On the Anti-Neolithic of Cyprus

Cyprus is the first place that we know that crops and livestock were spread to by human action. This even took place before domestication. Morphologically wild wheat and barley, cattle, sheep and goat that appear wild. Cats that were presumably following mice that were stow-aways with grain stores on those early boats; early meaning ~9000 BC. But despite this very early start on the path to agriculture, Cyprus throughout the Neolithic and into the Bronze Age appears decidely unagricultural, what I might dub an anti-Neolithic. This is evident due to the accumulation of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence, that my colleague Leilani Lucas has been compiling and analyzing for several years, and which is summarized and discussed in our new Journal of World Prehistory article.

Long-term Cypriot trends  in cereals (vs. wild plants)
 Cyprus (black squares) vs. the
mainland (above). Below: proportion of deer
out of  consumed meat (below) 

Cyprus is perhaps quintessentially an island, in the sense of demonstrating evolutionary patterns that work differently from the large land areas and populations of the mainland. So years ago her work demonstrated that in terms of morphological change, domestication processes seem to be happening faster on Cyprus, with much higher rates of grain size increase in wheat. But this does not mean that wheat became quickly important or even that the overall economy was especially agricultural. Instead it appears that cereals (and other crops) remain a minor, rather than dominant, part of the economy for millennia (see left). This is in contrast to the mainland Fertile Crescent where increasingly morphological features of domestication are accompanied by a trend towards increasing use of cereals and dominance of wheats and barley out of all plant remains. If agriculture as an economic change is properly decoupled from domestication (and genetic change), then these trends clearly do not go together on Cyprus. The same is clear in the faunal record. Despite the early translocation of mammals, including livestock or potential livestock (like cattle) but also wild game (like boars and deer), it is hunted game, especially deer, that dominate bone assemblages. Cattle even plausibly go extinct and get reintroduced to Cyprus. For fully agricultural economic systems one perhaps needs to look at transformations from the Middle to Late Bronze Age, driven by Cyprus getting more central to a world system of trade, in which cultivation of "cash crop" fruits became important. In this context continued hunter-gatherer economic activities  lost ground to the food and economic production activities that transformed the wild fringes to investment agriculture.

Thus despite material culture that we class as Neolithic (and Bronze Age) the economy looks rather anti-Neolithic.

Domestication of Plants in the [western] Old World, revised.

No doubt all students and researchers of plant domestication and archaeobotany will be pleased to hear that the revised 4th edition of Zohary and Hopf's Domestication of Plants in the Old World (now Zohary, Hopf and Weiss) is hot off the presses in Oxford. I have not seen a copy yet myself but previous editions, the last in 2000, remains the standard reference work on the crops of the Near East and Mediterranean, their wild progenitors and early archaeobotanical evidence. An updated treatment is only to be welcomed.

Wild plant use in archaeobotany: a new networking site

A new Groupsite, a kind of private 'facebook' for thematic sharing and networking has been started for the study  the "Ancient Wild Plant Economy", with a group blog and other networking potential. Visit or join at: http://staple.groupsite.com/main/summary.

Something similar, I came across recently in Archaeobotany.net, which provides networking for the archaeobotany of Asia, Australia and Oceania.

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.