Barrel: History

Although herodotus refers to palm-wood casks being used to carry Armenian wine to Babylon in Mesopotamia, it is generally accepted that it was the Iron Age communities of northern Europe, notably the celts, who developed the wooden barrel for the large-scale transport of goods. Its origins cannot now be recovered but Julius Caesar encountered barrels during his campaigns in France in the 50s bc. In the second half of the 1st century ad, pliny described transport barrels in gaul in a way that suggests they would have been unfamiliar to his Roman audience. The Latin term cupa, which later came to mean barrel, at this time normally referred to wood storage tanks, the remains of one of which have been found at pompeii, near Naples. Barrels or barrel staves have been preserved in waterlogged conditions on sites in Britain (at Silchester), and along the rhine and the Danube. The wood used was frequently silver fir.