St Gall and the bear

Saint Gall, Gallen, or Gallus (c. 550 – c. 646) according to hagiographic tradition was a disciple and one of the traditional twelve companions of Saint Columbanus on his mission from Ireland to the continent. Saint Deicolus is called an older brother of Gall.

The most popular story about St Gall says that once he was travelling in the woods of what is now Switzerland. One evening he was sitting down warming his hands at a fire. A bear emerged from the woods and charged. The holy man rebuked the bear, so awed by his presence it stopped its attack and slunk off to the trees. There it gathered firewood before returning to share the heat of the fire with St Gall. The legend says that for the rest of his days St Gall was followed around by his companion the bear.

Here are two miniatures depicting St Gall. On one he is walking with the bear and on the other one he is praying with the bear. The illustrations are from "Pontifical-Missal of the St. Gallen" which was made in 1555.

On both pictures there is a strange brownish circular object just behind his head made to look like a halo. The object looks very very very much like bodhrán, the Irish drum. 

bodhran

Bodhrán is one of the most basic of drums and as such it is similar to the frame drums distributed widely across the world. It has been suggested that the origin of the instrument may be the skin trays used for separating chaff, in baking, as a food server, and for storing food or tools. They are very similar to tambourines which are basically these drums with cymbals. In Ireland they are today played with a single drumstick called cipin. 

But is this halo like thingy behind St Gallen's head a bodhran or some other drum very similar to bodhran?

Well bodhrans were apparently once played using fingers just like tambourine or daf drum. This is a daf drum. :) 

The daf is a large Persian frame drum used in popular and classical music. The frame is usually made of hardwood with many metal ringlets attached, and the membrane is usually goatskin. The earliest evidence of the Dap (Daf) dates back to Sassanid Iran. The Pahlavi (an ancient Iranian language) name of the daf is dap. The word daf is therefore the Arabicized form of the word dap. Some pictures of dap have been found in paintings that date before the Common Era. The presence of Iranian dap in the reliefs of Behistun suggests the daf existed before the rise of Islam. Dafs were part of religious music in Iran much before Sufism. Iranian music has always been a spiritual tool. It shows that dafs played an important role in Mazdean Iran emerging as an important element during the Sassanian times.

Now these types of drums were also favorite drums of the Gypsi dancing bear trainers from Eastern Europe. They would play the drum (tambourine) and sing while the bear would dance to the rhythm of their song. I remember these guys from the streets of Serbia from the time when I was a kid.

The Gypsy bear trainers belong to a special caste called the Ursari (generally read as "bear leaders" or "bear handlers"; from the Romanian "urs", meaning "bear". They are also known as Richinara, Mechkari. They are known to have existed during the population's transit through the Byzantine Empire, as early as the 12th century, when they are mentioned in connection with the Athinganoi (Roma people) by Theodore Balsamon.

Here are some historical images of ursari with bodhran like drums:

As I already mentioned Gypsies arrived to the Balkans in 12th century. By 16th century Gypsies already lived in all parts of Europe. 

Soooo

Is St Gall's halo from the "Pontifical-Missal of the St. Gallen" a gypsy drum then? Did the author of this 16th century manuscript, base his drawing of ST Gall with a drum and a bear on traveling Ursari Gypsy bear trainers? After all he lived and worked in the 16th century in the St Gall monastery located in the north of Switzerland, and by the 16th century Gypsy bear trainers have already reached Switzerland. 

Now here is something interesting.

Here is an early 19th century depiction of Gypsy dancing bear trainers from the area of Hesse in Germany. They have a monkey, and the player is playing flute and a drum.

Here is an illustration from "Roman d'Alexandre", Flemish manuscript dated to 1338-44 written in French. It illustrates legends of Alexander the Great. The scene also has a dancing bear and its trainer, a musician playing flute and a drum and a monkey.

I was also told that there is an even earlier depiction of this scene from 12th century French manuscript. The illustration can be seen in Romanesque Manuscripts - The Twelth Century Vol. 1, P. 159 (Nr. 157), by Walter Cahn. Unfortunately I don't have this book. I will be grateful if anyone has a link to this image so that I can add it to this post. 

On the above map of the dispersion of the Gypsies within Europe, we see that the records show that Gypsies arrived into Netherlands in 15th century. So who are the bear trainers depicted in the Roman D'Alexandre? And who are the bear trainers depicted on even earlier French manuscript? 

Was there the same tradition  of dancing bear trainers in Europe before the arrival of the Gypsies? 

Or were these early images of the dancing bear trainers based on "exotic" images from other parts of the world, like the Middle East or the Balkans and not on commonly seen scenes from Western Europe? After all it was the time of the Crusades, which coincided with the arrival of the Gypsies into Europe. 

Or did some of the Crusaders bring the exotic entertainers back with them to Europe as a show off? 

Or is it that these images are the earliest records of the wandering Gypsy entertainers in western Europe? We have all seen, from the last refugee crises, that it doesn't take 300 years to walk from the Balkans to France? It takes few weeks. So if the first Gypsies did arrive to Balkans in the 12th century, chances are some of them went straight on further into Europe. Balkans was at that time full of the Western European crusaders, who mostly walked there. The inward migrants only start getting noticed when the number of migrants suddenly increase. Which is what happened in the 15th century, when Otomans finally took over the Balkans. So one or two small bands of street entertainers with dancing bears and monkeys would definitely not have been recorded in any official history. But they might have been noticed and recorded as a curio. Which is what these early depictions of bear trainers from Western European manuscripts could be...

What do you think?

Fishes

In my post "Ram and Bull" i asked this question:

"Have you ever wondered why Aries (Ram) and Taurus (Bull) astrological signs are where they are on a solar circle?" 

Most people would answer this question by: "Because the constellations in the sky at that time look like ram and bull"!

But it turned out that these two astrological signs mark the lambing season of wild European sheep and the calving season of wild European cattle. These were extremely important events which occurred every year at the same time. 

Our henge building Central European ancestors developed lunisolar calendar (at some stage before 5th millennium BC). This calendar has a static starting point (winter solstice) and can be used to mark repetitive events on the climatic yearly solar circle. Once our ancestors had this calendar they were able to mark these important events of the solar year on the solar circle, and "predict" or "know" when these events are going to happen next year. They marked lambing season with the symbol of a sheep and probably called it "lamb" but it came to us as Ram. They then marked the calving seasons and probably called it "calf" but it came to us as Bull. 

After I published my post about Ram and Bull, my friend Tim Walker posted this comment: "Makes sense of course. But then it begs the question: Can we account for all the other zodiac signs in terms of old agricultural/season practices?".

Thank you Tim for asking the right questions. And, you gonna like this, I think I might have found another zodiac sign which was originally used to mark another extremely important seasonal practice. This sign is Pisces (fishes).

Pisces (♓) (fishes) - from February the 19th to March the 20th. 

The official explanation of the zodiac symbol of pisces says that: 

"...the symbol of Pisces shows the two fishes captured by a string, typically by the mouth or the tails. The fish are usually portrayed swimming in opposite directions; this represents the duality within the Piscean nature....Pisces is the Latin word for Fishes. It is one of the earliest zodiac signs on record, with the two fish appearing as far back as c. 2300 BC on an Egyptian coffin lid."

I believe that this is another zodiac sign which marks a very important natural event, which occurs every year at the same time. 

So what do you think, which natural event, which occurs every year at the same time, and which is so important that needed to be marked on the solar circle, would our ancestors mark with a fish? Actually two caught fishes swimming in opposite directions.

Any guesses?

This is Atlantic Salmon.

Atlantic Salmon is a native fish of the North Atlantic and once used to live in all the rivers which empty into the north Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic sea and Barents sea. Basically all the rivers in the area above the red line.

But today in Europe salmon is a rare sight. Over-fishing, pollution, dredging, building of dams, all of this contributed to quite sudden decrease in salmon population and disappearance of this magnificent fish from European rivers. Even in rivers which still have salmon, the numbers are so small that you would be forgiven to ask what is all the fuss about. But in the past, this is what salmon rivers used to look like during the migration of the adult salmon upstream. 

This is a picture of an upstream run of Coho salmon, a type of Pacific salmon which lives in the Alaskan rivers. But once this is what Atlantic salmon runs in European rivers used to look like too. 

Few animals have attracted as much attention through the ages as has the Atlantic salmon. This is because Atlantic salmon has been one of the most important seasonal food sources for the people living along the rivers which empty into the North Atlantic. They were caught in large numbers during their migration upstream into the upper reaches of their spawning rivers and streams. Their meat was a steady source of protein during the salmon season. And later on when people invented the way to cure fish using salting and smoking the surplus of fishes from the last autumn run was preserved and used during the winter. 

Salmon bones were found in the debris from the French caves dated to Paleolithic times. And twenty five thousand years ago Paleolithic man carved a life-size salmon into the ceiling of a cave in southern France near the Vézère River. This is the oldest known artistic representation of a salmon in the world and proof that even in Paleolithic salmon was a well known and important food source.  

Salmon has a very interesting life cycle. 

It spawns naturally in freshwater. Spawning typically occurs in the headwater and tributary streams of rivers, though it can happen anywhere in a river if the substrate is suitable. Atlantic salmon lay their eggs in October-November and hatch in February-March-April, depending on temperature. When they are 1-3 years old, in March-April-May, salmon leave rivers to migrate along the North Atlantic Drift, and into the rich feeding grounds of the Norwegian Sea and the greater expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean. After spending 1 to 3 years in the sea, mature salmon begin migration back to the same rivers and streams in which they had spawned. This return into the rivers and the swim upstream is called "salmon run". 

Now how do you catch salmon. Well in the past, during the large runs, there were so many fishes swimming slowly upstream and they were so tightly packed, that you could laterally pick salmons up out of the river using your bare hands. Locals in Alaska still do that during the Pacific salmon runs, as you can see in this video and this video. If you were a hunter gatherer, catching a lunch this easily will quickly make start paying attention to salmon and its migration patterns. 

But even though salmon is so easy to catch, if you want to catch a lot of salmon there are other easier way to do it. 

Our ancestors mostly caught salmon using fish traps called fish weirs like this one which were built on rivers and streams used by salmon:

The fish could then be picked out either by hand or by using fishing spears like this one: 

The fishing weirs were also used with basket traps. The fish would be funneled directly into a trap where it would get stuck. 

We know that these types of fish traps have been used in Europe for millenniums. The oldest fish traps found in Europe were found in Ireland and were used for catching salmon 8000 years ago. And they have been used until the beginning of the 20th century. 

Now every year a lot of preparatory work needs to be done in order to get ready for the arrival of salmon. 

Fish weirs need to be repaired and rebuilt. The winter floods could have dislodged the weir barrier or blocked the entrance into the weir. Fish baskets would also need to be repaired or made anew as the old ones probably fully or partially rotted away. New fish spears would need to be made too. 

And all this has to be done before the salmon run season starts. And when does the Salmon run season start? 

Salmon fishing in the Spring tends to be limited to the lower river unless a series of floods have encouraged them to progress beyond Durham. 

Well that depends on where you are in the Europe. The migrations of both smalts and adult salmon are triggered by the river water temperature and the river water volume. The migration normally starts after the first spring floods. 

In "The Baltic salmon (Salmo salar L.): its history, present situation and future" by Lars Karlsson’ & Östen Karlstrårn we can read that: "Salmon leave the southern Baltic in April-June, and set towards their home rivers in the Gulf of Bothnia (the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea). Once they reach the river mouth they stay there for some time and gradually enter a new migration phase adapted to fresh water. Thereafter, they ascend the river in June-August."

In Finland and Northwestern Russia spring run starts in May or June.

In Sweden spring run starts in May. 

In Denmark spring run starts in April. 

According to "The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000" By Mark Cioc we can read that: "In Rhine river in Germany, which was once the main salmon river in Europe, spring run started as a winter run but peaked in March."

In the "Decline and fall of the salmon fisheries in the Netherlands: is restocking the Rhine a reality" we read that: "In the Netherlands, the most important months for the salmon fishermen on river Rhine were March to August."

According to "Atlantic Salmon: An Illustrated Natural History" By Rod Sutterby, Malcolm Greenhalgh. we can read that: "In river Loire, the river water temperature in the lowlands is too high during the summer so salmon start their run in the winter and finish their upstream swim in the spring, spring run peaking in March."

In "France’s implementation plan in line with NASCO’s recommendations concerning the protection, management and enhancement of the Atlantic salmon and its habitat" we can read that "The season for river salmon fishing generally runs from March to July."

The situation is the same in Pomeranian rivers, like Vistula, according to "The restoration of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) in Poland". In "Historical occurrence and extinction of Atlantic salmon in the River Elbe from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries" by Jan Andreska, Lubomír Hanel we can read that: "George Handsch von Limus (1529-1578) wrote in his unfinished writings Historia animalis that in Litoměřice, Bohemia, salmon are mostly caught in the river Elbe, mainly in March, April and May, when their taste is the most delicious...According to the inventory from 1588 for the village of Nelahozeves (in German Mühlhausen an der Moldau) located on the Moldau River near Prague, the largest salmon migrated to this location in March and April. A frequency of migration increased until May...The first migrating salmon were recorded in Prague in 1875, 1893, 1908 in March. These were fish about 1 m long weighing 7.5-15 kg, silver in color with bluish backs and small black stars...". River Elbe (original Slavic Laba) used to be one of the longest salmon rivers in Europe. 

In "Recollections of fly fishing for salmon, trout, and grayling, with notes on their haunts, habits, and history" by Hamilton, Edward, M. D Published 1891, we read that: "Salmon begin ascending all the larger rivers in England, as early as February, but chiefly in March..." and "Thomas Faulkner ("Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea," 1829), says that salmon fishing on the Thames begins on the 25th of March above London Bridge, and ends the 4th of September...".

In Scotland the spring run starts in mid February to mid March depending on the river. In "Status of exploitation of Atlantic salmon in Scotland" by Williamson R.B. we can read that: "Before 1950’s the catch of spring fish in February-April was sometimes more than 50% of the whole annual catch."

In Wales the spring run also starts mid February to mid March, depending on the river. 

In Ireland, a very small number of Spring Salmon start returning to rivers in January, but the proper salmon run doesn't start until February. The Fresh salmon, (Spring salmon, also known as Springers) will arrive into most of the rivers by mid February and start swimming upstream towards their spawning grounds. At the same time a lot of Spent salmon (Last Seasons Spawning Salmon, also known as Kelts), are making their way down stream and back into the sea and their feeding grounds. The main Fresh salmon season starts mid-March. From the middle of March the number of Springers entering the river and swimming up stream increases, while there is still a large number of Kelts going downstream. Saint Patricks Day “March 17th” is a traditional starting day of the proper Springer angling season. 

This is very interesting. It seems that the proper beginning of the salmon fishing season across all major European Atlantic salmon rivers used to begin somewhere between the middle of February and the middle of March. This is almost identical to the Pisces period which falls between February the 19th and March the 20th. 

So if you wanted to be ready for this amazingly important event, you had to know when it will arrive next time, so that you can repair the fishing and curing equipment and get ready. How would you do it? You would mark the event on your circular lunisolar calendar with an appropriate self explanatory symbol. And what symbol would be appropriate?

Every year salmon undertakes two huge migrations along the same river in two opposite directions. 

Smalt salmons migrate from rivers into the sea swimming downstream.

Adult salmons migrate from the sea into rivers swimming upstream.

And right during the period of Pisces, we have both Fresh Springer salmons entering the river and swimming up stream and the last years Spent Kelts salmons leaving the river swimming downstream.

Does this remind you of something?

Salmon the fish that swims in two opposite directions along the same river and that we start catching during the period of...Pisces.

Sooooo

Is it in any way possible that people would mark the beginning of the spring run of the Atlantic salmon, the fish which swims along the same river in two opposite direction, with two fishes swimming in two opposite directions? What do you think. 

O yea, the constellation. 

Here is the Pices constellation:

This is a typical salmon trap from central Europe:

Do you see any similarity?

And finally. Does anyone realize how important this is, from the point of view of the determining the origin of the Zodiac? Here we have three consecutive zodiac signs, Pisces, Aries and Taurus marking three extremely important cyclical natural events which occur in Central and North Western Europe: 

Pisces - Fishes - the beginning of the spring run of the European Atlantic salmon
Aries -  Ram - The beginning of the wild European sheep lambing period
Taurus - Bull - The beginning of the wild European cattle calving period

These zodiac signs could only have been invented in Europe where they have self explanatory meaning. So was zodiac invented in Europe? And more importantly when was it invented? And what about the other zodiac signs?

For the end, I give you this:

The above image of a salmon, which was cut into the walls of the Abri du Poisson cave in France and which was dated to 25kya is not just one of the oldest surviving images of a fish.

Over a period of 7 years, French researcher Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez visited 130 cave sites featuring paleolithic drawings, recording their solar alignments throughout seasons, and revealing that 122 of the 130 sites had optimal orientations to the solstitial horizons. Her example case “considered a salmon with a curved lower jaw, a characteristic of post-spawned fish. During the winter, the sunlight would fall specifically on this fish, concurrent with the season in which spawning occurs”...

Fulacht fiadh - a cooking pit?

A fulacht fiadh or fulacht fian is a type of archaeological site found in Ireland. In England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man they are known as burnt mounds. They commonly survive as a low horseshoe-shaped mound of charcoal-enriched soil and heat shattered stone with a slight depression at its center showing the position of the pit.

Radiocarbon dating indicates that the majority of fulachta fiadh were constructed during the mid to late Bronze Age (c.1500- c. 500 BC), though some Neolithic examples are known. 
Originally it was thought that fulachta fiadh were still in use up to medieval times. But in the paper entitled “Medieval fulachtai fia in Ireland? An archaeological assessment” by Alan Hawkes, published in the Journal of Irish Archaeology, Hawkes concludes that it is unlikely that the burnt mound tradition continued into the medieval period. Fulachta fiadh are the most common archaeological sites in Ireland, with over 4,500 recorded examples, of which some 2,000 are found in County Cork. Permanent structures are rarely found near to fulachtaí fiadh, but small hut sites are common and it is unknown whether early sites were built by permanent settlements or nomadic hunters.

Fulachtaí fiadh generally consist of three main elements: a mound of stones, a hearth used to heat the stones, and a trough, often lined with wood or stone. Troughs may be cut into subsoil or, more rarely, into bedrock.

The site may contain the remains of structures such as stone enclosures or even small buildings, and sometimes multiple hearths and additional, smaller pits. A number of the fulachtaí fiadh pits are approximately a meter wide by 2 meters long and maybe half a meter or more in depth. However, size can vary a great deal from site to site, from rather small pits lined with stones to pools conceivably large enough for people to bathe in.

The exact usage of these sites and even the exact meaning of the word fulacht is still debated. So lets see if I can help this debate in any way. 

The name

In "Lapidibus in igne calefactis coquebatur: the historical burnt mound ‘tradition’" which was written by John Ó Néill and printed in the Journal of Irish Archaeology Vol. XII/XIII, 79-85 we read that:

"Many commentators suggest that the Irish word "fulacht" denotes a pit used for cooking. "Fiadh" in Old Irish meant something like "wild", often relating to animals such as deer. However, all commentators acknowledge significant difficulties in deriving a genuine etymology for the word "fulacht". As some historical references clearly use the term "fulacht" to describe a cooking spit...the word probably carries a deliberate reference to the Irish words for blood (fuil) and meat (feoil)....Further corroborating evidence that in the Irish antiquity pits dug in the ground were used for cooking, is found in Geoffrey Keating’s early seventeenth century history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, which describes a pre-Christian tradition of hunters boiling meat in earthen pits, and a late medieval ecclesiastical biography of the Irish St. Munnu, describing the boiling of porridge on fire heated stones"

In the "Early Irish Farming: A Study Based Mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries Ad" by  Fergus Kelly we read that:

"The early Irish literature also shows that the word fulacht is not only applied to a water filled pit for boiling meat but also to an outdoor cooking pit where meat was roasted on a spit or over an open fire"

The cooking

In legend, fulachta fiadh were the cooking place of the Fianna. As they were lead around the country by Fionn MacCumhal, the band of young warriors would feast on wild boar and deer. It had been suggested that the term ‘fulacht fiadh’ meant ‘cooking place of the Fianna’ and indeed on earlier maps the sites are sometimes called ‘fulachta Fian’. 

Now considering that fulacht fiadh consists of a trough (a pit) and a mound of burned and cracked stones, archaeologists suggested that the cooking was done in the trough, with the water being heated by hot stones which were heated in the hearth and then dropped into the trough....

The Ballyvourney reconstruction of fulacht fiadh included successful attempts at heating the water and cooking meat in this manner. In the experiment it took about half an hour to bring 450 L of water to the boil and four hours to cook a 4.5 kg leg of mutton.

Impressive some would say. And the proof that fulacht fiadh were indeed used as cooking pits.

But one of the people who took part in these cooking experiments had this to say about it:

"..having used a fulacht fiadh for a day down in Wexford in the way it's described in the books in Ireland, I have no doubt that the books are wrong. It took a good few hours of constant work by a team of us to maintain the fire, keep the stones going into the water and maintain that boiling water for long enough to cook a joint of meat...So I don't think that fulachts were used for cooking. There are a lot of much easier ways to cook a joint of meat...".

The reason why pit boiling is extremely unlikely usage for fulacht fiadh is that its dimensions are all wrong for a cooking pit. They have much larger surface area compared to their dept. Now meat cooking requires reaching and maintaining a boiling temperature in the trough for the duration of cooking. But "the heat loss due to evaporation of water from a surface of an open tank is totally dominant at higher water temperatures". What this means is that at boiling temperature, it becomes extremely difficult to keep the water in the shallow trough with the large surface boiling for long enough to actually cook the meat. You have to constantly feed the fire in order to heat the stones. You have to keep adding new heated stones into the trough and take the cooled ones out, while engulfed in a cloud of steam for 4 hours. Because of the wide surface and shallow dept the heat will try to escape straight up through the surface which means that you have to constantly stir the water in order to spread the heat. This is a lot of hard work for cooking some meat, and this is exactly what the above participant in the fulacht fiadh cooking experiment concluded after the "successful" fulacht fiadh cooking experiment. It is possible to use fulacht fiadh to cook, but why would anyone bother doing it when we know that there were other much easier ways of cooking large quantities of meat which were available to the Bronze Age builders of fulachta fiadh?

So what other easier procedures could the Bronze Age Irish use for cooking large quantities of meat? Well depends how they wanted to cook the meat.

Boiling

What is the most efficient way to boil water? When you heat water, the hot water rises. So if you heat the vessel containing water from the bottom, the bottom layer of water will be the hottest and will rise, while the cooler water layers from the top will sink only to be heated and to rise...This natural heat convection means that you don't have to stir the water to spread the heat. If your vessel is narrow but deep, this heat convection will create a powerful mixing flow which will result in very quick heating of the whole volume of water. Now remember that I said that the heat loss due to evaporation of water from a surface of an open tank is totally dominant at higher water temperatures. Major heat loss can be avoided only by covering the surface. And at the same time the heat loss through insulated walls can be almost neglected.

So if you want to quickly and efficiently bring to boil and keep boiling a large volume of water, you want to put it in a vessel which is the exact opposite of the fulacht fiadh trough. You want something that is narrow, deep, and covered. Something like a cooking pot.

This is why cooking pots used for high temperature high volume cooking have been shaped in the same way since they were invented in late Mesolithic. They are deep and narrow, which minimizes the evaporation surface relative to the volume. This is a 15,000 year old pot from Jomon culture, an early acorn eating culture from Japan,

This is a 6000 year old cooking set from Europe. You can see that the shape of the pot is still the same.

And this is the same type of high temperature, high volume cooking pot still used for high volume cooking in Serbia today. You can see that the only addition to the original design is the heavy lid. These are extremely efficient cooking utensils which require a small amount of wood to cook large amount of food.

This is a great picture showing the size of  these pots relative to the human body. You can see that you can use them to cook over a hundred kilos of food, in this case sour kraut and smoked pork (Serbian bacon and cabbage).

We know that these types of pots existed in Ireland at the time when fulachta fiadh were made. Here are some burial pots found in Ireland dated to 1900-1300BC. They belong to the "food vessel" type funerary vessels found in Irish early bronze age Wedge Tombs and pit and stone cist burials like this one at Bunnamayne, County Donegal. If people were able to make these kind of pots for burials, they were surely able to make them for cooking too (hence the name "food vessels"). The one on the left looks particularly suitable for cooking and very similar to the above cooking pots from Serbia.

So in order to cook hundreds of kilos of meat and veg, in the pots like these, you need to chop the meed and veg and fat, put all in the pot, add water, herbs, salt (sea water), pile hot charcoals near the bottom edge of the pot, and then sit and wait until it is cooked....No hours of hard work necessary.

So why would anyone who was able to make these types of cooking pots torture themselves by cooking in fulachta fiadh? Well they probably didn't use fulacht fiadh troughs for cooking. 

The cooking hypothesis is rendered even less convincing by the near absolute lack of animal bone or plant material within the troughs. Moreover, the location of many burnt mounds on marshy upland terrain makes the notion of cooking somewhat unlikely: the prospect of carrying large quantities of food to such inconvenient areas seems unappealing. Proponents of this view have argued that the lack of animal material is likely due to preferential decay associated with elevated soil acidity, which is a key feature of burnt mound sites. Now in these marshy areas a hole dug into the ground would quickly fill with water. Acidic marshy water. A very very bad water for cooking food. No normal person would cook food in water like that. Imagine the taste of meat cooked in such water. Now if the fulacht fiadh trough was cut into a bedrock or into a clay rich soil next to a clean stream, we could pour clean fresh water into it and use it for cooking (if we could be bothered going through the torture of the whole procedure), but then we would have had some traces of meat and plant residue, which again were not found. 

So I believe that we can safely discard fulacht fiadh trough as a cooking pit. But there are other cooking pit types which are still used around the world, specifically for large ceremonial feasts where large amounts of meat need to be cooked at once. And they produce a lot of burned cracked stones.

Pit ovens

In wrote a whole article about pit ovens. In short, an earth oven or cooking pit is one of the simplest and longest used cooking structures. It is  also the oldest oven type used by people. The earliest ones were found in Central Europe, and dated to 29,000 BC. They were situated inside mammoth bone yurts and were used to cook mammoth meat.

So how do you make an earth pit oven?

At its simplest, an earth oven is a pit dug in the the ground. A fire is lit at the bottom of pit and let to burn until only hot coals are left behind. The pit walls and the stones placed in the fire absorb and then radiate the heat back towards the center of the pit. This heat is then used to bake, smoke, or steam food inside of the pit. To make the earth ovens more efficient you can line them with stones as they are much better at absorbing and radiating back heat than the ordinary dirt. The food is placed inside the pit, either directly, covered in clay, wrapped in grass or leaves and then the whole contraption is covered with dirt, sealing the heat inside the pit. The stones slowly release the heat and cook the food. after several hours, when the food is cooked, the food is uncovered and taken out of the pit. The cracked stones are discarded on the burned mound and the intact ones are reused. The type of stones used, granite and sandstone can on average be reheated few times before they crack and have to be discarded. If you want to cook a whole large animal like a deer you need to make a fairly large pit and use a big fire and a lot of stones. So if the same cooking pits were used year after year, and we know from ethnographic data the they were, they would relatively quickly produce big piles of burned cracked stones...

An example of cooking pits used for large-scale cooking producing large "burned-rock middens" can be found in Central Texas. 

Is this what the Irish histories meant when they talked about the "cooking pits"? Again this is much much easier way of cooking large amounts of meat than using stone heated large troughs. Possibly, but only on dry well drained grounds. On marshy waterlogged grounds these pit ovens suffer from the same problem that the cooking pits suffer from: seeping marsh water. The seeping water would quickly extinguish any fire lit up in the pit. But there other surface stone ovens, which can be used for cooking of large quantities of meat, which also produce burned mounds and which are not affected by the soil drainage. I will talk about these ovens in my post about stone ovens.

As for boiling using heated stones, don't get me wrong. Stone water heating was used for cooking all over the world, and particularly for porridge cooking, just as the biography of the Irish St. Munnu describes it. We know that from the ethnographic data collected in United States where hated stones were used for cooking acorn porridge. I wrote about this in my post about eating acorns.

Stone boiling was used when available cooking vessels were baskets or some other type of watertight but not fire resistant container, such as wooden bowls or containers. 

In California,the hot stone cooking was done in this way by the local Native American people. Hot rocks the size of tennis balls were heated by fire. Then, they were put into baskets or wooden bowls or containers filled with water and acorn meal. The stones were stirred in the baskets gently and slowly with a wooden paddle or looped stirrer. When the mixture began to boil it was cooked, exactly like when you make a cereal porridge. The stones were then removed from the basket with wooden tongs. 

Stone Boiling was also used by plain tribes. A bowl-shaped pit would be dug into the hard earth. It would then be made watertight by pushing a fresh buffalo hide, fleshy side up, into the bottom of the pit. The pit would then be filled with water. Large heavy cobbles would be heated in a nearby fire until they glowed red. They would then be carried on a forked stick to the pit. By continually replacing the rocks as they cooled with hot rocks, the water would get very hot. Food would then be added and cooked. The material stacked up on the right is buffalo dung (commonly called buffalo chips). Since trees tend to be scarce on the Great Plains, dried buffalo dung was the standard fuel used by the Plains Indians. This type of cooking was used for cooking things that could not have been cooked in pit ovens which was preferred way of cooking buffalo meat. For instance this type of cooking was used for extracting bone marrow from broken bones.

There is an old story called "Stone Soup". The story involves a stranger coming to a village, building a hearth and placing a pot of water over it. He (or she) puts in stones and invites others to taste the stone soup. The stranger invites others to add an ingredient, and pretty soon, Stone Soup is a collaborative meal full of tasty things. Not to mention a stone or two. 

So stone cooking was used, and could have been one of the oldest cooking methods ever used. But look at the dimensions of the basket on the picture above. It is again narrow with the dept the same as the diameter, and relative size much closer to the size of the hot stones being dropped in. This means that the water in the basket will be heated to boil and kept boiling much easier then if the cooking vessel was a gigantic hundreds of liters fulacht fiadh trough. O one other thing. This method of cooking was abandoned for cooking in earthen pots heated from the bottom whenever they were available because cooking with hot stones is much harder and time consuming.


Now remember that the early Irish literature also shows that the word fulacht is not only applied to a water filled pit for boiling meat but also to an outdoor cooking pit where meat was roasted on a spit or over an open fire. Cooking pits can also be used for spit roasting.

Cooking spits

In Serbia and in the rest of the Balkans, no major celebration can be imagined without a roasted pig or lamb on a spit. Where I come from, the roasting process always started with digging of a ditch, an oval shaped pit. The pit was then filled with slow burning hardwood which was burned and turned into a charcoal. Once the pit was full of the smoldering charcoal, the spit was put over the ditch and the roasting would start. Basically the pig was a spit roasted over a pit oven.

Again this is a very easy way to cook a very large amount of meat. Actually the easiest. In Serbia they roast whole cows on spits, so a deer or a wild boar wouldn't be very difficult to cook at all. No wonder this remained through the ages the most favorite method from cooking large quantities of meat.

So if fulacht fiadh or fulacht Fian really was a place where members of Fianna cooked their food using pits, spits and open fire, then pit ovens are the best match. Not only that you can use them for steaming (boiling) and roasting of large quantities of meat in the pit, but you can also use them to cook the same large quantities of meat on a spit positioned over the pit. And if the cooking is done in the pit, the pit ovens produce large quantities of burned cracked stones and particularly charcoal-enriched soil. 

So I think that we can safely say that fulachta fiadh were not used in the way the mainstream archaeology suggest they were used:  for cooking large amounts of meat in troughs full of water heated by hot stones. The Bronze Age people who built fulachta fiadh had much more efficient ways of cooking large quantities of meat at their disposal. But what about the troughs? Every fulachta fiadh had a trough, so they must have been used for something. But if not for cooking, what were they used for? Particularly the ones built on the marshy boggy acidic terrain. I will talk about this in my next few posts.