“Slash and burn” or “weed and manure”? A modelling approach to explore hypotheses of late Neolithic crop cultivation in pre-alpine wetland sites

Modelling Agricultural Strategies in the Dutch Roman Limes via Agent-Based Modelling (ROMFARMS)

“…ROMFARMS as a computational tool is a new contribution to the analysis of agriculture in the past, alongside other recent approaches (see, e.g. Cimler et al 2012;Saqalli et al 2014;Danielisová and Štekerová 2015;Baum 2016;Baum et al 2016;Olševičová et al 2014). The results from simulating multiple scenarios in both randomly generated and reconstructed landscapes have generated new hypotheses regarding the relative impact of land and labour availability on agricultural productivity and the possible ways in which rural agrarian settlements could have supplied military settlements, towns and vici that did not produce their own food.…”

Late Neolithic Agriculture in Temperate Europe—A Long-Term Experimental Approach

“…But, experiments can rule out ideas that just do not work, they show otherwise unknown hints or problems, they provide data that are indispensable for modelling approaches (see Baum 2014 [47], Baum, et al 2016 [48]), and they provide material for further investigations, for example, isotope analysis. Baum et al (2016) combined a program for dynamics in agro-ecosystems, with another program that transfers the results into maps of the investigated area. Their approach shows that slash-and-burn resulted in the worst productivity of the tested methods.…”

“…It should be noted that Baum et al [48] pursued calculations with a given size of field (0.5 ha), instead of identical yields. This is disadvantageous for slash-and-burn and results in a somewhat larger land consumption than it already has.…”

Forest clearance and land use by early farmers in Europe: Insights from north Greek oral history

“…The debate has continued, with both sides citing circumstantial arguments and indirect evidence, but recent methodological and empirical advances in the archaeobotanical record from Neolithic Europe have provided two direct proxies for early cultivation regimes. First, ecological analysis of the weeds accompanying Neolithic grain crops, especially in temperate central Europe (Bogaard, 2002;2004;Jacomet et al, 2016) and more tentatively in the Mediterranean (Bogaard and Halstead, 2015;Antolin et al, 2015), reveals a prevalence of taxa indicating cultivation of long-established rather than recently cleared plots and also suggesting intensive disturbance of the soil rather than the perfunctory harrowing more typical of slash and burn. Secondly, stable nitrogen isotope values in Neolithic charred grains from southeast to northwest Europe widely indicate sowing of intensively manured plots (Bogaard et al, 2013;Fraser et al, 2013;Kanstrup et al, 2014;Styring et al, 2016;Vaiglova et al, 2014), that would have no place in a shifting slash-and-burn regime (Rowley-Conwy, 1981).…”

“…Analogy-based assessments of the costs and benefits of shifting and permanent cultivation can now be redeployed from identifying what Neolithic farmers did to understanding why they did so (e.g. Baum et al, 2016), with any failure of cost:benefit analysis correctly to 'predict' the predominant, empirically documented early farming regime potentially revealing factors affecting this choice that have hitherto been overlooked. Analogical studies may also highlight characteristics or consequences of either regime that have heuristic value for future research into early forest farming in Europe.…”