Re-analysis of archaeobotanical remains from pre- and early agricultural sites provides no evidence for a narrowing of the wild plant food spectrum during the origins of agriculture in southwest Asia

Abstract

Archaeobotanical evidence from southwest Asia is often interpreted as showing that the spectrum of wild plant foods narrowed during the origins of agriculture, but it has long been acknowledged that the recognition of wild plants as foods is problematic. Here, we systematically combine compositional and contextual evidence to recognise the wild plants for which there is strong evidence of their deliberate collection as food at pre-agricultural and early agricultural sites across southwest Asia. Through sample-by-sample analysis of archaeobotanical remains, a robust link is established between the archaeological evidence and its interpretation in terms of food use, which permits a re-evaluation of the evidence for the exploitation of a broad spectrum of wild plant foods at pre-agricultural sites, and the extent to which this changed during the development of early agriculture. Our results show that relatively few of the wild taxa found at pre- and early agricultural sites can be confidently recognised as contributing to the human diet, and we found no evidence for a narrowing of the plant food spectrum during the adoption of agriculture. This has implications for how we understand the processes leading to the domestication of crops, and points towards a mutualistic relationship between people and plants as a driving force during the development of agriculture. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00334-018-0702-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sowing the Seeds of Future Research: Data Sharing, Citation and Reuse in Archaeobotany

“…Meta-analysis can be undertaken on the basis of simple presence/absence data per site, but in order for such analysis to be rigorous and comparable, sample-level data must be utilised. For instance, sample-level data is required for meta-studies, in order to identify high-quality samples of unmixed crops for weed ecology analysis (Bogaard 2004), to assess the importance of context in the evaluation of wild plant foods (Wallace et al 2019), or to use volumetric measurements as a proxy for scale (Lodwick 2017b). The reuse of archaeobotanical data also extends to include datasets used as "controls" in commonly used forms of statistical analysis, for instance Jones's weed data from Amorgos, Greece, which is utilised as a control group in discriminant analysis of crop-processing stage (Jones 1984), and ethnographic observations of crop items in different crop-processing stages (Jones 1990).…”

“…The creation of a new archaeobotanical dataset through primary analysis is a key form of training in archaeobotany, and the perception of the value of the reuse of other previously published archaeobotanical journals may be low, hence not encouraging the sharing of well-documented datasets. Excellent exams of data reuse have resulted in influential studies (Bogaard 2004;Riehl 2008;Wallace et al 2019), and would hopefully encourage further data sharing in the future.…”

Pathways to plant domestication in Southeast Anatolia based on new data from aceramic Neolithic Gusir Höyük

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La explotación de las plantas y los inicios de la agricultura en el Próximo Oriente: 20 años de investigación arqueobotánica

“…También en este periodo, en el Neolítico Pre-Cerámico B medio y antiguo, se observa una mayor explotación de algunas especies, como la escaña (T. monococcum), escanda (Triticum dicoccum), cebada (Hordeum vulgare), lenteja (Lens culinaris), garbanzo (Cicer arietinum), yero (Vicia ervilia) y el guisante (Pisum sativum), considerados como los "cultivos fundadores" de la agricultura neolítica. De todos modos, los estudios arqueobotánicos más recientes indican que las sociedades neolíticas continuaron consumiendo de forma regular plantas silvestres en el marco de una dieta variada (Wallace et al, 2018).…”