Bell Beaker Culture or Pottery as Social Identity?

Once again an archaeologist is looking into the phenomena known as Bell Beaker Pottery. The pottery’s spread and use is massive, very complex, and largely not well understood. The Bell Beaker pottery is thought to have originated somewhere out of the European southwest and spread into good portion of Europe all the way up into Ireland. Whether it is all just one culture that had massive migration or pottery vessels that spread through trade or the pottery became a copying phenomenon, is up for interpretation still. The Bell Beaker pottery is sometimes described as an entire culture phenomenon, but that is what the author of the paper “Danish Bell Beaker Potter and Flint Daggers-The Display of Social Identities?” Torben Sarauw, looks at most closely and possibly disagrees with.
Sarauw using recent studies and his own research into the area is tackling the issue of if the Bell Beaker pottery(BBP) in the Danish area is used differently than the other BBP regions. The BBP is used in ceremonial manners and prestigious grave sites throughout most of the participating European regions however the Danish use the pottery in a much more casual way. So the issue is what was the meaning of the BBP for the Danish Bell Beaker people? Sarauw also adds the production of flint daggers and their social meaning in to his thesis, since flint daggers were evident in the culture of the Danish Bell Beaker era and show material culture as social identity.
Social identity of the Danish Bell Beaker is the main issue in this article using the definition by social anthropologist Richard Jenkins as “…the way which people distinguish themselves and others through their social relations with others on the basis of similarity and difference.” (Sarauw 2008, 24) Sarauw uses the distribution of the pottery between several houses on the archaeological site of Bejsebakken to show how some households or community groups identified themselves with pottery in their everyday lives. These Bejsebakken households are of a common style in the Jutlandic and are radiocarbon dated to be in the correct time for the BBP in other areas of Northern Europe. The site also holds very large amounts of BBP and flint dagger remains of varying lengths and widths.
Sarauw’s article is divided into two parts for the main discussion the Pottery section and the Flint Section. In the Pottery section the discussion centers around the findings that the grave goods were either from an earlier interpretation of the Bell Beaker pottery or were only a shot term or “tested” cultural tradition for the Danish (Sarauw 2008, 26). This means that the Danish did not use their Bell Beaker pottery to show respect to the dead or to warrior men but used it instead to create an identity in their lives. This is shown by how the pottery distributed between the Bejsebakken houses. 16 houses were particularly studied because of their amount of pottery. There were several different types of pottery, some plain utility ware with no decoration, some coarse ware with horizontal grooves, and BBP were found around the houses (Sarauw 2008, figure 4). The particular oddity is that the three types of pottery surrounded only certain houses in chronological progression.
The flint daggers that were created and formed at the time are called “type I daggers” and they fall into varying standards. Sarauw refers to them as “ordinary” and “parallel-flaked” or “sub-type I C.”(Sarauw 2008, 32) The many daggers found were charted by length and width, which show where they fall in the two categories, although the “ordinary” daggers far outweigh the “sub-type I C.” It seems that the “sub-type I C” daggers appear most often in male graves, presumed to be warrior graves or graves that got warrior attention recognition. The other “ordinary” daggers are seen to be used as common things by all ages and sexes. The “sub-type I C” daggers when used in their ceremonial status are connected to only to warrior activities (Sarauw 2008, 36).
The social identities that are associated with this use of material culture from the Danish at Bejsebakken, and can possibly be expanded to all Danish is very interesting to the overall conclusions about the Bell Beaker Culture. Sarauw shows that the Danish at Bejsbakken do not use the BBP as a ceremonial pottery for the dead, but as a signifier of family. The pottery, plain, coarse ware and Bell Beaker pottery, that is found around these certain houses, are not exchanged between houses but are kept in the households continually. Sarauw interprets this as the pottery types create a social identity of lineage and family connection, not prestige or sex. However the difficult to make ‘sub-type I C” flint daggers from the area that was used at the same time as the pottery is created for warrior practices, and giving honor to warrior men at their graves. The flint daggers take the place of the pottery in the Danish Bell Beaker society. Sarauw comes to several conclusions about the overall Bell Beaker culture from this. A possible theory is due to sea voyages and trade the pottery is not a symbol for a migrating or dominant culture, but merely a trade picked up because it is attractive or in the case of the non-Bell Beaker areas not picked up because they find it unattractive (Sarauw 2008, 31). The final conclusion is that the Bell Beaker culture in the Danish society was not a culture at all, but merely a social identity marker, and that more research into the area is needed.

Work Cited

Jenkins, R
1996 Social Identity. London and New York, Routledge.

Sarauw, Torben
2008 Danish Bell Beaker Pottery and Flint Daggers - the Display of Social
Identities? In European Journal of Archaeology pp 23-47.