Post-harvest intensification in Late Pleistocene Southwest Asia: plant food processing as a critical variable in Epipalaeolithic subsistence and subsistence change (original) (raw)
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Quaternary Science Reviews, 2018
The Natufian culture (c. 14.6e11.5 ka cal. BP) represents the last hunter-gatherer society that inhabited southwest Asia before the development of plant food production. It has long been suggested that Natufians based their economy on the exploitation of the wild ancestors of the Neolithic "founder crops", and that these hunter-gatherers were therefore on the "threshold to agriculture". In this work we review the available data on Natufian plant exploitation and we report new archaeobotanical evidence from Shubayqa 1, a Natufian site located in northeastern Jordan (14.6e11.5 ka cal. BP). Shubayqa 1 has produced an exceptionally large plant assemblage, including direct evidence for the continuous exploitation of club-rush tubers (often regarded as "missing foods") and other wild plants, which were probably used as food, fuel and building materials. Taking together this data we evaluate the composition of archaeobotanical assemblages (plant macroremains) from the Natufian to the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB). Natufian assemblages comprise large proportions of non-founder plant species (>90% on average), amongst which sedges, small-seeded grasses and legumes, and fruits and nuts predominate. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, in particular the EPPNB, the presence of "founder crops" increases dramatically and constitute up to c. 42% of the archaeobotanical assemblages on average. Our results suggest that plant exploitation strategies during the Natufian were very different from those attested during subsequent Neolithic periods. We argue that historically driven interpretations of the archaeological record have overemphasized the role of the wild ancestors of domesticated crops previous to the emergence of agriculture.
The scale and nature of early cultivation are topics that have received relatively limited attention in research on the origins of agriculture. In Southwest Asia, one the earliest centers of origin worldwide, the transition to food production is commonly portrayed as a macroevolutionary process from hunter-gatherer through to cultivator-forager and farming stages. Climate change, resource intensification, sedentism, rising population densities, and increasing social complexity are widely considered by prehistorians as pivotal to the emergence of protoagricultural village life. In this paper we revisit these narratives that have been influenced by culture-history and social evolution, together forming the dominant theoretical paradigms in the prehistory of Southwest Asia. We propose a complementary contextual approach seeking to reconstruct the historical development of Early Holocene plant-food production and its manifold sociocultural environments by intersecting multiple lines of evidence on the biology of plant domestication, resource strategies, settlement patterns, cultivation and harvesting technologies, food storage, processing and consumption, ritual practices and symbolic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose that early plant-food production in Southwest Asia should be dissociated from ethnographically derived notions of sedentary village life. Plants emerge as important components of community interactions and ritual performances involving suprahousehold groups that were mediated through communal food consumption.
Hunter-gatherer plant use in south west Asia: the path to agriculture
Karen Hardy and Lucy Kubiak-Martens (eds.) Wild Harvest: Plants in the Hominin and Pre-Agrarian Human Worlds. Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2016., 2016
This paper focuses on plant use by the last hunter-gatherers in the Levant from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the first experiments with plant cultivation at the beginning of the Holocene. This review of Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic plant use summarises available archaeobotanical and technological data. Information far the Early Epipalaeolithic, especially from the site of Ohalo II, shows that, from the LGM, humans had access to exceptionally rich plant,food staples that included smallgrained grasses and wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and wild wheat (Triticum dicoccoides). Grasses seem to have been the staple plant foods but other plants were also present: wild pulses, acorns, almonds, pistachios, wild olives, fruits, and berries. Grinding and pounding stone tools were in use at this time far processing plant resources. During the Late Epipaleolithic (Natufian) period plant use intensified, as can be seen in the site of Abu Hureyra. The seed assemblage from Abu Hureyra I may have included more than 120 food types comprising possible staples such as the grain of wild rye (Secale spp.) and wheat (Triticum spp.), feather grasses (Stipa and Stipagrostis spp.), club-rush (Scirpus maritimus), Euphrates knotgrass (Polygonum corrigioloides), small-seeded grasses, and wild shrubby chenopods (Atriplex spp. and others). The presence in Natufian siles of tools with glossy edges that were used for harvesting cereals, and the widespread nature of mortars suggest that cereals were a more common food. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), the first experiments with cultivation of morphologically wild cereals, and also probably of legumes, took place. This involved cereals such as wild emmer (T. dicoccoides), wild einkorn (T. boeoticum), wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and wild oat (Avena sterilis), and pulses such as rambling vetch (Vicia peregrina) and probably others. Human manipulalion of plant resources opened the path to domestication with the first evidence found during the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB). However, the exploitation of wild plants continued to be important far these societies, as is suggested by the admixture of plant exploitation strategies during most of the PPN period and the late establishment of crop 'packages' during the Late PPNB.
After the harvest: investigating the role of food processing in past human societies
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2011
Plant processing provides an essential framework for archaeobotanical interpretation since practices of processing lie between the ancient acquisition of plants and the preserved remains of archaeology. Crop-processing stages have received much attention as they contribute towards the interpretation of plants recovered from archaeological sites, linking them to routine human activities that generated these plant remains. Yet, there are many other important aspects of the human past that can be explored through food processing studies that are much less often investigated, e.g. how culinary practices may have influenced resource selection, plant domestication and human diet, health, evolution and cultural identity. Therefore, this special issue of AAS on "Food Processing Studies in Archaeobotany and Ethnobotany" brings together recent pioneering methodological and interpretive archaeobotanical approaches to the study of ancient food processing. This new research, which involves archaeobotany, ethnoarchaeology, ethnobotany and experimental methods, encompasses investigations into dietary choice, cultural traditions and cultural change as well as studies of the functional properties (i.e. performance characteristics) of edible plants, and the visibility as well as dietary benefits and consequences of different food processing methods.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
Archaeobotanical evidence from southwest Asia is often interpreted as showing that the spectrum of wild plant foods narrowed during the origins of agriculture, but it has long been acknowledged that the recognition of wild plants as foods is problematic. Here, we systematically combine compositional and contextual evidence to recognise the wild plants for which there is strong evidence of their deliberate collection as food at pre-agricultural and early agricultural sites across southwest Asia. Through sample-by-sample analysis of archaeobotanical remains, a robust link is established between the archaeological evidence and its interpretation in terms of food use, which permits a re-evaluation of the evidence for the exploitation of a broad spectrum of wild plant foods at pre-agricultural sites, and the extent to which this changed during the development of early agriculture. Our results show that relatively few of the wild taxa found at pre-and early agricultural sites can be confidently recognised as contributing to the human diet, and we found no evidence for a narrowing of the plant food spectrum during the adoption of agriculture. This has implications for how we understand the processes leading to the domestication of crops, and points towards a mutualistic relationship between people and plants as a driving force during the development of agriculture.
2018
This paper addresses the range of subsistence strategies in the protracted transition to agriculture in Southwest Asia. Discussed and defined here are the intermediate economies that can be characterized by a mixed-subsistence economy of wild plant exploitation, fruit cultivation and crop agriculture. Archaeobotanical data from sites located across the Fertile Crescent and dated 12000 to 5000 cal. BC are compared alongside a backdrop of data for domestication (i.e., non-shattering rachises and seed size increase) and crop diversity with regionally distinct profiles of crop agriculture and wild food exploitation. This research highlights sub-regional variations across Southwest Asia in the timing of subsistence change in the transition from hunting and gathering to diversified agricultural systems.
2017
This chapter tackles one of the most enduring questions posed by prehistoric archaeology worldwide attracting the interest of prehistorians, anthropologists, economists, geographers and natural scientists alike: how and why did late Palaeolithic societies abandon long-lived and highly successful foraging and hunting economies in order to adopt farming? The chapter provides a critical overview of how this transformation unfolded in Southwest Asia, the place of origin for some of the economically most important contemporary plant and animal food staples, at the very end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene some 12,000 years ago. It focuses in particular on the nature of plant management practices during this period and how they were intertwined with changes in climate and vegetation, seasonality patterns, local micro-ecological variability, people’s historical experiences and perceptions of the landscape, mobility strategies, community interactions, and associated symbolic and ritual behaviours. Some of the currently accepted notions about the nature, ecology and economic returns of predomestication cultivation, the causes and evolution of the morphological domestication syndrome in crop progenitor species, and the predicted impacts of climate and environmental change on economic decision-making are critically reviewed and revisited. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the implications of the Southwest Asian case study for understanding the nature and evolution of prehistoric human economic behaviours, and the central role that resource ecologies play in determining the directionality and pace of macroeconomic change. (Chapter published in M. Benz, H.G.K. Gebel and T. Watkins (eds.), Neolithic Corporate Identities. Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence and Environment 20 (2017) pp. 21-53. Berlin, ex oriente. This edited volume is available for ordering at http://www.exoriente.org/bookshop/detail.php?b=61).