NICHE · Investigating the Ecology, Composition and Exploitability of Wild Cereal Habitats in Relation to Agricultural Origins in the Near East

Investigating the Ecology, Composition and Exploitability of Wild Cereal Habitats in Relation to Agricultural Origins in the Near East

During the Earliest Neolithic in southwest Asia, between ca. 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the first farming communities of the world developed in southwest Asia. Archaeobotanical research on this process strongly focused on the wild progenitors of the cereal founder crops einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley. Scholars developed the “pre-domestication cultivation" hypothesis, arguing that wild cereals were cultivated for millennia before morphological domestication traits appeared. Pre-domestication cultivation now represents the major explanatory framework for understanding early farming, with the identification of potential weed floras associated with remains of wild cereals as its key identification criterion. However, little is known about the origins of arable weeds and their association with unmanaged wild cereal habitats, casting doubt on their reliability as indicators of early cultivation activities. We must therefore be cautious in using modern weed taxa for identifying the beginnings of plant cultivation and need to develop a more holistic approach to trace the origins of “weed seeds” from early cultivator sites. These uncertainties pose major problems in reconstructing the socio-economic organisation of early cultivating communities and the labour-demands associated with early resource management systems. A related problem concerns edible medium- and large-seeded wild grasses that grow together with the wild cereals in modern stands and occur abundantly at Early Neolithic sites, which seem to have played a crucial role in Early Neolithic subsistence economies and culinary practices throughout southwest Asia. Reconstructing subsistence developments during the Neolithic transition must therefore consider these medium- and large-seeded wild grasses more thoroughly and we need to develop new approaches for understanding the role of edible grass resources in comparison to the wild cereals in prehistoric contexts. The diversity of exploited food resources during the development of early cultivation may otherwise be severely underestimated. The overall objective is to develop an analytical approach that can identify management practices like tillage from the archaeobotanical record in order to trace it's development through time and correlate it to simultaneous social processes.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз