Stocking the Past: Isotopic and Genomic Approaches to Pastoralism in Prehistory

Ziel

The Neolithic Revolution marks a major turning point in human history, with the adoption of agriculture decisively changing the way people lived and their relationship with the natural environment. Archaeology has been fundamental in documenting and understanding this process. Much of the focus, however, has been on farming’s initial stages: the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. Far less attention has been paid to the subsequent trajectory of farming societies. This question has recently come to the fore, instigated by claims for a ‘boom and bust’ cycle for early farmers in Neolithic Europe. This is particularly pronounced in Britain and Ireland, where farming was introduced comparatively late, ca. 4000 BC. Populations appear to have rapidly increased by many orders of magnitude, only to collapse after a few centuries. The currently favoured explanation is that this remarkable demographic shift coincided with the decline of arable farming in favour of herding. Yet the evidence for this is largely circumstantial, and its implications remain unexplored. A reliance on either cereals or livestock leads to differences in labour demands, sociopolitical structure and mobility, as well as environmental impacts. Distinguishing their contributions to human diets, therefore, is crucial to our understanding of human-environment interactions in the past: yet we still struggle to do so.

IGAPP addresses this gap by developing a novel, cutting-edge biomolecular toolkit to to elucidate the roles that livestock played in past economies, including distinguishing between the importance of manured cereals and dairy products/meat in people's diets – problematic with current isotopic approaches due to their equifinality – and the nature of ancient animal management practices through isotopic and genomic methods. The toolkit will enable a robust assessment of the proposed ‘boom and bust’ of Neolithic farming, with wider applications to other places and time