Bronze Age Britons Threw Massive Ragers With Food and Friends From Far Away

You can learn a lot about people by studying their trash, including populations that lived thousands of years ago.

In what the team calls the “largest study of its kind,” researchers applied this principle to Britain’s iconic middens, or giant prehistoric trash (excuse me, rubbish ) piles. Their analysis revealed that at the end of the Bronze Age (2,300 to 800 BCE), people—and their animals—traveled from far to feast together.

“At a time of climatic and economic instability, people in southern Britain turned to feasting—there was perhaps a feasting age between the Bronze and Iron Age,” Richard Madgwick, an archaeologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study published yesterday in the journal iScience, said in a university statement . “These events are powerful for buil