Al Poux
More actions
| Al Poux | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Country | France |
| Department | Lot |
| Site | |
| Period | Late Iron Age |
| In use | Mesolithic; Iron Age |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Seeds |
| An estimated six uncharred hemp achenes from a waterlogged layer by the stream | |
| Dated | c. 150–50 BCE |
| Dating | Typology |
| Identified by | Morphology |
Al Poux is an archaeological site on the floor of the Boulou valley, in the commune of Fontanes in the Lot department of France. A waterlogged layer there, dated by its pottery to the end of the second or the beginning of the first century BCE, held an estimated six uncharred achenes of hemp. Laurent Bouby, who studied the layer's plant remains, took them as probable evidence that hemp was grown in south-western France in the Late Iron Age.[1]: 89, 91, 93
Site
The Boulou is a small stream that drains indirectly into the Aveyron. Its valley cuts into the limestone plateau of Cieurac, on the southern edge of Quercy. A rescue excavation ahead of the building of the A20 motorway revealed two main phases of human occupation on the banks of the stream: one in the Mesolithic and one in the Iron Age. Its team set out in particular to reconstruct the local environment through the Holocene.[1]: 91
Four test trenches, cut at right angles to the stream, exposed the stratigraphy. It included an organic layer full of plant remains, which its wet conditions made well suited to the study of seeds and fruits. The layer has no structure built by people, but the pottery in it suggests that people lived near the trenches. Fragments of Italian amphorae, above all of the Dressel IA type, date the occupation to the end of the second or the beginning of the first century BCE.[1]: 91
The finds
Bouby sieved the organic sediment under running water through meshes of 2, 0.5 and 0.25 millimetres, in small batches, until no new taxa appeared. He sieved 9.75 kilograms of sediment at the coarsest mesh and 1.75 kilograms at the finest, and scaled the count of each taxon to 10 kilograms of sediment.[1]: 91 Because the layer had stayed under water without air, the plant remains survived uncharred. Only one fragment of hazelnut shell was charred, which Bouby linked to the settlement nearby. He identified at least 73 taxa and sorted them into nine ecological groups.[1]: 91–92
Seeds of water plants were numerous and showed that the Boulou flowed very slowly. Plants of the banks and of the riverside woodland were few. The woodland group was made up mostly of plants that need light, which Bouby read as a sign that the oak woods had been opened up. Meadow plants formed the largest group, by number of both taxa and remains. Arable weeds and plants of waste ground pointed to fields in the valley, or to crops brought there, and to dwellings nearby.[1]: 92–93
Hemp was the only cultivated plant in the assemblage, and Bouby estimated its abundance at six achenes.[1]: 93 He identified them by their form. The achenes, he wrote, are easily recognised by their characteristic shape and are the most reliable evidence of the plant, because its pollen is hard to tell from that of the hop and its fibres from those of flax.[1]: 90–91 The paper illustrates one of the achenes with a photograph.[1]: 93
Interpretations
Bouby called the achenes the oldest hemp seeds recorded in France and, he thought, in western Europe. In the paper's English summary they "seem to be the most ancient Cannabis seeds recorded in western Europe".[1]: 90, 93 Until then, he noted, no hemp seed found in western Europe was older than the Roman period, whereas in Germany hemp was thought to have been grown from the Iron Age onwards.[1]: 89
He weighed whether the plant was a crop or a weed. Hemp is not native to western Europe, he wrote, and it most likely arrived with farming as a crop, though it may first have come as a weed and been taken into cultivation later. The small number of seeds might seem to point to a weed. Against that, he argued that the sampled layer lay outside any dwelling, so that little waste from crops reached it, and that charred seeds were very rare in it. Hemp was nonetheless the only plant in it that may have been cultivated, and even medieval sites in Britain and France give few hemp achenes. He judged that the plant was most probably cultivated.[1]: 93
To explain hemp in a valley bottom, Bouby offered two possibilities. Hemp needs fertile soil and much water, so it may have been grown in fields on the banks of the Boulou, and its seeds would then have reached the layer like those of the plants growing around it. Or the stems may have been brought to the stream after the harvest to be retted in its water, to free the fibre for textiles.[1]: 93–94 He noted that the only other waterlogged valley-bottom site studied in south-western France, Douville (Pont-Saint-Mamet) in the Dordogne, had also given hemp achenes, in a layer of the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE.[1]: 93
Bouby also took Al Poux as evidence that hemp seeds survive far better in waterlogged deposits than as charred remains. In French medieval and later sites hemp is found more often uncharred than charred, and he linked this to the oil in the seeds, which makes them burn away more completely in a fire. More study of wet valley-bottom sites, which rescue excavations often leave aside, would in his view show how early hemp was grown in southern and western France. He pointed to other evidence that it may have been grown there before the Late Iron Age: charred fragments of a cord from a fourth-century BCE layer at Lattes, which R. Boyer attributed to hemp, and pollen from the Loire estuary, from Carquefou and from a burial mound at Lons in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.[1]: 93–94
In their review of the archaeological evidence for cannabis in prehistoric Europe, John McPartland and William Hegman list Al Poux under the La Tène period with a date of 100 BCE. They list six hemp seeds and note good photographic evidence.[2]: Online Resource 2
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 Bouby, Laurent (2002). "Le chanvre (Cannabis sativa L.) : une plante cultivée à la fin de l'âge du Fer en France du Sud-Ouest ?" [Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.): a Late Iron Age cultivated plant in southwestern France?]. Comptes Rendus Palevol (in français). 1 (2): 89–95. doi:10.1016/S1631-0683(02)00015-5.
- ↑ McPartland, John M.; Hegman, William (2018). "Cannabis utilization and diffusion patterns in prehistoric Europe: a critical analysis of archaeological evidence". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 27 (4): 627–634. doi:10.1007/s00334-017-0646-7.