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Science, Tech, Math › Social Sciences

The Archaeology and History Bitumen

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 Shriram Rajagopalan/Flickr/CC BY 2.0

Table of Contents
 What Bitumen Is
 Uses and Processing
 Evidence of Uruk Expansionist Trade
 Bitumen and Reed Boats
 The Bronze Age Mummies of Egypt
 Mesoamerica and Sutton Hoo
 Chumash of California
byK. Kris Hirst 
Updated January 30, 2019

Bitumen—also known as asphaltum or tar—is a black, oily, viscous form of

petroleum, a naturally-occurring organic byproduct of decomposed plants. It
is waterproof and flammable, and this remarkable natural substance has
been used by humans for a wide variety of tasks and tools for at least the past
40,000 years. There are a number of processed types of bitumen used in the
modern world, designed for paving streets and roofing houses, as well as
additives to diesel or other gas oils. The pronunciation of bitumen is "BICH-
eh-men" in British English and "by-TOO-men" in North America.

What Bitumen Is
Natural bitumen is the thickest form of petroleum there is, made up of 83%
carbon, 10% hydrogen and lesser amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and
other elements. It is a natural polymer of low molecular weight with a
remarkable ability to change with temperature variations: at lower
temperatures, it is rigid and brittle, at room temperature it is flexible, at
higher temperatures bitumen flows.

Bitumen deposits occur naturally throughout the world--the best known are
Trinidad's Pitch Lake and the La Brea Tar Pit in California, but significant
deposits are found in the Dead Sea, Venezuela, Switzerland, and
northeastern Alberta, Canada. The chemical composition and consistency of
these deposits vary significantly. In some places, bitumen extrudes naturally
from terrestrial sources, in others it appears in liquid pools which can
harden into mounds, and in still others it oozes from underwater seeps,
washing up as tarballs along sandy beaches and rocky shorelines.

Uses and Processing

In ancient times, bitumen was used for a huge number of things: as a sealant
or adhesive, as building mortar, as incense, and as decorative pigment and
texture on pots, buildings or human skin. The material was also useful in
waterproofing canoes and other water transport, and in the mummification
process toward the end of the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt.

The method of processing bitumen was nearly universal: heat it until the
gasses condense and it melts, then add tempering materials to tweak the
recipe to the proper consistency. Adding minerals such as ochre makes
bitumen thicker; grasses and other vegetable matter add stability; waxy/oily
elements such as pine resin or beeswax make it more viscous. Processed
bitumen was more expensive as a trade item than unprocessed, because of
the cost of the fuel consumption.

The earliest known use of bitumen was by Middle

Paleolithic Neanderthals some 40,000 years ago. At Neanderthal sites such
as Gura Cheii Cave (Romania) and Hummal and Umm El Tlel in Syria,
bitumen was found adhering to stone tools, probably to fasten a wooden or
ivory haft to the sharp-edged tools.

In Mesopotamia, during the late Uruk and Chalcolithic periods at sites such

as Hacinebi Tepe in Syria, bitumen was used for the construction of
buildings and water-proofing of reed boats, with among other uses.

Evidence of Uruk Expansionist Trade

Research into bitumen sources has illuminated the history of the
expansionist period of Mesopotamian Uruk. An intercontinental trading
system was established by Mesopotamia during the Uruk period (3600-3100
BC), with the creation of trading colonies in what is today southeastern
Turkey, Syria, and Iran. According to seals and other evidence, the trade
network involved textiles from southern Mesopotamia and copper, stone,
and timber from Anatolia, but the presence of sourced bitumen has enabled
scholars to map out the trade. For example, much of the bitumen in Bronze
age Syrian sites has been found to have originated from the Hit seepage on
the Euphrates River in southern Iraq.

Using historical references and geological survey, scholars have identified

several sources of bitumen in Mesopotamia and the Near East. By
performing analyses using a number of different spectroscopy, spectrometry,
and elemental analytical techniques, these scholars have defined the
chemical signatures for many of the seeps and deposits. Chemical analysis of
archaeological samples has been somewhat successful in identifying the
provenance of the artifacts.

Bitumen and Reed Boats

Schwartz and colleagues (2016) suggest that the onset of bitumen as a trade
good began first because it was used as waterproofing on the reed boats that
were used to ferry people and goods across the Euphrates. By the Ubaid
period of the early 4th millennium BC, bitumen from northern
Mesopotamian sources reached the Persian Gulf.

The earliest reed boat discovered to date was coated with bitumen, at the site
of H3 at As-Sabiyah in Kuwait, dated about 5000 BC; its bitumen was found
to have come from the Ubaid site of Mesopotamia. Asphaltum samples from
the slightly later site of Dosariyah in Saudi Arabia, were from bitumen
seepages in Iraq, part of the wider Mesopotamian trade networks of Ubaid
Period 3.

The Bronze Age Mummies of Egypt

The use of bitumen in embalming techniques on Egyptian mummies was
important beginning at the end of the New Kingdom (after 1100 BC)--in fact,
the word from which mummy is derived ' mumiyyah' means bitumen in
Arabic. Bitumen was a major constituent for Third Intermediate period and
Roman period Egyptian embalming techniques, in addition to traditional
blends of pine resins, animal fats, and beeswax.

Several Roman writers such as Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) and Pliny
(first century AD) mention bitumen as being sold to Egyptians for
embalming processes. Until advanced chemical analysis was available, black
balms used throughout the Egyptian dynasties were assumed to have been
treated with bitumen, mixed with fat/oil, beeswax, and resin. However, in a
recent study Clark and colleagues (2016) found that none of the balms on
mummies created prior to the New Kingdom contained bitumen, but the
custom began in the Third Intermediate (ca 1064-525 BC) and Late (ca 525-
332 BC) periods and became most prevalent after 332, during
the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

Bitumen trade in Mesopotamia continued well after the end of the Bronze

Age. Russian archaeologists recently discovered a Greek amphora full of
bitumen on the Taman peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea.
Several samples including numerous large jars and other objects were
recovered from the Roman-era port of Dibba in the United Arab Emirates,
containing or treated with bitumen from the Hit seepage in Iraq or other
unidentified Iranian sources.

Mesoamerica and Sutton Hoo

Recent studies in pre-Classic and post-classic period Mesoamerica have
found bitumen was used to stain human remains, perhaps as a ritual
pigment. But more likely, say researchers Argáez and associates, the staining
may have resulted from using heated bitumen applied to stone tools which
were used to dismember those bodies.

Fragments of shiny black lumps of bitumen were found scattered throughout

the 7th-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo, England, in particular within the
burial deposits near remains of a helmet. When excavated and first analyzed
in 1939, the pieces were interpreted as "Stockholm tar", a substance creating
by burning pine wood, but recent reanalysis (Burger and colleagues 2016)
has identified the shards as bitumen having come from a Dead Sea source:
very rare but clear evidence of a continuing trade network between Europe
and the Mediterranean during the early Medieval period.

Chumash of California
In California's Channel Islands, the prehistoric period Chumash used
bitumen as body paint during curing, mourning and burial ceremonies. They
also used it to attach shell beads onto objects such as mortars and pestles
and steatite pipes, and they used it for hafting projectile points to shafts and
fishhooks to cordage.

Asphaltum was also used for waterproofing basketry and caulking sea-going
canoes. The earliest identified bitumen in the Channel Islands so far is in
deposits dated between 10,000-7,000 cal BP at Cave of the Chimneys on San
Miguel island. The presence of bitumen increases during the Middle
Holocene (7000-3500 cal BP and basketry impressions and clusters of tarred
pebbles show up as early as 5,000 years ago. The fluorescence of bitumen
may be associated with the invention of the plank canoe (tomol) in the late
Holocene (3500-200 cal BP).

Native Californians traded asphaltum in liquid form and hand-shaped pads

wrapped in grass and rabbit skin to keep it from sticking together. Terrestrial
seeps were believed to produce a better quality adhesive and caulking for the
tomol canoe, while tarballs were considered inferior.

Sources

 Argáez C, Batta E, Mansilla J, Pijoan C, and Bosch P. 2011. The

origin of black pigmentation in a sample of
Mexican prehispanic human bones. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(11):2979-2988.
 Brown KM. 2016. Asphaltum(bitumen) production in everyday life on the California Channel
Islands. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology  41:74-87.
 Brown KM, Connan J, Poister NW, Vellanoweth RL, Zumberge J, and Engel MH. 2014. Sourcing
archaeological
asphaltum (bitumen) from the California Channel Islands to submarine seeps.  Journal of
Archaeological Science 43:66-76.
 Burger P, Stacey RJ, Bowden SA, Hacke M, and Parnell J. 2016. Identification,
Geochemical
Characterisation and Significance of Bitumen among the Grave Goods of the 7th Century
Mound 1 Ship-Burial at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk, UK). PLoS ONE 11(12):e0166276.
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evidence of adhesive as hafting material
on Middle and Upper Palaeolithic artefacts from Gura Cheii-Râsnov Cave
(Romania). Journal of Archaeological Science 39(7):1942-1950.

 Clark KA, Ikram S, and Evershed RP. 2016. The

significance of petroleum bitumen in ancient Egyptian
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