Gonur Depe
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| Gonur Depe | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Country | Turkmenistan |
| Coordinates | 38.21, 62.04 |
| Site | |
| Type | Settlement |
| Culture | Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex |
| Period | Bronze Age |
| Excavated by | Viktor Sarianidi |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Impressions, Pollen |
| Impressions in the gypsum lining of vessels, published as hemp seeds and re-examined as broomcorn millet | |
| Identified by | Morphology, Pollen analysis |
| Identification | Disputed; see the article |
Gonur Depe is a Bronze Age settlement on the alluvial fan of the Murghab River in south-eastern Turkmenistan, within the culture that its excavator, Viktor Sarianidi, called the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex.[1] Sarianidi reported hemp among the plant remains in gypsum-lined vessels in the temple precinct he called the Gonur temenos and took it for an ingredient of a ritual drink.[2] The archaeobotanist C. C. Bakels examined material from the same vessels and identified the impressions in it as broomcorn millet. The identification of cannabis at the site is disputed.[3]
Site
Gonur Depe lies in the delta of the Murghab, an alluvial fan on which about 2000 archaeological sites have been recorded. Traci Billings and colleagues date the culture to about 2250 to 1700 BCE and note its other names, the Oxus Civilization and the Greater Khorasan Civilization.[1] Terracotta pipes formed part of the drainage of a palace at Gonur North. A cemetery near Gonur South held looted burials of the mid-third to early second millennium BCE.[1]
Sarianidi counted the Gonur temenos with Togolok-21 and Togolok-1 among three monumental temples of ancient Margiana, whose plans he compared with the temples of Mesopotamia. Each had what he called a "white room", with low brick platforms along the walls into which vessels lined with thick layers of gypsum were set. Around a small temple in the Gonur temenos stood houses whose people, in his reading, served the temple. More than 25 of their rooms held large vats or "small baths" built into brick platforms.[2]
The reported finds
In a book of 2002 Sarianidi wrote that laboratory tests had found traces of hemp in vessels set into a brick platform in the Gonur temenos. Tests also found a large quantity of hemp in the gypsum-lined tubs in the houses around the small temple, where he thought it had probably been retted.[4]: 194–197
In 2003 he wrote that the vessels of the white rooms held remains of ephedra, cannabis and poppy, citing the analyses of the palaeobotanist N. R. Meyer-Melikyan. In the vats and baths of the Gonur houses, he wrote, there were remains "with the offprints of seeds, ephedra stems and cannabis, mostly".[2] His Necropolis of Gonur (2007) states that every temple of Margiana yielded pollen of ephedra, hemp and poppy, analysed by Meyer-Melikyan in a Moscow University laboratory.[5]: 174–175 Meyer-Melikyan and N. A. Avetov had published the Gonur material in 1998. They separated the gypsum deposit into layers with different contents and reported hemp pollen in large quantities.[3]
Sarianidi read these plants as the ingredients of a drink of the type called haoma in the Avesta and soma in the Rigveda. In his account the plants were soaked in the vats, pressed and left to ferment in the white rooms. Ceramic stands and strainers found in a room next to the white room of the Gonur temenos were, he proposed, used to strain the drink.[2]
Re-examination
F. Hiebert (1994) and A. Parpola (1998) doubted the contents of the vessels, after samples from the Gonur temenos analysed at the University of Helsinki gave negative results. Sarianidi answered that those samples came from vessels that had stood in the open, in sun, rain and snow, for five years. In the summer of 1999 new samples from the Gonur temenos were sent to Leiden for an independent analysis.[2]
Bakels, of the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, examined parts of the white layer of gypsum and clay from vessels of the Gonur white room and of Togolok-21. The plant matter had decayed and survived only as holes in the deposit. She judged from Meyer-Melikyan and Avetov's photographs that her Gonur pieces were the material they had published, but she could not separate the deposit into layers with different contents as they had.[3]
Most of the impressions are round to oval; a few were left by stems. Bakels found the round impressions too small for hemp seeds, with the wrong shape and surface pattern. She found that the grooved stems could not be firmly identified as ephedra. Some round impressions still held a cell layer resembling the silica-rich husk of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum). She concluded that the vessels had been filled with millet that had not been dehusked and that the stems might belong to the same cereal, though that could not be proven. Sietse Bottema and René Cappers of the University of Groningen compared the impressions with small-seeded hemp from Iran in their reference collection and found the hemp too large. Mark Nesbitt of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Dorian Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology in London also judged broomcorn millet the best fit.[3]
Neither Bakels nor Bottema, who tried two methods, could extract pollen from the deposit. They concluded that pollen had not survived. Bakels wrote that she and her colleagues were left wondering whether they had examined the same material that Meyer-Melikyan and Avetov described.[3] In editing Sarianidi's 2003 paper, J. E. M. Houben noted that it had not so far been possible to confirm Sarianidi's identifications and conclusions in all details.[2]
Billings and colleagues cite Bakels's identification of the impressions in vessels at Gonur South and Togolok 21 as tentative. Broomcorn millet has been recovered as plant remains from Gonur North and from other sites in the region.[1] Meng Ren and colleagues wrote in 2019 that follow-up studies of the reported cannabis from Gonur had shown the original identifications to be erroneous. In their account the original published photograph shows impressions of plant parts on a ceramic sherd, not preserved plant remains. Specialists, they wrote, found the round impressions to be of broomcorn millet, not of cannabis or ephedra.[6]
Textiles
The textile analyses printed in Necropolis of Gonur, on cloth from a warrior's grave at Gonur, identified flax. One of the three laboratories allowed that the fibre might be hemp but thought flax more likely.[5]: 330–337 A study of the molecular preservation of a cloth taken from a Gonur warrior's grave in 2001 found it to be probably flax.[7]
Readings
Sarianidi wrote that in Margiana, "for the first time in the world archaeological practice", temples had been found in which drinks of the soma-haoma type were prepared for cult ceremonies. From them he argued that the cult had been brought to Central Asia from the west.[2] Ren and colleagues trace the soma debates in Central Asian archaeology to his accounts of these buildings. They note that perforated vessels of the kind he took for strainers are found across Central Asia and are often associated with making cheese. They count the Gonur claims among the claims of archaeological cannabis in Central Asia that they call "spurious".[6] Bakels, for her part, noted that broomcorn millet is known from the Merv oasis from the Bronze Age onwards and that the cereal can be cooked, made into a heavy bread or used, without dehusking, to prepare a fermented drink.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Billings, Traci N.; Cerasetti, Barbara; Forni, Luca; Arciero, Roberto; Dal Martello, Rita; Carra, Marialetizia; Rouse, Lynne M.; Boivin, Nicole; Spengler, Robert N. (2022). "Agriculture in the Karakum: an archaeobotanical analysis from Togolok 1, southern Turkmenistan (ca. 2300–1700 B.C.)". Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. 10 995490. doi:10.3389/fevo.2022.995490.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Sarianidi, Victor I. (2003). "Margiana and Soma-Haoma". Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 9 (1). doi:10.11588/ejvs.2003.1.787.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Bakels, C. C. (2003). "The contents of ceramic vessels in the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, Turkmenistan". Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 9 (1). doi:10.11588/ejvs.2003.1.785.
- ↑ Sarianidi, Viktor (2002). Margush: ancient Oriental kingdom in the old delta of the Murghab River (PDF) (in Türkmençe, русский, and English). Ashgabat: Türkmendöwlethabarlary. ISBN 5-7270-0100-5.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sarianidi, Victor (2007). Necropolis of Gonur (PDF). Athens: Kapon Editions. ISBN 978-960-7037-85-5.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Ren, Meng; Tang, Zihua; Wu, Xinhua; Spengler, Robert; Jiang, Hongen; Yang, Yimin; Boivin, Nicole (2019). "The origins of cannabis smoking: chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs". Science Advances. 5 (6) eaaw1391. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391.
- ↑ Reynaud, Corentin; Thoury, Mathieu; Dazzi, Alexandre; Latour, Gaël; et al. (2020). "In-place molecular preservation of cellulose in 5,000-year-old archaeological textiles". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (33): 19670–19676. doi:10.1073/pnas.2004139117.