The earliest wheats of Ukraine (5400 BC)

The eastern areas of Europe and their transition to the steppe that lead to Central Asia remains one of the less well-studied regions archaeobotanically. The sparseness of reliable evidence has meant that the region is sometime discussed in terms of an alternative eastern source of crops from Europe, in addition to the main thrust from Anatolia through Greece and the Balkans, and it is sometimes mooted as a region of some crop origins, such as spelt wheat. New data is always welcome, especially of a high empirical calibre, from systematic sampling and backed up by AMS dating.

New data from the Ratniv-2 site in Western Ukraine, near the eastern frontiers of the Linear Pottery (LBK) culture, has been published by Motuzaite Matuzeviciute and Telizhenko in Archaeologia Lituana. This is an important record of early crops, and as the authors point out, it clearly points to similarities to the West and Southwest in Neolithic  Europe and suggest a spread towards Ukraine from the West in the Neolithic, rather than the east. The assemblage consists of wheats, barley, flax, lentil and pea. Two direct AMS radiocarbon dates on emmer wheat grains place these assemblages between 5400 and 5200 cal.BC. Of particular interest is that the wheats here include not just einkorn and emmer but apparently at some of the socalled "new type glume wheat," which these and other authors sometimes equate with Triticum timopheevi, and 20th century relict wheat found north of the Caucasus (western Georgia). That the archaeological "new type" has the AAGG genome of timopheevi remains unproven-- although I agree it is likely. It is perhaps more accurate to regard T. timopheevi as the relict remnant of what was a once a much more diverse and widespread species of wheat, which in all likelihood originated in the Anatolia and spread through many part of Europe and east through northern Iran in the Neolithic. I have sometimes offered the name "striate emmeroid" as a descriptive alternative to  "new type", as it is hard to think of something that has been largely extinct since the Bronze Age as new, and this wheat type has been in discussion by archaeobotanists for around 20 years...

In any case, what is notable about this assemblage is that is corresponds to those crops that are most common in the Neolithic of southwest Europe, supporting the ceramic and settlement evidence that attributes to the origins of agriculture in western Ukraine to spread from the west.

Another IWGP theme:Food Globalization in Prehistory Across Eurasia

Another proposal for  a thematic session at IWGP 2013, Thessaloniki, has come through. This is not from me, but from Cambridge so interest should be sent as appropiate to some of the Cambridge archaeobotanical post-doc (website), Geidre Motuzaite Matuzeviciuit or Liu Xinyi. This lab has been active on the research of temperate millets for a while (previous blog), including recognition of immature Panicum.

This topic obviously relates to the discussion article that this group published in the last World Archaeology, on food globalization in prehistoric Eurasia (which I have not gotten around to commenting on previously in this blog.

Here is the precis for their session: Food Globalization in Prehistory Across Eurasia. Chair of a session: Prof. Martin K. Jones

 A variety of crops that originated in China or central Asia, such as the Chinese millets and buckwheat, had appeared in Europe by the 5^th millennium BC, while by the end of the second millennium BC, the south-west Asian crops, wheat and barley, had reached several parts of China.

There are some striking features of that early phase of food globalisation, features that relate both to the crop plants themselves and to the societies that utilised them. A series of later episodes of globalisation, from the Classical period onwards, involve exotic fruits, vegetables and spices. The earlier phase, however, is manifested in evidence for staple sources of grain starch, the cereals, and the 'pseudo-cereal' buckwheat. 

We would like to invite papers or poster on current archaeobotanical and genetics studies that aim to establish when and how that early globalisation of staple foodstuffs happened, what it meant for human societies in very different parts of Eurasia, and what it meant for the plants upon which they relied for food.

What role wild foods for Neolithic farmers? A proposed thematic session for next years IWGP

Next year (2013) sees the next International Workgroup in Palaeoethnobotany conference go to Thessaloniki Greece. Together with the overall conference organizer I am proposing a session on the role of wild foods in the Neolithic and what was special about it. This will be circulated through the regular conference channels, but to start a precis is here.

The role wild foods amongst early farmers and late foragers

(Proposal for a thematic session at IWGP 2013, Greece) By Dorian Q Fuller and Soultania Valamoti

The Neolithic transition to cultivation and reliance on domesticated grains is a major focus of archaeobotanical research, but do we have a “cereal-bias” that means we undervalue the continued roles of wild food sources amongst early farmers? Looking over archaeobotanical reports from Early Neolithic Europe or the Prepottery Near East, one often finds quite substantial quantities of remains of wild food resources, potential co-staples,  or secondary staples, perhaps more than just fall back foods. The recent rise of archaeobotanical sampling in China has revealed that in the same culture in which domestication of rice is taking place the quantities of wild nut remains are vast and out- number rice. These wild foods might include nuts (Corylus or Quercus in Europe, Pistacia or Amygdalus in the Near East, Lithocarpus/Quercus, Trapa, Euryale in East Asia) or nutlets (Polygonaceae, Cyperaceae) or some small seeds (e.g. Chenopodium), as well as wild fruits. While the large quantities of these show some similarities to pre-agricultural assemblages: what has changed in their use with the advent of agriculture? There also appears to be an almost uniform contrast with later prehistory: perhaps sites of the later Neolithic or Bronze Age or Iron Age provide scant evidence for these same taxa, implying some changes since the earlier agricultural economies. Drawing largely on American evidence and Jomon Japan, Bruce Smith (2001), proposed the concept of “low-level food production“ for the first domesticators and early cultivators, in which the majority of food is inferred to come from wild sources, but despite the high levels of wild foods in the earlier Neolithic across Eurasia, it seem difficult to accept that this “low level” category necessarily applies where cereals clearly have high ubiquity and counts. The aim of this session to consider in further detail how particular sites and regional sequences inform on the role and importance of wild foods in the early Neolithic and how this may have differed from either full foraging “broad spectrum” economies or later more intensively agricultural economies. Is there a wild-side to the Neolithic that made it different from later agricultural economies? And how do we accommodate this to our understanding of the beginnings and spread of agriculture?

Paper presentations and poster presentations welcome. Please indicate your interest by emailing a provisional title to Dorian (d.fuller@ucl.ac.uk) , but also return your pre-registration form to Tania Valamoti. 

Book of plant histories in Europe

Just a quick note, to record a link to a free, on-line book about plants in Europe (mainly Medieterranean and eastern Europe): Plants and Culture. Seeds of Cultural Heritage of Europe, edited by Jean-Paul Morel and Anna Maria Mercuri; the chapters or whole can be downloaded in PDF for free.

Drawing on historical sources and archaeobotany, various chapters deal with vegetables, fruits, gardens and recipes. Topics ranges from a history of peaches in Italy, to a detailed archaeobotanical consideration of Portulaca oleracea (purslane), to a reconstruction of food preparation (recipes) in prehistoric Greece, to renaissance era archaeobotany of Ferrera, Italy.

Millets and Mistakes

In Last week's Science the journalist Andrew Lawler, published an extended series of News Focus articles on Chinese civilization. The central piece focuses on the origins of civilization, highlighting for example the impressive urban settlement of Liangzhu (a kind of walled Neolithic Venice, many centuries before the Shang Dynasty) which ought to be better known to world archaeology than it is. (I had my own tour of some of the mutliple sites that compose it, and its multimedia museum, with site director Liu Bin in July). Also of note is his one page sidebar entitled "Go East, Young Archaeologist" on the specialists trained outside China, which features Jimmy Zhao, who has been instrumental in getting serious archaeobotany established in the minds and manners of Chinese archaeologists, and has been promoting flotation in China for the past decade.

What I would like to pursue here, however, are some observations on archaeobotany, and pick out some mistakes or misleading statements, with reference to the origins of millet agriculture which features in another sidebar, "Millets on the Move." Lawler begins which a point that seems to look increasingly true, that millet(s) were cultivated and presumably domesticated before rice, and were the staple foods of the northern China region where the classic Chinese civilization later emerged (focused on Erlitou rather than Liangzhu). He makes reference to the recent early dates (ca. 8000 BC) associated with Panicum miliaceum husk (lemma/palea) phytoliths reported from storage pits at Cishan (blogged previously). However, I must disagree the there is any hard evidence that the Panicum miliaceum at Cishan was morpholoigcally domesticated (i.e. non-shattering, with marked increased grain size, etc.), nor is there even clear evidence for cultivation, unless one assumes that large stores could only be ontained from cultivation, which in turn implies that we know the Early Holocene wild ecology of this species (which we don't) and that it did not form extensive collectible stands, as wild wheat, barley or rice or teosinte do (see discussion on my earlier Dadiwan blog and comment from L. Barton). I also must reiterate that there is much about the archaeology of the Cishan find (stratigraphiy, cultural context, and dating that require further work.

A lack of scientific clarity in Lawler's piece, however, is indicated in that millet is always used in the singular and the species (there are two major domesticates in ancient China) is never specified. And things get worse... as Lawler explored the hypothesis (favoured by Martin Jones and Cambridge millet group) that Panicum miliaceum (but NOT Setaria italica) spread before 5000 BC acroos temperate Eurasia from China to India. This hypothesis is plausible, but there is not yet any good clear data for this, only hints that it might yet emerge from ongoing and unpublished genetic work. Lawler acknowledges an alternative, which I would favour, that Panicum may have had a seperate domestication in the west somewhere near the Caspian and Black Seas. Well-dated, clearly-identified and numerically large assemblages of Panicum miliaceum outside China are mostly millenia later. To illustrate his case, Lawler produces a map which shows a major lapse in scientific clarity:

This map, although redrawn from that in Hunt et al (2008), is extremely mis-leading, especially when coupled with the text that hook-line-and-sinker swallows the notion that "millet" spread in the early Neolithic to Europe, without apparently realzing what "millet" is (or millets are). Millet is more than one species anyways despite the English misnomer-- in modern India one can find 12 domesticated species of "millet" in cultivation, with several more restrcted to Africa). The early dispersal of "millet" that Martin Jones favours, applies to broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), as does the recent early find at Cishan, although Neolithic North China also boasts foxtail millet (Setaria italica), by about 6000 BC or so. For the map of Lawler, however, the "millet" in the caption actually means the genus Panicum or the genus Setaria, and does not require that these be cultivated or domesticated finds. What is most grevious in this map are the dots in Western Asia and Egypt. This map in its original, illustrated all reports identified to genus level of Setaria or Panicum-- both of which are major genera of grasses with multiple wild species-- in which the error margins of calibrated radiocarbon dates may place them as early as 5000 cal.BC (although often the dates are likely to be later). The dots in Western Asia, include sites such as Abu Hureyra in Syria, which is a well-known site to students of early wheat and barley agriculture. At this site it is argued (by Hillman et al. 2001) that wild rye and perhaps two-grained einkorn were brought into cultivation in the Late Pleistocene during the Younger Dryas, while later PPNB levels have evidence for domesticated wheats, barley and other Near Eastern crops. "Millet" is represented at this site by small number of wild Setaria, of either S. pumila or S. verticillata, and certainly not Setaria italica nor Panicum miliaceum. Other dots in Syria and Cyprus include Tell Mureybit, El Kowm, Bouqras, and Khirokhitia, which Lawler has now awarded domesticated Chinese millet in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Meanwhile, three dots occur in Egypt, representing Early Holocene "Neolithic" sites like Nabta Playa. These sites are Neolithic in the sense of having pottery but not in having agriculture. Archaeobotanical evidence from these sites shows wild savannah grass gathering, including wild sorghum and a range of other species, including wild Panicum sp. and wild Setaria sp., but there is certainly no suggestion that these were cultivars or related to S. italica or P. miliaceum. While Hunt et al (2008: S6) were explicit in trying avoid the pitfall of "over representing.... securely identified domesticated finds", Lawler appears to have jumped headfirst into this pit!

The dot in Iran (representing Daulatabad R37) is also problematic as early millet finds there are more likely local wild species, while evidence for domesticated Panicum miliaceum is probably later form the latter Third Millennium BC at Tepe Yahya (a time period which fits with the reports of broomcorn millet appearing in Yemen before 2000 BC-- see the recent Boivin/Fuller review dealing with the prehistory of Arabia). A more detailed and critical look at the sites in Europe would show that these also include numerous Setaria sp. and some Panicum sp. reports that are of local wild species. In addition, quantities of reported Panicum miliaceum are extremely low and it remains entirely plausible that these represent wild, weedy Panicum miliaceum subsp. ruderale as a weed rather than domesticated broomcorn as a crop-- a point admitted in the Hunt, Jones, et al. paper from which the map derives (see page S14). Of course there is a bias towards focuing of wheats and barley in European archaeobotany, and careful documentation of the early Panicum has been less thorough. More archaeobotanical efforts are needed in this direction, like that being pursued by the Cambridge millet group, but dumbing-down for, and misleading, the educated readers of Science is not.