Bronze age fuel use and its implications for agrarian landscapes in the eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

We compare carbonized seeds and charcoal excavated from four Bronze Age settlements in the eastern Mediterranean to infer distinctions in fuel use and the exploitation of woody vegetation amid developing anthropogenic landscapes. Charcoal evidence generally implicates combustion of fuel wood, while burned seeds commonly result from dung fuel use. Varying fuel consumption profiles reflect the availability of woody vegetation and cultivation practices that reveal temporal and geographical dynamics on Bronze Age agrarian landscapes. In the farmlands of the northern Jordan Valley, villagers at Early Bronze Tell Abu en-Nia'j and subsequently at Middle Bronze Tell el-Hayyat relied heavily on dung for their fuel needs, supplemented by burning of orchard prunings and to a lesser extent wood from nearby riparian vegetation. In this agrarian setting, limited availability of forest resources engendered exploitation of the highest diversities of cultivated crops, weedy species and woody plants. The village of Zahrat adh-Dhra' 1 (contemporaneous with Tell el-Hayyat) on the arid, sparsely populated Dead Sea Plain relied less on dung fuel, and similarly harvested wood from orchards, while also utilizing the desert trees Acacia and Tamarix. Fuel use at Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus suggests ready access to Pinus and Quercus forests, and burning of Olea wood from nearby orchards, associated with little dung fuel use and the lowest taxonomic diversity of fuel sources among these four Bronze Age communities. The range of evidence for fuel use at these settlements reflects varying exploitation strategies based on plant resources and animal management in agrarian countrysides, as well as the larger influences of urbanized or non-urbanized society during the development of Bronze Age anthropogenic landscapes.

Agricultural resources in the Bronze Age city of Tel Lachish

“…FreeWheat free threshing wheat played an important role in ancient diet and they could have been dried and stored for a long time, as with a Neolithic example from Gezer (Zohary 1982). Furthermore, they may represent animal feed as interpreted for EBA Tell Abu en-Ni 'aj where dung remains were found (Fall et al 2015).…”

Herd management and subsistence practices as inferred from isotopic analysis of animals and plants at Bronze Age Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus

“…To minimize the potential for chronological mixing, samples were selected as often as possible from relatively shallow localized deposits in or on burned surfaces. All recovered plant remains 0.25 mm or larger were sorted under a binocular microscope at 6 to 40x magnification, and identified using Fall's personal reference collection, as well as comparison with published literature following established methods of floral recovery and analysis [14,15,[29][30][31]. At the University of Arizona, δ 13 C was measured with an isotope ratio mass spectrometer.…”

The burning issue of dung in archaeobotanical samples: a case-study integrating macro-botanical remains, dung spherulites, and phytoliths to assess sample origin and fuel use at Tell Zeidan, Syria

“…Generally, amounts of wood are compared to amounts of weedy or wild seeds, but some scholars also include fruits (e.g. Miller and Marston 2012;Miller et al 2009;Fall et al 2015;Deckers 2011). Replicating the application of ratios between studies can prove difficult in instances where the boundaries of each plant grouping or the units of measure are not described in detail (Smith et al 2015a).…”