Between 10.7 and 10.2 ka cal. BP a process culminated in southwest Asia that marked the path of human history: the domestication of plants. A group of eight species including einkorn, emmer, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and flax become the “founder crops” of Neolithic agriculture, which revolutionized our economy and subsistence for the time to come. But why were these particular species domesticated and not others?. Building on some of the richest and most iconic Natufian hunter-gatherer and early farming Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in southwest Asia (14.6-10.2 ka cal. BP), this project aimed to evaluate the economic role these eight “founder crops” played prior to agriculture. It asked: 1) How often were there these species used as food before the emergence of Neolithic agriculture?; 2) Were they staples, occasionally exploited food resources, or “special” foodstuffs?. To answer these questions the FOUNDERS project took a radically new perspective: it pioneered an inter-disciplinary approach that merged archaeobotany, experimental archaeology, ethnobotany and biomolecular techniques to analyse the charred food remains these societies left behind.
The specific objectives of the project were to:
1) Define the group of plant species consumed by the last hunter-gatherers and early farming communities, through the microscopic and biomolecular analyses of archaeological remains of prepared plant foods.
2) Characterize the contextual setting for plant-food consumption, through the comparison of the spatial distribution of food remains in different archaeological sites, and integration of the associated archaeological material culture.
3) Synthetize the data and assess the economic role of the “founder crops” prior to agriculture, based on the comparison of the results obtained across eight sites, two regions (southern-central and northern Levant) and three main periods (Natufian, Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, 14.6-10.2 ka cal. BP).
The study of accidentally preserved remains of carbonised plant-foods has the potential to illuminate the origins of some of the foodstuffs that still play a central role in our lives (e.g. cereal-based meals like bread), and provide first-hand empirical evidence with which to directly contribute to current debates on the nature and of the “Palaeodiet” and clarify long-held misconceptions about past plant-based subsistence.
