 3123BC Jun. 29 Overhead comet/asteroid explosion; Köfels’ Impact

5438 Archeology Cultural Evidence 3000BC Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex civilisation of Central Asia; monumental structures; evidence of wheeled transport

What stands out is the Köfels’ Impact combined with the Piora Oscillation. The dates are approximate for the Piora oscillation and it could very well belong to the impact event which seems pretty secure IMO.

You can click on the event and read a more detailed description.
 
Source: Did the Cosmic impact described in the Hindu Epic Mahabharata cause the Piora Oscillation?

ACADEMIA Letters
Did the Cosmic impact described in the Hindu Epic Mahabharata cause the Piora Oscillation?

Dr. Jayasree Saranathan

The Piora Oscillation is a climatic period of a sudden drop in temperature in the Northern Europe and flooding in lower latitudes around 3200 BCE that lasted for 200 to 300 years. Named after the Piora Valley of Switzerland giving the strongest evidence for this climate change with a sudden increase in glaciation, this phenomenon has been the focus of active research from different quarters.

Among the various causes debated, such as the orbital change of the earth around the sun, a drop in solar insolation, the explosion of Supernova W44 (Sokeland 2017), the end of the Atlantic Climate Regime etc., the cosmic impact theory put forth in the paper “Climate pattern recognition in the Mid-Holocene (4800 BC to 2800 BC, Part 3)” (Seifert et al. 2015) finds a parallel in the literary account of the Hindu Epic called “Mahabharata”. The focus of the current paper is to highlight that a cosmic collision simultaneously on the earth and the moon on 3136 BCE, suggested by this Epic, offers scope for further research in identifying the cause for the Piora Oscillation.

The cosmic impact is detected in an abrupt break in the EOO-wave (Earth Orbital Oscillation) around 3200 BCE causing a Z-shaped temperature pattern that lasted till 2900 BCE. The impact location at the Andaman Sea as suggested by the paper is not convincing in the wake of all evidences appearing in Europe and Greenland and not anywhere on the regions around the Andaman Sea.

The acid spike noticed in the ice cores of Greenland around 3150 BCE and the Belfast tree-ring chronology around the same time, signaled the onset of cold conditions. The Ötzi man found his icy grave at the heights of the Alps in this period. The beginning of horse domestication in Europe started around the same time signaling a shift to colder climate.

The increase in swamp oak in Germany associated with flooding occurred around the same time. Similar water logging in other places and flooding of the Nile coincided with this date. The water level at the Dead Sea rose up by 300 feet. At the same time the rainfall pattern was affected causing desertification of the Sahara.

With most of the imprints localized in the northern hemisphere covering Europe, the literary inputs from Mahabharata offer supportive evidence for a major impact in Europe by a disintegrating comet that broke into several pieces and fell over a vast region including North-India in the year 3136 BCE.

Simultaneous cosmic impact on the earth and the moon

The description appearing in the 5th book of Mahabharata conveys intermittent shower of meteors for thirteen days with a major impact on the ninth day that corresponds to 2nd September, 3136 BCE in the astronomical Gregorian calendar. A south-westerly wind hit the city of Hastinapur (close to New Delhi) with a thunderous noise on the first day and impacted the region between the rivers, the Ganga and the Indus in North India, causing the east flowing rivers to reverse the direction of the flow. Explosions were often heard in the Himalayan range too.

Thunderous roars from the cloudless sky, rain of fragments, fires everywhere, atmosphere filled with dust causing all-round haze, the trembling of the earth, rains in the absence of clouds noticed somewhere behind, the sudden change in the direction of seven east flowing rivers and the spilling out of water from the wells and the vessels were reported on the first day of impact. All these can occur simultaneously in the event of a cosmic impact – of an object or fragments of an object colliding with the earth.

If several such asteroids are falling on the earth, it could be the case of broken parts of a larger asteroid or a comet. The dust thrown into the air blurs the directions. The asteroid hitting the ocean would cause an increase in water vapor in the air that pours down as rains following the path of the falling fragments, which is expressed as rains at the rear.

These events had repeated at sunset time on the ninth day (Sep 2, 3136 BCE). This time the text explicitly states that a comet pressed down horribly on the day, the moon crossed the star Beta Cancri. [1] It was the 6th day of the waning phase when moon had not yet risen in the Hastinapur sky. Strange sightings were reported in the text, such as the right-ward movement of Polaris, two rising planets seen with red-crest, and a shift in the position of the planet Mars to the right in Scorpio, which cannot be the case of retrogression because the Sun was also present in the same sign. A momentary interchange of positions in the binary of Alcor and Mizar was also seen, followed by a complete blur of the northern sky.

A shocking sight further awaited the observers as the moon arose around mid-night in Hastinapur. The waning sixth phase of the moon was seen reduced to the seventh phase. The dark feature on the lunar disc was seen shifted (Mahabharata 5-141-10, 6-2-32. somasya lakṣma vyāvṛttaṃ). This was reported by two different observers in Mahabharata. The picture below was taken from a location in India as it appears on the 6th day of the waning phase of the moon. The picture shows the only probable location on the visible disc where a new feature could have appeared.


3-c3aa288bd4.jpg

.

That phase ended earlier than normal, upsetting the calendar of the time (Mahabharata:6-3-28, 29). In the Vedic time scale, the moon’s phase is divided into 30 parts known as ‘tithi’ with each part measuring a distance of 12 degrees in the lunar orbit. Counted from the Full Moon Day, the 15th part occurs on the No-Moon day at 168 to 180 degrees. At times the No-Moon had started before 168 degrees but ended up between 168 and 180 degrees (from 14th to 15th phase), but it can never start in the 13th phase (between 144 and 156 degrees). The No-Moon following this weird appearance started on the 13th phase, which clearly implies that the moon’s orbit had changed. The ascending node of the moon was also seen to have shifted to the right (clockwise) following the cosmic impact. [2]

A combined reading of this with the 13th phase No-Moon implies that the lunar orbit had drifted to a shorter orbit than usual. This is a clear indication of a massive hit on the moon by a comet, shaking it from its path.

Mahabharata continues to narrate how the next phase was keenly observed only to find out that the lunar surface appeared reddish and devoid of any marks! This waxing phase ended up quickly and surprisingly in the same star in which the Full Moon appeared in the previous month. This is yet another evidence for the shorter than the normal orbit of the moon, besides indicating the faster than normal speed of the moon.

However, the moon came back to the regular 15 tithi phase following this. All these events give rise to a hypothesis that the moon was badly battered by a comet whose fragments had fallen on the earth too. This is like the comet Shoemaker-Levy that rammed into Jupiter in 1994. After getting caught in the gravitational field of Jupiter it broke into several pieces and started falling on Jupiter over a span of seven days, with the biggest fragment falling on the 3rd day. In a similar way the comet of 3136 BCE was trapped by the combined pull of the earth-moon system and started falling as broken fragments over thirteen days, with the biggest fragment landing on the moon on the 9th day.

A cosmic collision simultaneously on the earth and the moon has a probability ratio of 23:1 (Terada et al. 2020). On average the lunar surface receives 140 new craters every year with diameters of 10 meter and more (Speyerer et al. 2016). The powerful collision or 3136 BCE must have left a recognizable crater on the seemingly featureless (as seen from the earth) part of the moon. Crater Moretus in this region is found to be deep enough to have caused massive ejecta that exceeds the total thickness of ejecta of all the lunar basins (Ivanov et al. 2018). Lunar samples from this crater might throw up surprising connections with samples found on the earth.

A major sampling site on the earth is in the Lower Town area of Mohenjo-Daro where 40 skeletons were found scattered on the streets and in the houses. The findings of David Davenport show an à la Pompei kind of devastation caused by a cosmic impact (Gillan 2020). The date is Early Harappan, close to 3136 BCE.

Another probable candidate is the water filled crater like Kara bogaz Gol adjacent to the Caspian Sea, the focus of researchers of the Ark of Noah. The impacted region on the earth anywhere in Europe during the day when it was sunset at Hastinapur, this water body is needed to be probed well in the search for the cause for Piora Oscillation.


Notes

[1]
Mahabharata 6-3-12: ”dhūmaketur mahāghoraḥ puṣyam ākramya tiṣṭhati”.
The star is known as Pushya in Vedic astronomy.

[2] Mahabharata 5-141-10, 6-3-11
The ascending and the descending nodes of the moon are the points of intersection of the lunar orbit with the ecliptic. These points keep moving very slowly in anti-clockwise direction.These points are noted down till this date in Vedic astrology.


References

1. George F.Dales, (1964), “The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-Daro”

2. Gillan.Joanna, UPDATED 30 APRIL, 2020 - 20:55, “Was the Mohenjo Daro ‘Massacre’ Real?”

3. Ivanov et al, (2018) “Geological characterization of the three high-priority landing sites for the Luna-Glob mission”,
Planetary and Space science, p.195

4. Poschlod. Peter, (2015), “The Origin and Development of the Central European Man-made Landscape, Habitat and Species Diversity as Affected by Climate and its Changes –a Review”,
IANSA, Volume VI, Issue 2/2015, Pages 197–221

5. Seifert. J et al., (2015), “Climate Pattern Recognition in the Mid-Holocene (4800 BC to2800 BC, Part 3)”.

6. Sokeland.W,(2017),“Supernova and Nova Explosion’s Space Weather: Correlated Mega-fauna Extinctions, Antarctica Ice Melts and Biosphere Mega-disturbances—Global Warming”,
Journal of Earth Science and Engineering 7,136-153. - doi: 10.17265/2159-581X/2017.03.003

7. Speyerer, E., Povilaitis, R., Robinson, M. et al. (2016) Quantifying crater production and regolith overturn on the Moon with temporal imaging.
Nature 538, 215–218 (2016). - https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19829

8. Terada et al., (2020), “Asteroid shower on the Earth-Moon system immediately before the Cryogenian period revealed by KAGUYA”,
Nature Communications. - DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-17115-6

About the author:
Dr. Jayasree Saranathan
Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh Alumnus

Authored three books. Independent researcher. Freelance writer since 1990. Ph.D. in Astrology from PSTU, Hyderabad, India. With her strength in connecting the missing links in the ancient texts and interpretation of the same, she is known for her research and write-ups in Indology, Hindu Epics, validation of the traditional date of Mahabharata, Pre-history, Ramanujacarya’s history, Tamil Sangam literature and Astro-meteorology.
Jayasree Saranathan

Related sources:
Piora Oscillation - Wikipedia
The Piora Oscillation — S. E. BARTON

Diet of Ötzi the Iceman revealed
 
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