From Traditional Farming in Morocco to Early Urban Agroecology in Northern Mesopotamia: Combining Present-day Arable Weed Surveys and Crop Isotope Analysis to Reconstruct Past Agrosystems in (Semi-)arid Regions

Abstract

We integrate functional weed ecology with crop stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to assess their combined potential for inferring arable land management practices in (semi-)arid regions from archaeobotanical assemblages. Weed and GIS survey of 60 cereal and pulse fields in Morocco are combined with crop sampling for stable isotope analysis to frame assessment of agricultural labour intensity in terms of manuring, irrigation, tillage and handweeding. Under low management intensity weed variation primarily reflects geographical differences, whereas under high management intensity fields in disparate regions have similar weed flora. Manured and irrigated oasis barley fields are clearly discriminated from less intensively manured rain-fed barley terraces in southern Morocco; when fields in northern and southern Morocco are considered together, climatic differences are superimposed on the agronomic intensity gradient. Barley δ 13 C and δ 15 N values clearly distinguish among the Moroccan regimes. An integrated approach combines crop isotope values with weed ecological discrimination of low-and high-intensity regimes across multiple studies (in southern Morocco and southern Europe). Analysis of archaeobotanical samples from EBA Tell Brak, Syria suggests that this early city was sustained through extensive (low-intensity, large-scale) cereal farming. ARTICLE HISTORY

Nitrogen isotope values of Pennisetum glaucum (pearl millet) grains: towards a reconstruction of past cultivation conditions in the Sahel, West Africa

“…In the regions studied, application of manure/household waste is in fact managed in such a way as to maintain overall crop productivity rather than increase it in certain plots. Such variability in crop δ 15 N values between manured and unmanured plots has been observed in other traditional, small-scale farming systems in Tighirt, Morocco (Bogaard et al 2016b;Styring et al 2016), Kastamonu, Turkey (Bogaard et al 2016a) and…”

The farming-inequality nexus: new insights from ancient Western Eurasia

“…Our dataset builds on recent efforts to quantify wealth inequality in diverse archaeological forager and farming contexts, and exploits a series of archaeological case studies in Western Asia and Europe in which we can also characterise farming regimes in unusual detail, using refined and integrated archaeobotanical techniques for assessing agricultural scale and intensity (Bogaard et al . 2016, 2018a & b). Figure 1 shows the locations of the relevant sites.…”

From Isoscapes to Farmscapes: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Isotopes are now frequently applied to the zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical materials to either construct a 'baseline' of the resources or environment in a region or to directly explore past farming practices in the area. Methodological advances such as sequential sampling of dentition (Balasse 2002), multi-element analysis (Sayle et al 2016) and isotope extraction from charred seed assemblages (Bogaard et al 2016) are illustrating the potential for a more nuanced understanding of past subsistence and farming practice. Recent examples include modelling landscape exploitation (Newsome et al 2004), access/control via cultivation practice/grazing regimes (Brewington et al 2015); seasonality of farming practice via evidence for manipulation of birthing season (Towers et al 2011), and foddering strategies, including mechanisms for enhancing fertility and productivity via manuring and supplementary foddering (Makarewicz 2014).…”

“…These practices form a quantity known as agricultural labour intensity, linked to available arable catchment, climatic conditions and the size of food resources required. Bogaard et al (2016) seek to identify agricultural labour intensity in the key archaeological zone of (semi-)arid regions. They first develop an isoscape for modern-day Morocco using δ 13 C and δ 15 N of cereal and pulse fields, and combine this plant functional traits (e.g.…”

“…The contributors to this special issue have combined archaeology, ecology and isotope analyses, to understand crop cultivation and animal husbandry across North Africa, the Near East, Asia Minor and Western Europe, stretching up to the Scottish North Atlantic Islands. This includes mapping modern agrosystems to reconstruct prehistoric agroecology (Bogaard et al 2016), combining archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological isotope analyses to examine the effect of crop fertility upon a whole farming system (Aguilera et al 2017), and integrating archaeology and isotopes to focus on animal husbandry in more marginal environments (Jones and Mulville 2018). Mobile systems are also considered, where pastoralism is practised over very wide regions (Ventresca Miller et al 2017).…”