Stone age excrement provides insight into the life of pile dwellers

5500 years ago, people in the Alps lived in stilt houses. Most of their remains are now submerged as the water level in the lakes has risen. Diving archaeologists have found, among other things, well-preserved remains of cattle excrement in a settlement on stilts on Lake Mondsee in Upper Austria. The Stone Age dunghill provides insight into the life of the pile dwellers and shows how they farmed and changed their environment.

In 2018, the multi-year excavations in the small settlement “Mooswinkel” of 70 by 40 meters started. Among the numerous finds, such as ceramics, tools, wooden beams and botanical material, there was also a large amount of small chunks of cow dung and goat or sheep dung. This material was well preserved in the absence of oxygen and has survived for thousands of years.

“We only have a small excavation section, but I suspect it is farmyard manure taken from the house and dumped next to it,” explains archaeobotanist Thorsten Jakobitsch of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAI) at the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). ) the APA. Together with colleagues from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Boku) in Vienna, he analyzed these remains and, in a paper published in the journal “Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences”, provides insight into the lives of people from the Neolithic era. and shows how intensively they already used and shaped their environment.

The researchers were able to demonstrate that the animals were only kept in the settlements during winter. This is evident not only from the shape of the stool – large chunks of stool in the summer, small round droppings in the winter – but also from the identified plants in the droppings. Hazelnut blossoms, which bloom from January to March, were found in almost all feces. “So the excrement must come from this time of year,” says Jakobitsch. He also identified winter foods such as dried elm leaves and grains.

“For the first time, we have also found solid evidence for the assumption that grass plants were already being processed into hay,” says the archaeobotanist. They identified buttercups in the remains of hay in the faeces, which would be poisonous to the animals if eaten fresh, but edible when dried.

The traces of leaf hay in the faeces show the researchers that the forest was already being used in a planned and organized manner. The use of leaf hay, also called “Schneitelwirtschaft”, existed in the Alpine valleys until a few decades ago. In late summer, the branches of elm or beech are cut, dried and fed in winter. “Each tree was only cut every two to four years so it can recover,” says Jakobitsch. As a result, they produced long, thin branches with many leaves and therefore high yields of fodder foliage.

Given the estimated 750 kilograms of dried leaves that a small Neolithic cow needs to forage in winter, an average of 18 trees would have to be felled, Jakobitsch refers to corresponding experimental studies. Since the trees can only be felled every few years, the number of fodder trees needed for one cow would require about three to five hectares of forest. “This represents a major intervention in the forest ecosystem and also shows that people had to be very organized.”

As a result of this practice, man changed his environment radically as early as the Neolithic Age: the originally wooded areas around the settlement became a park-like landscape with ideal conditions for light-loving plants such as shrubs, grasses and wild fruit trees, for example wild apples, blackberries, raspberries or black elderberry, which served as food for the inhabitants of the stilts. “People then knew a lot of ecological compounds and used them to their advantage,” Jakobitsch said.

In further analyses, the archaeobotanist wants to analyze remains of moss and pollen from the found finds. This could provide information about the climate at that time.

(aeg/sda/apa)