Archaeobotanical Evidence for the Spread of Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean

2004/08/01 by Sue Colledge, James Conolly, Stephen Shennan · 16 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History #Archaeology and Historical Studies

paper · doi:10.1086/422086

Abstract

A major topic of debate in Old World prehistory is the relative importance of population movement versus cultural diffusion in explaining the spread of agriculture into and across Europe following its inception in southwestern Asia. An important set of data that has surprisingly been largely absent from this debate is the preserved crops and associated weeds of the earliest farmers. An analysis of archaeobotanical data from 40 aceramic Neolithic sites in southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe shows that there are vegetational signatures that characterize the different geographical regions occupied by the Early Neolithic farmers. On this basis it is argued that the compositional similarities of the crop package between the Levantine core, Cyprus, and Greece are indicative of both the routes of migration of early farming groups and the early agricultural practices of Europe's first farmers. © 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.

Cited by

• Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East
• Supra-Regional Networks in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia
• Human responses and non-responses to climatic variations during the last Glacial-Interglacial transition in the eastern Mediterranean
• Evolutionary ecology during the rise of dioxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. [europepmc]
• Millets across Eurasia: chronology and context of early records of the genera Panicum and Setaria from archaeological sites in the Old World. [europepmc]
• Adaptation and niche construction in human prehistory: a case study from the southern Scandinavian Late Glacial. [europepmc]
• The complex history of the olive tree: from Late Quaternary diversification of Mediterranean lineages to primary domestication in the northern Levant. [europepmc]
• Ornaments reveal resistance of North European cultures to the spread of farming. [europepmc]
• From Pleistocene to Holocene: the prehistory of southwest Asia in evolutionary context. [europepmc]
• Barley heads east: Genetic analyses reveal routes of spread through diverse Eurasian landscapes. [europepmc]
• Whole genome resequencing of the Iranian native dogs and wolves to unravel variome during dog domestication. [europepmc]
• Celtic Provenance in Traditional Herbal Medicine of Medieval Wales and Classical Antiquity. [europepmc]
• Enhanced UV-Reflection Facilitated a Shift in the Pollination System of the Red Poppy, Papaver rhoeas (Papaveraceae). [europepmc]
• Integrating faunal and botanical remains using multivariate statistics to reconstruct (pre)historic subsistence developments. [europepmc]
• Spatially explicit paleogenomic simulations support cohabitation with limited admixture between Bronze Age Central European populations. [europepmc]
• Epipalaeolithic animal tending to Neolithic herding at Abu Hureyra, Syria (12,800-7,800 calBP): Deciphering dung spherulites. [europepmc]

Related

• Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East
• The Neolithic Transition in Europe at 50 Years
• Multiple Sources of the European Neolithic: Mathematical Modelling Constrained by Radiocarbon Dates
• The role of local domestication on the island of Cyprus during the Neolithic transition (10,000-7000 BCE)
• The Aegean in the Early 7th Millennium BC: Maritime Networks and Colonization