Among the ceramic finds from the cemetery of the Bronze Age Encrusted Pottery culture at Bonyhád in Hungary, archaeologists have found many ceramic "drinking horn" vessels, like this one, in the graves of infants...
This may suggest that the drinking horns functioned as special items used for the nutrition of children, i.e. like contemporary baby-bottles, or possibly they were related to customs related to birth and new life...
The location of Bonyhád inside of the Encrusted Pottery Culture territory in the Carpathian Basin.
From "The chronology and meaning of the Transdanubian encrusted pottery decoration"
What did the kids doing from these horns? Milk? Quite possibly, considering that Central Europe was where milk tolerance seem to have developed, and where we find Copper age and Bronze Age ceramic butter churns and Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age cheese strainers...I talked about this in my post "Milk Butter Cheese"...
No chance they were mini-trumpets?
ReplyDeleteIn the Tarim basin, a baby was buried with a milk bottle of sorts.
I guess if more sons were needed they'd try to wean young'uns over to goat/cow milk asap (while lactose was still acceptable) to put the next sibling in the "oven".