Search

In much of Europe, the advent of low-input cereal farming regimes betweenc.ad800 and 1200 enabled landowners—lords—to amass wealth by greatly expanding the amount of land under cultivation and exploiting the labour of others. Scientific analysis of plant remains and animal bones from archaeological contexts is generating the first direct evidence for the development of such low-input regimes. This article outlines the methods used by the FeedSax project to resolve key questions regarding the ‘cerealization’ of the medieval countryside and presents preliminary results using the town of Stafford as a worked example. These indicate an increase in the scale of cultivation in the Mid-Saxon period, while the Late Saxon period saw a shift to a low-input cultivation regime and probably an expansion onto heavier soils. Crop rotation appears to have been practised from at least the mid-tenth century.

Charring is the most ubiquitous form of preservation of plant material on archaeological sites, occurring wherever people use heat. The usefulness of preserved seeds for a range of analytical techniques is dependent on the conditions under which they were heated. In this study, we investigate the effect of experimental heating on two types of glume wheat grain (einkorn and emmer) under a range of conditions, with the intention of establishing the likely parameters for the generation of virtually undamaged, undistorted charred cereal grain on archaeological sites. The results show that grain morphology is very sensitive to the charring conditions, especially temperature, and that well preserved grains with little distortion are produced at relatively low temperatures (220–240°C). The implications of these findings for the study of grain morphology, biomolecules and chemical composition are assessed.Data availability The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available witho...

The early Middle Ages saw a major expansion of cereal cultivation across large parts of Europe thanks to the spread of open-field farming. A major project to trace this expansion in England by deploying a range of scientific methods is generating direct evidence for this so-called ‘Medieval Agricultural Revolution’.

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.

We synthesise the results of a large programme of plant ecological research to investigate the selective pressures driving crop domestication and the origins of agriculture in western Asia. We explore this primarily through a series of experiments, comparing the ecological characteristics of: (1) domesticated cereal and pulse species with their wild progenitors and (2) the wild progenitor species with other west Asian grasses and legumes that did not become domesticated during the emergence of agriculture. In particular, we consider the balance between deliberate human selection and unintended consequences of human actions in driving the domestication process. Taken together, our results provide the first empirical evidence to suggest that ecological processes, and unintended selection due to competition between growing plants within anthropogenic environments, may have played a more significant part in the emergence of agriculture than previously supposed. Such human-plant co-evolutionary mechanisms would render unnecessary the search for ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors, dependent on deliberate human invention to solve a problem or to satisfy a need, as prime movers to explain why hunter-gatherers switched to an agricultural way of life.

International audience; The application of morphometric analysis in archaeobotany has the potential to refine quantitatively identifications of ancient plant material recovered from archaeological sites, most commonly preserved through charring due to exposure to heat. This paper uses geometric morphometrics, first, to explore variation in grain shape between three domesticated cereal species, einkorn (Triticum monococcum), emmer (Triticum dicoccum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare), both before and after experimental charring at 230 and 260 °C. Results demonstrate that outline analysis reliably reflects known variations in grain shape between species and differences due to charring observed in previous experimental work, and is capable of distinguishing the species, with near-perfect results, both before and after charring. Having established this, the same method was applied to different accessions of the same species, which indicated that three different grain morphotypes of einkorn and two, possibly three, of emmer could be identified in the uncharred material, and that at least two different morphotypes for each species could be distinguished even after charring at temperatures up to 260 °C. This opens up the possibility of tracking evolutionary change in crops, both chronologically and geographically, through morphometric analysis.

The transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settled agriculture is arguably the most fundamental change in the development of human society (Lev-Yadun et al., 2000). The establishment of agricultural economies, emerging initially in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East (Nesbitt, 2002), required the domestication of crops; ancient plant remains recovered from early farming sites provide direct evidence for this process of domestication. Archaeobotanical remains are typically preserved through charring (partial to complete carbonisation through exposure to heat) and recovered during archaeological excavation (Charles et al., 2015). Seeds of the same species, recovered from different sites and periods, can sometimes be seen to exhibit morphological differences, which may have arisen owing to variations in cultivation practices, climate, soils and altitude, etc. To explore these possibilities, morphological variation in seeds of wheat and barley between archaeological sites was recorded and mapped both in time and space. Results presented here suggest that modern morphometric approaches may help to test some long-debated hypotheses and pave the way for new insights into the evolutionary origins of agriculture in western Asia.

There is increasing evidence that electronic and other aids can support older people’s memory. In an effectiveness study, we explored whether assistive technologies could benefit 200 potential beneficiaries in a naturalistic setting. We first interviewed 50 participants to assess needs and preferences for memory aids, then researched, developed and trialled specific aids, and finally administered a follow-up questionnaire assessing future use of aids. Matching aids to needs was not easy. Relatively few people were interested in trailing aids. Simpler aids were most successful. Participants were curious about electronic aids, but found them too complicated and not adapted enough to their needs. Assistance from other people was necessary to prompt use of all types of aids. Future effectiveness studies should focus on longer trials with greater training and support for participants, a wider range of technologies, and more promotion of possible benefits.