Life Conditions and Health in Early Farmers

Human remains provide a fund of data for documenting and interpreting the quality of life, living conditions, and the costs and benefits of the foraging-to-farming transition and the dependence on domesticated food sources, especially those related to the adoption and spread of plant staples that today feed much of the world’s population, including the superfoods—wheat, rice and maize. This chapter presents comparative results of human bioarchaeological research programmes where human skeletal samples are large and well documented and where archaeological context (settlement systems, dietary reconstruction) is comprehensive: west and east Asia, Europe, and North America. These investigations reveal largely similar but variable health outcomes relating to the foraging-to-farming transition. The record shows a general picture of compromised health either with the shift from foraging to farming or with intensified farming.

Stewing on a Theme of Cuisine

In the last two decades scientific techniques have opened up new avenues in archaeological studies of food. In particular, biomolecular approaches generate datasets with fundamentally different resolutions compared to traditional macro-remains. Equipped with these datasets, the authors probe the possibility for discussing new themes in food studies, through an investigation of cuisine. Following a critical review of theoretical approaches to subsistence and prestige food economies, they suggest that cuisine is a social expression of past food evaluation processes. By reconstructing pottery use at two sites that span the transition from foraging to farming in northern Europe (c.4,000 cal BC) using organic residue analysis, they suggest that understanding how food was valued is important in explaining the wider economic changes during this period. The foodstuffs that were carefully chosen to be processed in pottery fulfilled contingent social purposes beyond economic necessity.

Multi-agent Modelling of the Trajectory of the LBK Neolithic

A modelling approach is presented in which archaeological data on the first farmers in central and western Europe, called the Linearbandkeramik (LBK; 5600–4900 cal BC), are cross-analysed with the corresponding environmental data. The purpose of this approach is to reconstruct the geographical expansion and subsequent dissolution of the LBK culture, and to gain insights into the reactiveness and resilience of this sociocultural system to climatic impacts. The socio-natural data are cross-analysed at multiple scales (from micro-regional to continental), via multi-agent modelling of the LBK farming system, based on ethno-archaeological inferences and integrating palaeoenvironmental and bioarchaeological disciplines, cultural archaeology, palaeodemography and economics.

The Future Neolithic

As for Shakespeare, every generation gets the Neolithic it deserves. This chapter discusses emerging views of what the Neolithic is and how to study it, with the thesis that recently there has been a quiet revolution in how we understand the Neolithic. A broad change in how Neolithic specialists understand the relationship between science and the humanities is envisioned, with the principal result that a new interpretive vocabulary, including a definition of the Neolithic, has arisen. This is illustrated with regard to changing understandings in the study of animals, plants, landscapes, things and monuments; for example, rather than being culture written on the material world, or material worlds determining culture, the practices of Neolithic life defined participation in a specific kind of historic process structured by these relations. The effects of changing perspectives are shown in, for example, multi-scalar approaches to both the origins and the end of the Neolithic.

Doing Science in the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age

This chapter explores the ways in which categories of class and order have been built up into science in later prehistoric south-east Europe. Five themes related to scientific principles are explored: harmonious proportions and the geometry of buildings; an aesthetic of geometric order for the design of objects; numerology; calendrical observations; and the geometry of plaited patterns and woven structures. It is undesirable to separate the ritual from the domestic, the scientific from the technological or the pragmatic from the symbolic in the interpretation of the material culture under discussion. The author proposes that, under certain social conditions, there arose opportunities for more complex cognitive formulations than in the everyday formulation and use of the four main principles of object design—symmetry, precision, compartmentalisation and standardisation—found over a wide area of central and south-east Europe and covering four millennia.

Constructing a Narrative for the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland

Case studies are presented to discuss various ways, good and bad, in which ‘hard science’ has been used to construct aspects of the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland. The use of radiocarbon dating and dietary evidence to characterise the Neolithisation process is reviewed; the disjunction between existing archaeological narratives and the results of a genetic and morphometric analysis of the Orkney vole as a Neolithic arrival in Orkney is considered; and the reasons for the success of Projet JADE, a major international research programme investigating axeheads and other artefacts made of jadeitite and other alpine rocks, are explored. Conclusions are reached about the way in which ‘hard science’ can be used to inform archaeological narratives (and vice versa).

Revealing Our Vibrant Past

This chapter argues that, despite some valiant attempts, archaeologists are still struggling with fundamental tensions between science and theory, and in effect, between nature and culture. These oppositions have been a particular bone of contention in the transition to farming, and continue to frustrate attempts to move the debate forward. By drawing on wider discussions of a potential ‘ontological turn’ in archaeology, and in particular the potential for thinking through the past as assemblages of vibrant matter, the chapter outlines an alternative perspective. This is then applied to two sites in Britain, one Mesolithic and one Neolithic, to examine how turning to this approach might open up new understandings of the similarities and differences between the two periods, and set the stage for a reconsideration of the transition itself.

Neolithic Lifeways

In this chapter, the authors review how integrated microstratigraphic, phytolith and chemical analyses can contribute to our understanding of continuity and change in ecological and social practices during the transition to agriculture, in Zagros, with selective comparative reference to central Anatolia. They examine how micro-contextual analysis of plant materials preserved in large thin-sections and phytolith analyses are contributing to a fuller understanding of the ecology and use of both wild and domesticated plants than is possible from study of charred plants alone. They consider how integrated analyses of animal dung are informing on the earliest stages of animal management, including penning, foddering and use of dung for fuel. Lastly they briefly review the microstratigraphic evidence for how the transition to agriculture was shaped by and impacted on particular activities, roles and relations within households and communities by study of continuity and change in the nature, timing and organisation of these.

Herding Practices in the Ditched Villages of the Neolithic Tavoliere (Apulia, South-east Italy)

In the Apulian Tavoliere (Italy), a large plain south of the Gargano promontory, early and middle Neolithic villages (c.6000–5000 BC) are characterised by circular ditches, which enclose dwellings associated with early farming communities. Through the integration of isotopic data the authors explore the food practices and the social landscapes of these communities, finding that this interconnected cultural system shows a great level of complexity, especially in the economic strategies of the groups investigated. The stable carbon and nitrogen isotope study of human and animal samples reveals how some sites, which are only a short distance from one another, show different isotopic signatures within a largely homogenous environment (for example Passo di Corvo versus Masseria Candelaro and Grotta Scaloria). The authors speculate that such differences reflect multi-faceted herding/farming systems, which in the case of Passo di Corvo involved the use of animal manure.

Cattle and Sheep Herding at Cheia, Romania, at the Turn of the Fifth Millennium cal BC

A stable isotope study was conducted on the zooarchaeological assemblage from Cheia, located on the Central Dobruja plateau, Romania, between the Danube and the Black Sea. Occupied at the turn of the fifth millennium cal BC by Hamangia communities, the site had a faunal assemblage heavily dominated by domesticates. The δ13C isotopes measured on domestic cattle and sheep bone collagen and tooth enamel were comparatively higher than those measured on most wild fauna, suggesting the exploitation of different ecosystems for herding and hunting. They could reveal either pasturing in dry ecosystems in the vicinity of the site, or exploitation of littoral lagoons where C4 plants could have occurred. Cattle birth seasonality occurred over less than four months. Because calving initiates lactation time, this feature might help in the future to define more precisely the parameters of this kind of economy where milk exploitation is suggested by the cattle mortality profile.