The Romans living on the northern border of the empire collected and used black bilena. But it is still unclear what it is for them: medicine or medicine? Archaeologists discovered an unusual artifact during excavations at a rural Roman settlement dating from the 1st century AD in the community of Houten (Dutch). Inside the animal’s carved bone was a well-preserved black seed.hyoscyamus niger). An article describing his finding was published in the journal ancient ages.

The site of the Hauten community was first settled by people in the early Iron Age (around the 6th century BC). The Romans arrived at this northern tip of Europe in the 1st century AD. First, a military camp was built there – castrum (or castellum). Later the settlement developed into an ordinary agricultural community. For a while Hauten flourished, but in the second half of the 2nd century AD the inhabitants left for unknown reasons.

During excavations in this area, archaeologists discovered a significant number of pottery shards, metal objects and animal bones. Most of the finds belong to the Roman period. Some works are of non-local origin: they were brought from Germany and England.

In addition to a fairly standard set of objects for a Roman settlement, a peculiar selection of bones was also unearthed at Hauten. A dog skull, fragments of horse and cow skeletons, fragments of grinding stone, and a hollow goat bone sealed with birch tar were found in the common pit.

Although researchers could not find the stonemasonry characteristic of such places, they assumed that the pit was a ritual well. Inside the sealed bone were the seeds of hundreds of poisonous plants containing powerful alkaloids.

Belena grows and thrives where Houten is located: its seeds have been found in layers from the Iron Age, as well as at four sites of Roman settlement. But they can happen to be anywhere; just like a piece of grass. A closed bone is something completely different. Such a find suggests that people specially collected and stored blackberry seeds.

At first, scientists hypothesized that the hollow bone might serve as a pipe for smoking the seeds. However, they did not find any traces of charring and concluded that it was the container itself. Perhaps it ended up as a sacrifice in the ritual.

It cannot be said that the Romans were familiar with the properties of black blekota. Pliny the Elder mentioned four types of blackness in his “Natural History” (Naturalis Historia). Among these, one species has black seeds and purple flowers, as opposed to the more common white appearance. Pliny warned that all species caused madness and dizziness, but that the white species, which grows by the sea, was most commonly used by doctors to relieve pain.

In Plutarch’s works, belena is casually mentioned as a medicine or poison. In “Comparative Biographies”, the Greek king III. It is listed as one of the poisonous plants that Attalus cultivated and studied. Plutarch describes its action as follows: “The discomfort it produces in those who drink it is not properly called intoxication, but alienation of the mind or insanity.”

From here we can draw the disappointing conclusion that belena was used as medicine in the Roman and Greek world, and the dangerous side effects of its use were known – at least in the metropolises. A bone vessel found in the Netherlands is the first convincing evidence that peripheral parts of the empire were familiar with this obscure tool.

It is worth noting that the white black is only one of the four white species growing in the north-west of Europe. And it is the most dangerous, as stated in “Natural History”. It is now impossible to determine by archaeological methods whether the inhabitants of the Roman settlement used belenum as a medicine or as a hallucinogen. It is clear that they knew its properties even if they had not read Pliny the Elder.