Archaeobotanical and isotopic analyses of waterlogged remains from the Neolithic pile-dwelling site of Zug-Riedmatt (Switzerland): Resilience strategies of a plant economy in a changing local environment

Abstract

The excellent preservation of the waterlogged botanical remains of the multiphase Neolithic pile-dwelling site of Zug-Riedmatt (Central Switzerland) yielded an ideal dataset to delve into the issue of plant economy of a community spanning several decades. The study identified a major change in crops where oil plants played a key role in the site’s initial phase before being supplanted over the course of a few decades by naked wheat, barley and pea. Wild plants continued to be gathered albeit in different proportions. In the latest settlement phase, the changes in the local vegetation and in the values of the analyses of carbon stable isotopes suggest a less humid environment. The hypothesis is that the changes perceived in the plant economy represent a resilience strategy adopted by the inhabitants in reaction to short term local climatic alterations. The two types of soil sampling techniques (monolith and bulk) allowed comparing these results. While the density of plant remains appears to be underestimated among the samples collected by the monolith technique, the proportions of economic taxa remain unaffected. The findings thus reveal that when the bulk samplings are distributed carefully throughout multiphase sites and avoid mixing stratigraphical units, and if the samplings are representative of all archaeological features from a whole area, then each of the two techniques offer analogous results.

New research on crop diversity of the early farmers in southeastern Europe (ca. 6400 − 5700 bce)

“…The occupation of Vlaho coincides with the time of a potentially arid climatic phase, the 8.2 ka event (Weninger et al 2009). It is possible that naked cereals grew better under drier conditions as in a similar case study (Steiner et al 2022), than in a damper Servia (Greece) and Mursalevo (Bulgaria), as well as at the pile-dwelling site of Ploča-Mićov Grad in the lake Ohrid, dated to ca. 4600 bc (Holguin et al in press).…”