Developments in subsistence during the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age in the southern and central Levant: Integration of faunal and botanical remains using multivariate statistics

Agropastoral and dietary practices of the northern Levant facing Late Holocene climate and environmental change: Isotopic analysis of plants, animals and humans from Bronze to Iron Age Tell Tweini

“…What is clear is that despite a continuous slight decrease the ubiquity, and thus importance of the grapes, remains generally high in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (S1 Fig in S1 File ). This fits the general patterns of fruit tree cultivation in the Levant, and indicates the cultural connotation and commercial range of grapes during these times [ 79 ].…”

“…While the multiplicity of decision making in food production by human societies is well-known [ 127 , 128 ], the interplay of different variables of inner- and interregional differences in the local environmental capacity of a given area (determined by rainfall, soil depth, various hydrological conditions and topographic indices such as slope and elevation) and individual/cultural preferences seems to be best understood by looking at the local evidence. This is probably the main reason why, despite recognizable environmental effects on food production, attempts of generalizations over wider spatial and temporal units proved invalid [ 79 , 129 , 130 ]. In particular, the role of ‘Rapid Climate Change’ events on human societies, while potentially having devastating effects on short-term production capacity, is regionally unclear [ 131 ].…”

Livestock management in the Northern Levant during the first millennium BCE

“…An agricultural domain was subsequently established during the Iron Age. The faunal remains were recovered from dwellings and workshops (Çakırlar et al, 2014;Vermeersch, 2021).…”

Integrating faunal and botanical remains using multivariate statistics to reconstruct (pre)historic subsistence developments

“…We first applied the methodology described here to investigate developments in subsistence practices from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age (3600–586 BCE) in the central and southern Levant. We investigated how the results of the correspondence analyses for the integrative dataset compared to those of the separate faunal and botanical datasets [49] . In this paper, we will use the same integrative dataset but instead of quantitative data, we will apply binary data to show that using either quantitative or binary data will usually yield similar results.…”

“…A more pressing issue is the methodological challenges faced when trying to integrate archaeological botanical and faunal remains. We described these in depth previously [49] but summarise the main issues here. Different qualities as placeholders for living plants and animals Archaeological faunal material is represented by fragments from specific animal bones (quantified as NISP) [10] , so we can reconstruct the MNI (minimum number of individuals).…”