NOTES 905

It was only in the course of this work that the
scope of the destruction going on in the field
became clear. During our work, we had occa-
sion to register about 800 of these sites in an area
of 2000 sq. km. Most of the togue are well off the
beaten track, some are almost hidden and diffi-
cult to get at. And yet, rare are the togue which
are not yet touched by treasure hunters. Only
sites which house an (Islamic) cemetery or
which are somehow associated in the oral
tradition of the local population with an event
of importance are conspicuously untouched -
as, for instance, Toguere Sonon, where the
Foulbe’s hero Cheikh Amadou with his foll-
owers is said to have camped on the eve of a
famous battle.
From the sites one can learn that treasure
digging started as an individual enterprise of
one or two farmers from the area. Theirs are the
pits of limited depth and irregular shape, scat-
tered over the surface. Such pits may also serve
as ‘reconnaissance’ for larger crews to come.
More and more we have now to do with organ-
ized gangs, often coming from quite a distance
and from neighbouring ethnic groups. We hit
upon complete encampments at the side of a
toguere, where they intended to stay all over the
dry season. These gangs are digging trenches 1
m deep and about 5 m broad in a systematic
way, one after the other, all over the site’s
surface. The excavated earth they throw behind
them, filling in the trench as they proceed, in
order not to miss any surface. We came across
sites (not only the smaller ones) of which the
entire surface had been ploughed through in
this way, with freshly cut pottery fragments,
broken bricks and even bones all over the
surface. Bases of buildings, tombs, urns, pot-
tery, everything is destroyed in the reckless
search for statues. And we came across the
gangs themselves at work, tens of men (never
hundreds).
Who is doing this work of destruction? Most
often it is farmers from the area itself (indi-
vidual workers who do the work on their own
account) or from adjacent areas (gangs, organ-
ized by art dealers or their accomplices). After
years of drought, locusts and poor harvests they
are glad to have the chance of earning a little
money in the dry season, when nothing useful
can be done, to be able to pay their taxes.
Whenever we hit upon these ‘robbers’, apart
from feeling indignant, we could not help also
feeling sorry for them. ‘A little money’: larger
profits are for the dealers and their accomplices.
But by far the largest profits are made outside
Mali, in Europe and in the United States. Those
who are most culpable are not in Africa.

Grape remains and direct radiocarbon dating: a

disconcerting experience from El Prado, Murcia, Spain

DIEGO RIVERANUNEZ& MICHAELJ. WALKER*

More on the troubling matter of how grape pips may move about in deposits that appear
securely stratified, and on the doubts this may spread.

We wish to draw the attention of readers of ant radiocarbon dates for palaeobotanical
ANTIQUITY to further puzzling aspects of direct samples obtained during excavation of a sealed
radiocarbon determinations on palaeobotanical Eneolithic (‘copper age’) deposit in southeast
remains. The matter in hand concerns discrep- Spain.

* Diego Rivera Nunez (Departmento d e Botanica y Biologia Vegetal) & Michael J. Walker (Laboratorio d e Antropologia,
Departamento de Biologia Animal y Ecologia), Facultad de Biologia, Universidad de Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain.

ANTIQUITY
65 (1991): 905-8
906 NOTES
The site and the radiocarbon determinations
The site is the prehistoric settlement at El Prado,
in the deepest part of the semi-endorrheic basin
beside the town of Jumilla (Murcia province).
Levels between about -2.5 and -1.75 m below
the land-surface, are characterized by abundant
Eneolithic pottery lacking later forms of either
Bell Beaker of ‘Argaric’ types. They lie sand-
wiched between an underlying impermeable
clay bed and an overlying bed of indurated,
cemented gley, 1-1.5 m thick, which is equally
impermeable and underlies a centuratio with
Ibero-Roman pottery and a dismantled Iberian
religious monument (Lillo & Walker 1990)
(FIGURE 1).The gley was already cemented in
the 3rd century BC, when drainage ditches and
rabbit warrens were limited to its upper third. It
contains mainly Eneolithic finds, although
these are not abundant, and its fine granu-
lometric characteristics point to it having
formed, perhaps relatively quickly, during the
prehistoric period due to deposition by spora-
dic floodwaters reaching the poorly-drained
basin via gullies from the surrounding uplands.
The levels in question, although doubtless
dry land when Eneolithic habitation took place,
are still subject to intermittent water-logging,
and both faunal and botanical remains are well
preserved in them. They have afforded unca-
librated radiocarbon determinations on
charcoal samples of
4230f60 b.p. (Beta-7073)
4350+50 b.p. (Beta-7072)
4180f50 b.p. (Beta-7071)
4 1 7 0 f 7 0 b.p. (Beta-7070)
3950+160 b.p. (Beta-7069)
1
2
m.L
4 FIGURE 1. A typical sectic
grape-pips and barley con
5 from layer 5 in the main.
0 m. 1 Grape-vine pollen was f o ~
6 in layer 4.
to which may be added that made prior to
excavation of
4080L130 b.p. (HAR-146)
on an unstratified bone.
Froth-flotation of soil samples taken from
trenches, scattered over an area some 200 m
across, permitted identification of cereal grains,
grape pips, and other plant remains (Walker
1984-5; Rivera & Walker 1989).
Direct radiocarbon values for these remains
are contradictory and puzzling. What appeared
to be, respectively, a carbonized fragment of a
stem of a grape-vine, and a carbonized barley
grain, gave determinations in good agreement
with those just mentioned, 4340+60 b.p. and
4 2 2 0 f 6 0 b.p. (AA-4237, AA-4238). Both deter-
minations were confirmed as carbonized speci-
mens by the Tucson laboratory, although it
misinterpreted as a ‘grape-pip’ our labelling of
the cereal grain. Both came from a small assem-
blage of macrobotanical remains, mostly
carbonized barley grains, which was excavatecl
by careful trowelling by a field archaeologist of
very great experience.
However, grape-pip samples AA-3036,
AA-3037, AA-3038, AA-4234, AA-4235, and
AA-4236 all correspond to the recent decade of
AD 1960-70. Sample AA-4235, a carbonized
fragment of a grape-pip, was confirmed as a
charcoal sample by the Tucson laboratory.
Samples AA-3036, AA-3037, and AA-3038
were mineralized grape seeds which showed
white granular change was of the seed-coat.
Samples AA-4234 and AA-4236 were claimed
by us to be carbonized because of their dark
colour; however, because they gave modern
 NOTES
dates it is very likely their dark colour is simply
due to grape-pressing which, of course, discol-
ours grape seeds.
Discussion
Samples AA-4234 and AA-4235 were regarded
as the ones most likely to be modern intruders,
because they were excavated near to where an
underground drainage gallery had been con-
structed around AD 1920. We also consider it
possible that AA-3036 and AA-3037 might have
entered the trench in which they were found
when it remained open for some months during
the course of the excavation.
It is disturbing that AA-3038 was found
together with AA-4237 and AA-4238 in the
assemblage of macrobotanical remains men-
tioned earlier. Moreover, from the same trench
Vitis pollen has been identified by Dr M.P.
Lopez Garcia in a situation slightly above that of
the two grape pips in question. In another
trench 200 m away, AA-4236 came from a
situation close to that of AA-4237.
Two points must be borne in mind. First,
comparative statistics of grape-pips excavated
at El Prado and modern cultivated grapes from
Murcia show the former to be of ‘wild’ rather
than ‘cultivated’form (Walker 1984-5; Rivera &
Walker 1989); morphological inspection
reveals only a few whose elongated fusiform
shape is consistent with the ‘cultivated’ desig-
nation. However, as Levadoux (1956) pointed
out, some well-known cultivated varieties have
‘wild’shape and form (e.g. ‘pinot noir’, ‘Monas-
trell’, etc.).
Secondly, comparative atomic absorption
spectrophotometry for determination of iron
and copper, and molybdenum-blue spectro-
photometry for determination of phosphorus,
showed that El Prado mineralized grape-pips
have proportions of those elements which are in
every way the reverse of those of both modern
wild and cultivated grape pips collected from
living plants by us (Rivera & Walker 1989).
What are we to make of all this? No vineyards
have been present on or immediately around
the site for several decades, although Jumilla is
well-known for its red wine made with the
hardy Monastrell variety of grape. Fruit
orchards, covering the site and immediately
surrounding land during the 1960s, were
ploughed up in the 1980s; now alfalfa, forage,
and vegetable crops predominate. The post-
907
1960 radiocarbon dates render unlikely the
possibility that grape seeds were blown, or fell,
into the trenches from surrounding top-soil,
even if that could be presumed both to contain
recent grape seeds and to be able to cause
diagenetic change in iron, copper, and phos-
phorus in them.
Might birds have dropped grape-pips over the
trenches during the course of the excavation,
perhaps in the night-time? Could the mineral-
ization phenomena (white granular change of
seed-coat and trace-element reversals) be expli-
cable in terms of avian digestion of grapes,
especially of wild grapes carried from some
distance away? Nor can a possibility be ruled
out that loose seeds are eaten on their own (i.e.
other than as part and parcel of a fruit), perhaps
for their oil-content (e.g. by burrowing mam-
mals), or occasionally burnt seeds or seeds
discoloured by grape pressing.
In either case, however, not only does the
sparsity of cultivated forms among those items
supposedly dropped over our trenches cry out
for explanation (especially since the site is
much nearer to vineyards than to wild
grapevines which grow in distant woodlands
and valleys), but so also does the absence of
modern cereal seeds among the froth-flotation
material. (The well-water on which we had to
rely for froth-flotation was strained through
muslin cloth as a precaution against entry of
modern contaminants.) Might moles or other
small burrowing animals (not rabbits, whose
warrens never go deeper than the top of the
cemented gley) have continued the work of
avian vectors by carrying seeds downwards
before the site was excavated? That might
explain the dearth of modern cereal grains in
the prehistoric levels.
The weight of evidence from direct dating
demands we regard as modern all grape-pips
found at El Prado. It should also caution
archaeologists and paleoethnobotanists against
accepting as ancient all evidence for Vitis
remains, other than that of seed-impressions in
prehistoric pottery, which does not carry a
direct TAMS radiocarbon date (two examples
which do are AA-4237 above, and also OxA-931
which was published in Antiquity by Jones &
Legge (1986));or, perhaps, which is not backed
up by palynological findings, from each and
every one of those sites and stations which were
listed in our review of prehistoric Vitis around
908 NOTES

the Mediterranean (Rivera & Nufiez 1989). That
must affect both traditional interpretations of
early grape-vine exploitation as well as the
alternative one which we Presented in our
review. The methodological issue has wide-
spread theoretical repercussions and we feel
that there is urgent need for opening up a
wide-ranging debate on both aspects.
Acknowledgements. The authors wish to acknowledgegrate-
fully the generous collaboration of Dr Douglas J Donahue,
Professor of Physics at The University of Arizona for his
assistance in obtaining radiocarbon dates for the palaeo-
botanical samples using a tandem accelerator mass spec-
trometer.

References RIVERANUNEZ,D. & M.J. WALKER.1989. A review of

JONES,G. & A. LEGGE.1986. The grape (Vitis vinifera
L.) in the neolithic of Britain, Antiquity 61:
452-5.
LEVADOLIX, L. 1956. Les populations sauvages et
cultivees de Vitis vinifera L., Annales d'amdio-
ration des plantes 1: 1-59.
LILLOCARPIO. P.A. & M.J. WALKER. 1990. The Iberian
monument of El Prado (Jumilla, Murcia, Spain],
in J.-P. Descoeudres, (ed.), Greek colonists and
native populations: 613-19. Oxford: Clarendon.
palaeobotanical findings of early Vitis in the
Mediterranean and of the origins of cultivated
grape-vines, with special reference to new
pointers to prehistoric exploitation i n the west-
ern Mediterranean, Review of Palaeobotany and
Paiynology 61: 205-37.
WALKER,M.J. 1984-5. Nuevos datos acerca de la
explotacion de la vid e n el eneolitico espadol,
Cuadernos de Prehistorica y Arqueologia 11-12:
163-82.

Representation of the female breast in bone carvings

from a Neolithic lake village in Switzerland

JULIET CLUTTON-BROCK"

Remarkably, as the systematic study of well-preserved artefacts from the Swiss lake
villages reaches well into its second century, there are still new- and puzzling-forms to
be made sense of.

Over the last hundred years there have been
many publications on the animal remains from
the Swiss Neolithic lake sites, ranging from the
first descriptions of Rutimeyer (1861) to the
detailed analyses of Boessneck et al. (1963) and
Becker (1981). During the 1970s I had the
privilege to work on one of these faunal assem-
blages, retrieved by rescue excavation at the site
of Yvonand IV on the shore of Lake Neuchgtel in
the canton de Vaud (Clutton-Brock 1990).
The numerous bone and antler tools from
Yvonand IV had been fashioned with great care
and are wonderfully preserved. They were sep-
arated, at excavation, from all the other bones
and pieces of antler, and formed the basis of a
separate study by Voruz (1984). It appears,
however, that the excavators failed to notice
some curious examples of Neolithic bone-
carving for, amongst the animal remains sent to
me for analysis at the British Museum (Natural
History), were nine carefully worked models of
human female breasts (FIGURES 1, 2).
The models had been carved from the left and
right pedicles and frontal bones of the skulls of
red deer stags from which the antlers had been
cast. The stag must have been killed just after

* Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London sw7 ~ B D

ANTIQUITY
65 (1991): 908-10