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Pottery spilled the beans: Patterns in the processing and consumption of dietary lipids in Central Germany from the Early Neolithic to the Bronze Age [1]

['Adrià Breu', 'Department Of Prehistory', 'Autonomous University Of Barcelona', 'Barcelona', 'Catalonia', 'Department Of Social Sciences', 'Humanities', 'Koç University', 'Istanbul', 'Roberto Risch']

Date: 2024-06 

Abstract The need to better understand economic change and the social uses of long-ago established pottery types to prepare and consume food has led to the study of 124 distinct ceramic vessels from 17 settlement and funerary sites in Central Germany (present day Saxony-Anhalt). These, dated from the Early Neolithic (from 5450 cal. BCE onwards) to the Late Bronze Age (1300–750 cal. BCE; youngest sample ca. 1000 BCE), include vessels from the Linear Pottery (LBK), Schiepzig/Schöningen groups (SCHIP), Baalberge (BAC), Corded Ware (CWC), Bell Beaker (BBC), and Únětice (UC) archaeological cultures. Organic residue analyses performed on this assemblage determined the presence of vessel contents surviving as lipid residues in 109 cases. These were studied in relation to the changing use of settlement and funerary pottery types and, in the case of burials, to the funerary contexts in which the vessels had been placed. The obtained results confirmed a marked increase in the consumption of dairy products linked to innovations in pottery types (e.g., small cups) during the Funnel Beaker related Baalberge Culture of the 4th millennium BCE. Although the intensive use of dairy products may have continued into the 3rd millennium BCE, especially amongst Bell Beaker populations, Corded Ware vessels found in funerary contexts suggest an increase in the importance of non-ruminant products, which may be linked to the production of specific vessel shapes and decoration. In the Early Bronze Age circum-Harz Únětice group (ca. 2200–1550 BCE), which saw the emergence of a highly hierarchical society, a greater variety of animal and plant derived products was detected in a much more standardised but, surprisingly, more multifunctional pottery assemblage. This long-term study of lipid residues from a concise region in Central Europe thus reveals the complex relationships that prehistoric populations established between food resources and the main means to prepare, store, and consume them.

Citation: Breu A, Risch R, Molina E, Friederich S, Meller H, Knoll F (2024) Pottery spilled the beans: Patterns in the processing and consumption of dietary lipids in Central Germany from the Early Neolithic to the Bronze Age. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0301278. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301278 Editor: John P. Hart, New York State Museum, UNITED STATES Received: August 23, 2023; Accepted: March 13, 2024; Published: May 16, 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Breu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This research has been financed by the State Office for Heritage Preservation and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt (S.F., R.S., H.M., F.K.) and by the Academia program of the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) of the Catalan Government and the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (PID2020-112909GB-100) (R.R.; E.M.). Adrià Breu acknowledges funding from the European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Cofund program “Co-Funded Brain Circulation2 Scheme (CoCirculation2)” and the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TÜBİTAK) (project reference 121C047). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction The first agricultural and pottery-producing societies settled in Central Europe around 7,500 years ago as part of the so-called Early Neolithic Linear Pottery (LBK) expansion. Over the following millennia an exceptional cultural diversity unfolded in the region, an aspect of which was expressed through a wide range of pottery styles and decorations. These, in combination with burial practices, have been essential to the definition of the archaeological cultures that still today structure the prehistoric materiality of large parts of Europe into chronological and spatially recognisable entities [1]. Whatever ideological meanings might have been expressed through these clearly recognisable pottery types, they were manufactured to fulfil everyday needs, probably as means to store, cook, and serve food. To a large extent, pottery would have been a manufactured object mediating between the available subsistence resources and human consumption, both at the individual and at the social level. In this material sense, and as means to transform subsistence resources into nourishment, different pottery forms can be expected to have reflected changing human-animal-plant relationships. The study of vessel contents thus may provide crucial insights into Central Germany’s prehistoric economies as well as into social practices of food consumption and sharing [2–7]. The main aim of the present study has been to determine the importance of various products within the pottery-based food storing and culinary practices of Central Germany throughout the Neolithic and the Bronze Age (ca. 5500–1000 BCE) by studying the lipid residues trapped in a set of 124 period-characteristic pottery vessels of different shapes, sizes, and contexts. Lipid analyses can distinguish between residual fats derived from milk, ruminant and non-ruminant animals, as well as of marine or plant origin [8–11], or the effects of heating [12–16]. Their detection has been used as a proxy for the presence of wider food categories such as dairy [2,17] or plant products [11,18] and as direct evidence for the sources of fat used in those foodways involving pottery. Although previous lipid studies in Central Europe are available, these have focused mainly on Early Neolithic contexts [4,6,19,20], resulting in an absence of geographically well-defined diachronic analyses exploring connections between different pottery types, sizes, decorations, the depositional context of the vessels, and their different types of residues. In the continental but at the same time relatively arid conditions of Central Germany from the Holocene Thermal Maximum to the 4.2kyr event [21–24], the consumption of lipids through fat-rich food may have been more critical for human nourishment than in more temperate and southern regions, where a broader array of plant resources was available since the beginning of the Neolithic [25,26]. Amongst the existing lipid-rich resources in the Central German Neolithic, the existing faunal analyses show that cattle were the most important domesticate across time while sheep, goat, and pig were of secondary importance and hunting played only a minor role [27]. Flax could have also been an alternative source of fat-rich meals, as its presence is attested since the Early Neolithic of Central Germany, either through seeds or as textiles [28–30]. However, as important as the differing fat resources used during Later Prehistory are, the pottery containers in which they were processed, stored, and offered for consumption can also point at the social rules and norms ordering their distribution. In light of the dairy-centred research by Evershed et al. [19], where cultural changes in dietary preferences are considered as a potential factor to explain past change, integrating pottery characteristics with additional contextual and social information has become indispensable. Thus, the research presented here aims to shed new light on several major social and economic changes observed in later prehistoric Europe, some of which have been the focus of recent debates and studies: How did the exploitation of ruminant animals for dairy products change from the Early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, i.e. between ca. 5500 to ca. 1000 BCE? Dairy products are present in 7th millennium pottery vessels used by northern Mesopotamian farmers [31,32], but their abundance in the Mediterranean Early Neolithic is low [33–37]. A recent European-wide analysis of the correlation between dairy fats and the lactase persistence gene indicates that the preparation and consumption of dairy products is not a consequence of the expansion of the lactase persistence gene [19] but a socioeconomic feature of only certain Neolithic and Bronze Age groups. Was the increase in dairy products accompanied by the appearance of specialised vessel types? The up to 100 hectares of ditched enclosures (“Erdwerke”) defining the landscape of Central Europe during the 4th millennium and within the Michelsberg Culture have been interpreted as possible cattle corrals beyond other symbolic or political relationships [e.g., 38–40]. Although these suggest an increased capability to produce dairy products, it is not clear what role pottery played in supporting the new animal-human relationships in contrast to the apparently more agriculturally oriented Early Neolithic communities. Archaeogenetics has identified a dominant Eastern European or so-called “steppe” ancestry component among communities using Corded Ware (CWC) pottery from ca. 2800 BCE onwards [41,42]. The rapid expansion of these groups throughout large parts of Europe has been explained by their alleged nomadic or pastoral economy. Co-existing Corded Ware and Bell Beaker (BBC) communities in Central Germany (2500–2200 cal. BCE) followed similar individual burial practices but showed marked differences in settlement location and architecture which confer a more husbandry-oriented milieu to the Corded Ware groups in contrast to a greater importance of agriculture among the Bell Beaker groups [43]. Can these differences also be detected in the way pottery was used by these communities, particularly in their burial rituals? During the Early Bronze Age, identified with the circum-Harz Únětice group (UC), a much more complex form of social organisation emerged. Evidence of marked social differences, probably hereditary, labour specialisation, mainly in the realm of metallurgy and gold working, settlement aggregation and surplus production through a dependant work force are recognised as traits of early state formation [44–46]. These political and economic changes could have influenced diets and pottery-based foodways, as suggested by the appearance of a new, rather standardised and undecorated set of vessel types. This study explores these three issues of later prehistoric archaeology within the geographical context of modern-day Saxony-Anhalt by analysing the relationship between vessel contents and pottery forms through time. Moreover, the domestic versus funerary character of the final vessel placement will be introduced as a third variable. Pottery used as grave goods in burials provides an even closer insight into the relationship of specific individuals, of different sex and age, to pottery forms and their contents.

Conclusions Overall, the study of the lipid residues in different vessel-types from the Early Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Central Germany reveals a complex picture resulting in the detection of broad changes in pottery use and food preparation over time, fuelled by diverse period-specific strategies where different vessel types presented different use patterns and degrees of specialisation. In contrast to the 6th and 5th millennium BCE, LBK, and SCHIP pottery use patterns focused on the consumption of ruminant or non-ruminant adipose lipids, the 4th millennium BCE evidence gathered hitherto shows a strong increase in the reliance of dairy products as the main source of dietary lipids from pottery (Table 4). This coincided with the appearance of at least one dairy-specialised form and the development of the BAC and the corresponding demographic shift brought by the Funnel Beaker and Michelsberg cultures. Furthermore, these results are in line with contemporary 4th millennium BCE data from Skogsmossen, Wangels, Oldenburg, Store/Lille Åmose, Sławęcinek, and Kopydłowo 6 in Poland, Denmark, and Sweden [20,93,97,98,115] (Fig 11) amongst many sites [19], demonstrating a strong shift towards the use of dairy products in pottery-based culinary practices, constituting the strongest evidence for the first widespread adoption of dairying in northern Europe. The stronger reliance on dairy products by the BAC groups seems coherent with the development of new economic strategies managing animal herds to maximize milk production and of new sets of pottery types, such as cups with high carinations and handles, apparently developed to prepare and consume this product. Interestingly, these economic changes did not seem to affect the species composition of the domestic animals herds, which suggests that the social management of animals was most probably a driver of change which also led to an increase in the importance of animal protein in the diet, as suggested by δ15N isotopic values. The arrival of the new populations associated with the CWC and BBC in the 3rd millennium resulted in a notable change of scenario, returning to a majority consumption of products bearing non-dairy fats in a context of an increasing pottery shape standardisation which does not always correlate with stronger functional vessel specialisations. While the typical decorated CWC amphorae has been tentatively identified as a special type of container for non-ruminant derived products, the standardised cups and beaker shapes may have served for a wider variety of culinary purposes. Intensive cases of dairy production and consumption were detected in CWC-related assemblages [95] and in one of Pömmelte’s beaker deposits. However, the vessels with the highest amounts of lipids across all the studied periods, located in CWC sites such as Profen, Wennungen, and Oechlitz, contained mainly non-ruminant fats. It has also been noted that the funerary assemblages considered show no association between specific products and the biological sex and age of the buried individuals. Thus males and females were often buried with a variety of forms, each containing a different product. The Únětice wares of the end of the 3rd and first half of the 2nd millennium BCE show a departure away from the Final Neolithic period, as detected in certain contexts at the site of Pömmelte, by maintaining the prevalence of adipose fats over dairy products. The new pottery shapes were not accompanied by a clear functional specialisation of pottery types, as seen by high diversity indices and low dominance indices in all the studied forms. An increase in availability and consumption of animal products, seen in δ15N values, is complemented by the presence of animal adipose fats in a wide variety of containers and is coherent with the detection of specialised slaughtering installations in Salzmünde-Schiepzig and in Gotha-Sundhausen [43,109]. In conclusion, this first diachronic study on prehistoric pottery use from a concise region in Central Europe (the south of modern day Saxony-Anhalt) has shown how combining lipid organic residue analysis with more conventional contextual and pottery typology studies may reveal complex realities of changing culinary gestures and practices otherwise left unnoticed by other diet indicators. Thus the initial complex trends detected here merit the development of future studies including a larger number of samples from each period. The detected steady increase in protein consumption, seen through δ15N values over several millennia, implies a higher overall availability of animal fat-rich products, which is coherent with the detection of animal fats in settlement contexts, but contrasts with changes in the contents of funerary vessels, episodes of strong and weak dairy consumption in pottery, the development of specialised pottery types, and the formation of assemblages with highly formalised but multipurpose vessels. Over time, as an intricate history of pottery use unfolded, distinct groups developed different strategies incorporating pottery in the acquisition, transformation, and consumption of lipid-rich foodstuffs, responding to the needs and challenges of their respective economies, and gave new meanings to those fired clay containers invented by their south-eastern forbearers millennia ago.

Acknowledgments We thank all the colleagues at the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (LDA) at Halle (Saale) involved in providing the samples, (often) unpublished drawings, and further information on the discussed sites; first and foremost, Johanna Kleinecke, who has compiled the data of the archaeological heritage service (LDA). Ralf Schwarz has supported us with his expertise on the typochronological classification of the pottery analysed for this article. We want to especially thank Birte Janzen for her work on the tables given in S1 and Anna Swieder for the map in Fig 1 as well as Tobias Mühlenbruch for information provided on Halle-Queis and David Tucker for professional proof reading. We also thank Nuria Moraleda, Pau Comes and Joan Villanueva at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) laboratories for their help and assistance in the performance of the molecular and isotopic analyses.

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