A remarkable flame

Puzzling artefacts can sometimes be explained by recreating them and exploring their possibilities.  Such was the case with the remarkable Bronze Age “Bunsen burner.”

  A question that had puzzled me for years was how, during a storm, a Bronze Age farmer would have searched for a lost sheep during lambing.  What light would withstand high winds? Tar or bitumen is not found in northern Europe, so tar-soaked torches were not an option.

  In Britain, the soft rush called juncos has been used as a sort of candle. Peeled of its green outer casing, the rush was dipped in fat or beeswax and left to dry before being lit.  But these lights blow out as easily as a candle.

pith, which looks like a pile of spaghetti.  In order to find some use for it, I dipped the pith in fat and placed it in a replica of a Bronze incense pot.  When lit, the tangled mass caught fire, and a cloud of white vapour floated between the flames and the pith.  The wind did not extinguish the flaming pot. 

  This was a very versatile light, as the fat-soaked pith can be made in large quantities and stored.  If a small light is needed, a small, ceramic incense pot can be filled and lit.  A large bowl can be filled to produce the equivalent of a car’s headlight. 

  Last year while working at a museum in northern Italy, I noticed in a bronze Age exhibit, a perforated ceramic bowl with a large hole in its base, it was described as a cheese strainer or milk boiler.  The bowl’s inner surface looked as if it had been subjected to intense heat.

  My first thought was it might have been some form of lantern top that fit over a ceramic bowl of rush lights.  I reconstructed the bowl in order to test this hypothesis.  But when I lit the rush fire beneath the bowl, a quite extraordinary thing happened:  A pencil-like flame rose form the hole in its “base,” a flame very similar to that of a Bunsen burner.

  If a piece of slate was placed over the top of the pot, the fire ebbed; when the slate was removed, it flared up again.  The significance is momentous.  The device would have provided a metallurgist with an easy-to-control bench fire for soldering and fine-tooling metalwork.  Such work was done in the Bronze Age, and we have decorated, metal artefacts to prove it.  But no one has discovered a tool that was adequate to the task.  Similar perforated Bronze Age pots have been found all over Europe, though they are always described as culinary tools.