 Welcome in the second block of our session. We are in Bronze Age, the most exciting time to be in. And we will continue with the several key topics that are probably one of the most important in our studies of Bronze Age economy. My name is Dalia Pakuta, I'm from Stockholm University. I'm working primarily with the, thank you. I'm working primarily with the isotopic research, recently also in a genetic, but my main subject of interest is the unitist culture, but today I would like to tackle, I would like to tackle a very broad subject. I can imagine clearly the world without money. When we talk about barter exchange, when we talk about buying same things on a regular basis, but today when we live here, we can't really imagine the world without grain. And when we imagine the topic of grain in archeology, this is immense topic. This is an ocean of different things. It starts very early during the Neolithic, but it goes bigger and bigger when we reach the Roman times, when we go beyond that, it goes even bigger. So there's a question, how can you tackle such a grand issue in a 15 minutes time? I will show you the way I decided to take it, but this is a kind of experiment. So this is a trip to the world of grain. I would like to imagine the Bronze Age in a slightly different way. I would like to imagine the Bronze Age where the metals, the bronze matters less than before. I would like you to imagine something which I call the food system, the food system of the Bronze Age. And I'm making three basic assumptions. My first assumption is that the agriculture is fundamental to the Bronze Age. My second assumption is that the food system is a complex web of activities involving the production, processing, transport, and consumption. Issues concerning the food system include the governance of the economics of food production, the degree to which the food is wasted, how the food production affects the natural environment in a given territory, and what is the overall impact of the food upon the given society. My third assumption in that experiment is that the Bronze Age food system is linked to global technological changes of the era. Climate changes and it has an overall impact on the concentration of power and the creation of power systems in the Bronze Age world. And how this thing, the food system, can be manifested in archeological records. We can see three basic manifestations of that. First of that is the residue of the grain you find on your side, the remains of the food products that were traded in the Bronze Age. The second is the remains of the consumers, the people who actually created those surpluses and who consumed the surpluses. And the final product is the waste bit where everything blends up by the end of the process. So we can see a circle process where something comes in and something comes out. It's like a circle of dependency. If I imagine that kind of thing, I would like to call it a core mechanism of the Bronze Age. The mechanism of the creation of the surplus of the food that gives a possibility for us, for the prehistoric populations to actually develop new fields of interest, to develop transportation methods, to develop metallurgy on a grander scale than before. And this system can be visualized like a perpetual mobile as a circle. On the one hand side, we can see environmental drivers, climate, type of soil, water. And that part will be different in different parts of Europe or in a given place on the planet. Populations are living in different times, in different climate zones and so on. On the other hand side, we see socioeconomic drivers. So quite frankly speaking, it's a demography of the given population. How big the group of the people really is, how fast it can expand through the centuries. We can see also natural events that are happening during the Bronze Age. Volcanoes, climatic changes. And I'm going to come back to that because the Bronze Age is a very specific period that is suspended in between three major climatic changes. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, 3,200, we have a climatic change. In the middle, we have Terra eruption and Santorini volcanic winter. And by the end of the Bronze Age, we have again. In the Harstad period, the climate is changing. But everything in that diagram comes back to food security. The access, availability, and the utilization of food production in general. The Bronze Age was perhaps the most exciting time in agriculture since the invention of farming thousands years before. And I would like to show you the selection of six major agricultural innovations that shaped the productivity of that era. First thing obviously is an alloy. It's the possibility of having metals, something better than stone, something more durable than the wooden implements, especially in agriculture. The second thing is high temperature ovens and the new food processing techniques. And during the Bronze Age, the thing with the ovens, we do know that the ovens have been found already in the Paleolithic. We have sites in Dorniva Stonica and Czech Republic where Zvelebil has found first ovens dated to 23,000 years BC. But during the Bronze Age, we have a massive technological change that is actually shaping the new abilities of building up better ovens with better temperature range. And during the Bronze Age, they also have better control of the fuel, fueling and the temperature range within that field. Majority of that goes into metallurgy, but in a Bronze Age kitchen, ladies could actually fry and bake stuff more efficiently than during the Neolithic. The third thing is the sale. I'm saying the sale because in fact, I mean a silent revolution. During the Bronze Age, we are witnessing the silent revolution in water transportation. And we have an evidence that during the Middle Kingdom, 11 to 13 dynasty, the Egyptians invented a new type of sale which was more efficient. It was giving a bigger speed and they managed to build bigger ships than before. And from the records in the Egyptian history, we know that Tutmose III was able to have a big fleet of ships, very like ships. And he was using them in a battle, in a warfare situation. But when the ships were not used in a warfare, they were used to transport grain. And millions of them were trampling the night from top to bottom. But in general in the whole Europe, as we could see in the Neolithic presentation, we could see that the people are preferred to use canoes. They're easier. You can't reach certain territories on a horseback, so water everywhere. The fourth thing, the plow. We have three basic types of plows known from the Neolithic. Of course it's very difficult to date them. Sometimes we find them in a context, we find them on the Neolithic side. But in general, we can conclude for today that we have, until the Bronze Age, we have three major types of plows and the differences between them rely in stability. We can see an innovation going through the plowing because they are trying to develop the plow that is heavier and it's more stable. So during the Bronze Age, we have several iconographic representations of the new types of plows, some of them from Sweden, but also from Middle Eastern, where we can see that they're actively working on getting better stuff. The last three things is relating to the plants. And it's based partially on a polynomial logical evidence and partially on the things we see later on in the early Iron Age. We see massive intensification in the production. And we have new studies from Germany. They've been published recently two years ago where we can see that the number of different wild crops is broadening the spectrum of appearance on the field. So we can see that actually the Bronze Age farmers, they begin to play with the plants. The main aim is less work, more benefit. And this is the moment when we can start to see the changes in the regime of plants being cultivated during the springtime and in the wintertime to try to prevent the erosion of the land. Introduction of the new plants in ecological and ecological flexibility. I said before that the Bronze Age is suspended in between different climatic events. And in the more global scale there are the most crucial factors, but you can't really see them in archeological record unless they manifest themselves as a huge destruction of some kind of, or there's some kind of dramatic event. But during the Bronze Age we have the moment when the Bronze Age might have ended and quite seriously there might have been the moment when the Bronze Age was no longer present. And this is Santorini eruption and in that time we can see a lot of things changing in Europe. We have a lot of warfare, we have changes in metallurgy, but in agriculture we see introduction of millet. And there is a reason behind that because the massive eruption of the Santorini resulted in 100 year, years period of volcanic winter. So try to imagine 100 years or 200 years of permanent failure of crops, devastating famine. You cannot longer grow wheat or barley because it makes simply no sense. And even if you manage to cultivate something, the war is coming and it's taking everything. And in that moment the Bronze Age is actually showing the flexibility beyond any level. They introduce a millet, which is very resistant crop, crop that you can grow on pretty much any type of soil. The crop that can feed both horses and humans. And this crop is going to dominate the staples in the following centuries in the Iron Age. And the last thing is, it's the Mediterranean trade. Three types of crops appear in the Mediterranean area, olives, cereals and wine. And today when we look at the cuisine from Greece, we can't imagine that area without those plants. So this is the moment when that trend is happening. But there's something more. There's also a sacralization of agriculture and food production in the Bronze Age. This is the moment when the agriculture becomes something essential for the creation of power. The good king is the king that can feed people. And we can see that pretty clearly in Egypt, where the iconography of the pharaonic era is going strongly in that direction. In the Bronze Age Europe we can see that the plowing is used both to plow the fields but also to, during the construction of the burrows, we can find the scratch marks under the burrows. We can see that certain items associated with agriculture can be found in the burrows. For example, in the unit it's a culture, we find saddle querns in burrows that indicates the connection with the agriculture, the concept of power going into the land. And we have the, first time we have the gods appearing, the appearance of the gods of fertility, known by names, Tammuz, for example, in Mesopotamia, very popular. But my favorite god is Neptune. It's a less known god of Egypt. This is the god of grain and germination. And it was depicted as an older male, covered whole, his skin was covered with grain. And this god is associated with the Egyptian concept of happiness and fertility and never ending life. But during the Bronze Age, something really bizarre happens with Nepri. During the Bronze Age, Nepri, become, his god is confirmed since the Fifth Dynasty. So since the old kingdom. But during the Bronze Age, Nepri becomes the aspect of Osiris. So Osiris, the main god of the pantheon, is taking the features of Nepri, becoming the major source of life and also pharaonic power. And at the end, I would like to have a brief look at how isotopic perspective can be incorporated in that picture. On the one hand side, you can see a referential book by Harding and Fockens where they summarize the overall picture of the Bronze Age or rather the things we choose to believe in about the Bronze Age today. And in that book, when you go from culture to culture, you're going to see very typical description of the agricultural regime. So all Bronze Age cultures in that book are described pretty much as, they kept cattle, pigs and sheeps, and they cultivated crops. And that uniform description appears over and over again. And that creates the situation like every Bronze Age culture looks the same. And if they all look the same, what is changing? Obviously, you impede yourself from asking new questions if you define the problem like this. So I mapped 210 skeletons. I've been working recently in isotopic research. And I would like to briefly show you how diverse the dietary trends in the Bronze Age really are. We have 210 people coming from different Bronze Age cultures. The yellow part represents the typical Neolithic diet. This is the bulk, my comparison from. In the blue segment, you're going to see the unit that's a culture from Poland, which has very sharp rise in the nitrogen values. They are manuring the fields. In the red segment, you're going to see Bohemian groups of the same culture. The same culture, 200 kilometers further to the south, they are not manuring, they are doing something else. In the pink quarter, you're going to see late Bronze Age Greece, which is actually following very maladaptive tendency. In the late Bronze Age Greece, people decided not to eat fish because fish seems to be, they became picky. They don't want to eat everything that goes. They select things. This is also the thing about Bronze Age. In the Neolithic, you have to eat what goes. And usually it's porridge. And during the Bronze Age, things go more complicated and you may choose. But in order to have opportunities to choose, you have to have surplus, right? And in that last part, this is the moment of change. I mentioned Santorini eruption. The black doesn't present tumulus culture from also Czech Republic. And you can see entirely different regime that are growing malet, because they have to. So it will be my brief experiment. That's all from me. Thank you very much.