The Poles call them “little stone cheeses.” The Germans prefer one long word that translates “small stone balls with a groove carved in them.” The come in many sizes, although most are smaller than large, and can be made from any of a list of kinds of stone. Archaeologists have found them from northern Italy to the Baltic, from Gaul to the western steppes in what is now Beylarus and Ukraine. They are all Late Bronze Age, thus far, and no one knew quite what they were for.
Then someone said, “What if they were weights fo some kind. Not loom weights, but measuring weights?” And someone else, four someones else actually, did a lot of careful tedious work weighing, measuring, and recording the little stone cheeses and running the data through computers. Lo and behold, they probably were weights. Prehistoric metrology for the win!
Doing business without standardized weights and measures is…a challenge. Ask any medieval or early modern merchant. A London pound and a Paris pound and a Florentine pound might be very different weights. Each town with an official market had its measures, some of which were metal bars posted on the wall of the customs/toll/market master’s building. Everyone had to measure his cloth or other goods against the town foot or ell, since it was different from the last place’s official measure.
The same was true in prehistory, once trade became common enough. Metal in particular, but other goods as well, had to be semi standardized in some way that was acceptable. It’s one of those things that we take for granted today, and I mentally slapped my forehead (not physically, since I had students doing work and didn’t want them to think I was criticizing a project or discussion) when I read the paper. Of course there were weights and measures. That a standard had developed, and become accepted, and spread so widely opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Why had developed it, and when? How had it spread, and how quickly? How long had the trade network lasted and the weight unit been accepted as the standard? Who made sure that everything was legal and enforced the rules and prices?
Barry Cunliffe pointed out in his book about trade and civilization in the steppes of Eurasia that once trade begins, it is remembered even after it is interrupted. Trade and exchange were more common than we used to think, and far more extensive. Finding places that didn’t trade is unusual, or means that what went back and forth was something not easily seen in archaeology – furs, bone, wood, textiles, dye-stuffs, hides, slaves, ivory. The absence of the usual bronze and other status goods in parts of the southeastern Baltic raises all sorts of questions about trade, social organization, and so on.
So the little stone cheeses are a symbol of a far more complicated world in northern Europe than most of us realize existed in 1500 BC/BCE or so.
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An indian (feather, not dot) acquaintance I knew was very good at finding caches of tools, particularly arrowheads. He found one cache and pointed out that those flint arrowheads had come a long way, since local stone tools run to obsidian. (His SWAG was that they came from the Dakotas, and this was in S. Central Oregon.)
So, yeah. Trade happens.
[Wonders how many Oregon obsidian knives and/or scraping tools might be found in North Dakota.]
Another interesting thing, with the mass data in hand, is if the stones were carved from some specific rock types at a few location, such as granite beach pebbles, limestone/ashlar cuts, sandstone – something with a fairly constant density, easily worked and carved to consistent mass. Sets of those weights could go as trade goods in themselves, to keep tribes or clans on consistent basis. Somehow all those dumb pre-Enlightenment people seem to get smarter and cleverer. Cheers to the scientist who had the out-of-field mental flash for that possibility.
Ahh … the major Bronze Age fight and massacre in Germany? This type of finding raises another possibility. One clan or set of tribes may have used nonstandard weight stones and defrauded others, not checked until traders got home and compared to their local set. A bunch of angry tribes may have assembled and converged on them to literally exact a measure of redress and punishment.
They are not all of the same material, but mostly what was 1) workable and 2) on hand. They range from sandstone and limestone to carnelian. So a pattern got passed from one group to another, was copied and modified as needed (larger or smaller but always in a multiple or fraction of a constant), and then the idea and rough size traveled farther.
The massacre in the Tollensee seems to, perhaps, have been of a trading group that was ambushed during a time of increasing regional instability. Maaaaayyyyybe.
That makes sense – one group begins with a stone and pattern of weights, sends a copy off with other traders, with the idea that the weights are the same, size may not be. Maybe the larger or more influential ones send a copy of their own back, to compare to originals. And like now (grumbles at clothing “sizes” and “seams” …), there’s always one group or someone at the far end of the links who keeps pushing the acceptable bounds for size and weight.
Thank you – Tollensee, I could recall the posting but not the exact name. Insufficient caffeine.
Another fascinating snippet about weights and measures is the measurement of ship/boat size and capacity. Different woods have different densities: so, if two ships were built to identical dimensions from identical plans, one made of oak would have a different weight from one made of, say, teak. That, in turn, affected the displacement of the vessel, and possibly also its carrying capacity, in that if it was designed for a maximum gross tonnage, that would imply a lighter cargo in a heavier ship than it would a heavier cargo in a lighter ship.
That would likely show up as differences in boat designs. Can’t imagine too many cases where an oaken hull would be replicated in teak, or vice versa. 🙂 (Willow-bark tea for the boat builders, I’d suspect.)
Where it would show would be over time in a region/boatyard, where a given species was harvested thoroughly, and a different one came into play for a new set of boats. Would be really fun (for values) for the boat builders.
Interesting premise, and makes ‘perfect’ sense for a way to get equal measure for goods.