Investigating the Ecology, Composition and Exploitability of Wild Cereal Habitats in Relation to Agricultural Origins in the Near East

Project Information

NICHE

Grant agreement ID: 838395

DOI

10.3030/838395

Project closed

EC signature date 19 March 2019

Start date 1 April 2019

End date 31 May 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 212 933,76

EU contribution

€ 212 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NICHE (Investigating the Ecology, Composition and Exploitability of Wild Cereal Habitats in Relation to Agricultural Origins in the Near East)

Reporting period: 2019-04-01 to 2021-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

During the Earliest Neolithic in southwest Asia, between ca. 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the first farming communities of the world developed in southwest Asia. Archaeobotanical research on this process strongly focused on the wild progenitors of the cereal founder crops einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley. Scholars developed the “pre-domestication cultivation" hypothesis, arguing that wild cereals were cultivated for millennia before morphological domestication traits appeared. Pre-domestication cultivation now represents the major explanatory framework for understanding early farming, with the identification of potential weed floras associated with remains of wild cereals as its key identification criterion. However, little is known about the origins of arable weeds and their association with unmanaged wild cereal habitats, casting doubt on their reliability as indicators of early cultivation activities. We must therefore be cautious in using modern weed taxa for identifying the beginnings of plant cultivation and need to develop a more holistic approach to trace the origins of “weed seeds” from early cultivator sites. These uncertainties pose major problems in reconstructing the socio-economic organisation of early cultivating communities and the labour-demands associated with early resource management systems. A related problem concerns edible medium- and large-seeded wild grasses that grow together with the wild cereals in modern stands and occur abundantly at Early Neolithic sites, which seem to have played a crucial role in Early Neolithic subsistence economies and culinary practices throughout southwest Asia. Reconstructing subsistence developments during the Neolithic transition must therefore consider these medium- and large-seeded wild grasses more thoroughly and we need to develop new approaches for understanding the role of edible grass resources in comparison to the wild cereals in prehistoric contexts. The diversity of exploited food resources during the development of early cultivation may otherwise be severely underestimated.

The overall objective is to develop an analytical approach that can identify management practices like tillage from the archaeobotanical record in order to trace it's development through time and correlate it to simultaneous social processes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We conducted one field season in Israel in 2019, where we surveyed the vegetation in five wild cereal habitats. These data helped us to compare wild cereal communities to arable weed floras from traditionally (non-mechanised) managed fields surveyed in the early twentieth century in Mandatory Palestine. A floristic analysis showed that most genera, which contain arable weeds and are used to reconstruct the beginnings of plant cultivation in southwest Asia, also contain species that grow alongside wild cereals in habitats that are untilled and protected from most anthropogenic disturbances. Therefore, the taxonomic approach based on 'potential' arable weed genera widely used in archaeobotany to identify early cultivation must be revised in order to trace the beginnings of plant cultivation more reliably. These results are published in Environmental Archaeology (https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2021.1882715).

In a second step, we analysed the functional composition of the surveyed wild cereal communities and arable weed floras in order to find a combination of plant functional traits that distinguishes between both habitats. We used the two traits flowering duration (the number of months a species flowers and produces fruits) and the ability of perennial species to regenerate from root and stem fragments (coded as 'readily regenerating' and 'no to moderate regeneration'). Both these traits are positively correlate with mechanical disturbance such as soil tillage and weeding (uprooting, hoeing) and successfully distinguished untilled wild cereal communities from arable weed floras that developed in disturbed soils. We applied this novel disturbance model to seven archaeological datasets dating to the Early and Late Neolithic (ca 11,500 to 8,000 years ago) and showed that archaeobotanical assemblages that were previously interpreted as weed floras from arable fields match soil disturbance levels of modern untilled wild cereal habitats. This means that the earliest plant management practices, in this cases targeting wild cereals, did not create regularly tilled arable plots for cultivation but utilised less labour intensive, 'no-tillage' strategies. This conforms well with the ethnographic literature that documented a high diversity of effective food management practices by 'small-scale' communities that do not implement soil tillage but sow seeds or use burning to maintain vegetation units such as grasslands rich in edible food resources. These results are due to be submitted to Nature Plants.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The NICHE project contributes to a general paradigm shift in reconstructing the origins of agriculture in that it questions the traditional dichotomy between gathering and cultivation and develops a method to reconstruct practices associated with the management of food resources and not just a 'step-change' from gathering to cultivation. Since ca. 15 to 20 years, archaeobotanical and archaeozoological research demonstrates that the transition to food producing economies was much more gradual and involved millennia of what has been called 'low-level food production'. However, it was unclear which practices these management systems entailed, and in the case of cereals in southwest Asia scholars focused on the identification of regularly tilled plots, which was still oriented on the traditional dichotomy between gathering and cultivating. The NICHE project makes a major contribution to the development of analytical techniques that can identify specific practices such as soil tillage and related ecological effects. The result that early sedentary communities, which depended on the large-scale exploitation of wild cereals for centuries, did not cultivate these in arable plots but presumably practiced landscape-wide grassland management contributes to the recognition that resilient food management and production systems do not require labour-intensive practices such as tillage. 'No-tillage' farming as a sustainable and ecological modern strategy is practiced by an increasing number of organic farmers today, who focus on genetic and taxonomic diversity rather than maximum yields from a few crops. The latter aspect, high genetic and taxonomic diversity, is a further component of prehistoric farming since the Neolithic that contributed to the resilience of this 'new' way of life and has been documented from many prehistoric contexts in southwest Asia, Europe, and other world regions. All in all, these long-term perspectives on arable farming are pivotal to build resilient food production systems in the future. Phenomena like profound climatic changes, population growth, and growing social inequality, have been experienced by prehistoric farming communities since farming first developed between 12,000-8,000 years ago in southwest Asia. Archaeological studies like NICHE, which combine long-term socio-economic and ecological perspectives from the past, can contribute to a better understanding of how human societies can cope with and overcome these challenges today and in the future.

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