What food festivals looked like in the Bronze Age

By Stephen Beech

Bronze Age Britons gathered for huge "food festivals" - with pork, beef and lamb on the menu, reveals new research.

State-of-the-art analysis of bones found in rubbish heaps from around 3,000 years ago shows people traveled with their animals from "far and wide" for the events.

Middens - "astonishing" garbage tips which became part of the British landscape - are revealing the distances people came to feast together at the end of the Bronze Age.

Archaeologists from Cardiff University used cutting-edge isotope analysis on material found within six middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley in the largest study of its kind.

The results, published in the journal iScience, reveal where the animals that were feasted on were raised, and also shed light on the catchment of the "vast" feasts which researchers say were arguably the largest to take place in Britain until the Middle Ages.

They explained that middens are enormous mounds of debris left from those gatherings, some of which became hillocks in the landscape over time.

The largest, Potterne in Wiltshire, covers an area the same size as five football pitches and is packed with feasting remains, including up to 15 million bone fragments.

At Potterne, pork was the meat of choice, with pigs coming from a wide catchment - even as far as northern England.

The breadth of results from Potterne indicates animals came from several regions – suggesting it was a meeting place for producers from locally and beyond.

Runnymede in Surrey was also a major regional hub, but there it was cattle that were drawn from a distance.

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But researchers found that East Chisenbury - a monumental mound 10 miles from Stonehenge in Wiltshire estimated to contain the remains of hundreds of thousands of animals - was "overwhelmingly" dominated by sheep.

Unlike the other middens studied, the new study shows that the majority of the animals at East Chisenbury came from the surrounding landscape.

Lead author Dr Carmen Esposito, formerly of Cardiff University but now at the University of Bologna in Italy, said: “Our findings show each midden had a distinct make up of animal remains, with some full of locally raised sheep and others with pigs or cattle from far and wide."

She added: “We believe this demonstrates that each midden was a lynchpin in the landscape, key to sustaining specific regional economies, expressing identities and sustaining relations between communities during this turbulent period, when the value of bronze dropped and people turned to farming instead.”

Dr. Esposito says multi-isotope analysis is a rapidly developing scientific method in archaeology.

Each geographical area has a different chemical make-up, distinct to its environment and this permeates into the water and food grown there.

As animals eat and drink, the regional markers remain locked in their bones, allowing researchers to trace where they were reared centuries later.

Study co-author Professor Richard Madgwick, of Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: “At a time of climatic and economic instability, people in southern Britain turned to feasting - there was perhaps a feasting age between the Bronze and Iron Age.

"These events are powerful for building and consolidating relationships both within and between communities, today and in the past.

"The scale of these accumulations of debris and their wide catchment is astonishing and points to communal consumption and social mobilization on a scale that is arguably unparalleled in British prehistory."

He added: “Overall, the research points to the dynamic networks that were anchored on feasting events during this period and the different, perhaps complementary, roles that each midden had at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.”