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AGRICULTURE

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FOLLOWED BY FEATURE ESSAY ON:

Mills and Milling Technology . . . . . . . . . 376

By 1000 B.C. farming, which had originated in Southwest Asia, had been established throughout Europe for millennia. In parts of southeastern Europe agricultural communities existed from 7000 B.C. or earlier, and even in Norway cereal farming was present beginning at least around 2000 B.C. Agricultural changes from around 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000 therefore represent developments from a long-established tradition. Agricultural systems over this period had two main sets of influences.

BACKGROUND

One set of influences was economic and political. The border between "barbarian" and "civilized" Europe was fluctuating and permeable. In parts of western Europe, for example, agricultural systems that were both more intensive and more extensive developed in the first millennium B.C. to meet indigenous requirements, and subsequently changes were imposed to satisfy the demands of the Roman Empire for larger-scale cereal production. Following the collapse of the imperial economic system in the fifth century, agriculture reverted to subsistence production in some areas. Eventually agricultural systems capable of producing a surplus to support the newly established polities of early medieval Europe were developed. At any given location therefore the economic context of agriculture could vary markedly through time. Trade in plant products and crops and exchange of knowledge also transpired across the fluctuating cultural contact between civilization and "barbarity" and within the two.

The other major set of influences on early farming systems was environmental. Farmers are pragmatic. They are well aware of the potential productivity of their local environment—its geology, soils, topography, and climate. Although from the beginnings of agriculture cropping systems were almost certainly developed with local adaptations to enhance productivity, it is only in this period that we can unequivocally demonstrate such adaptations in Europe. The effects of climate change over this period are difficult to evaluate. The data currently available are not so regionally precise as to permit discrimination between the effects on agriculture of climatic or cultural change.

DATA SOURCES

Information on early agriculture comes from various sources:

• Field systems. These are known both from relict systems in areas which, as a result of climate change, are now too marginal for arable production and from ancient systems now subsumed into modern patterns of field boundaries.

• Implements. The artifactual technology of agriculture is known from finds of plows (initially ards, which could score only a thin furrow in the soil; later true moldboard plows capable of turning and inverting sod), hand-digging implements (such as spades), and harvesting tools.
• Crop-processing installations. These include corn driers.
• Storage facilities. In some parts of Europe cereals were stored in belowground silos—during the Iron Age, typically large cylindrical pits—but it is thought that aboveground storage may also have been accomplished in structures marked at many settlement sites by settings of four or nine postholes. Granaries, often with ceramic, basketry, or barrel containers, have been reported from the post-Roman period.
• Historical sources.
• Biological remains. Most directly these comprise remains of crop plants (macrofossils) preserved by charring (carbonization), as impressions on ceramics, by mineral replacement, and in waterlogged anoxic or oxygen-deficient deposits. Data from palynology (analysis of pollen, spores, and other microscopic entities), entomology (e.g., the presence of scarabaeoid dung beetles or grain pests), and soil science are also very informative. Dating Iron Age deposits by radiocarbon presents difficulties because of a plateau in the calibration curve, therefore palynological analyses of sediment sequences must be linked rigorously to a scientific dating program that permits enhanced precision of calibration by mathematical modeling, as Alex Bayliss has shown. Where this has been done, a detailed picture of land use and agricultural change during the Iron Age can be proposed (as, e.g., at Scole, England, which has been described by Patricia Wiltshire and Peter Murphy).

This article is concerned principally with plant macrofossils, the study of which is known as archaeobotany or palaeoethnobotany, although data from other sources will be mentioned. Cereals and pulses (the edible seeds of legumes) are the domesticated descendents of wild plants native to Southwest Asia. Once they were transplanted to entirely new habitats in Europe, a process of adaptation and intentional human selection began. The full economic potential of the crops available took millennia to realize. Some of the earliest direct evidence for cropping patterns that are closely attuned to local conditions of soil and climate dates from the first millennium B.C.

CROPS, PROCESSING, AND TRADE

Palaeoethnobotanical studies indicate that a wide range of crop species was cultivated during the two millennia under consideration. These included field crops: wheats (einkorn, emmer, durum wheat, rivet wheat, spelt, bread wheat), barley, rye, oats, millets, pulses (peas, horsebeans, vetches, lentils, chickpeas), and fiber and oil crops, such as hemp, flax, and gold of pleasure. The latter is an oilseed no longer grown commercially but well represented, for example, by threshing remains from Iron Age sites in the Assendelver Polders, Netherlands. Some plants that in modern times are generally regarded as weeds may also have been cultivated. In Denmark seeds of Chenopodium album L. (a garden weed commonly known as lamb's-quarter or fat hen) have been reported from the gut contents of Iron Age human bodies preserved in peat bogs, and large caches of the seed have been found at settlement sites. Experiments by Paul Stokes and Peter Rowley-Conwy have demonstrated that seed yields comparable to those of cereals may be obtained by cultivating this prolific goosefoot green. Early cultivation of fruits and nuts (including olives, grapes, figs, plums, cherries, walnuts) is evident in regions bordering the Mediterranean, but in the north and west only native wild fruits and nuts have so far been identified from Iron Age sites. Orchard crops and other plants, including culinary herbs (e.g., coriander, dill), spread with the expansion of the Roman Empire. Results from later sites indicate a cessation of fruit and nut cultivation in many areas formerly under Roman control and then reestablishment of production once new trade contacts were established. Orchard crops represented a long-term investment very vulnerable to destruction during conflict, so their apparent absence in these areas in the immediate post-Roman period is unsurprising.

Factors determining the relative economic importance of field and orchard crops were in part environmental, in part economic. The northern and western limits of cultivation for some crops (e.g., olives, lentils) were climatically determined. Rye seems to have reached Europe as a weed in other cereals. By the Iron Age it was being cultivated in some areas, and it spread farther as a result of post-Roman population movements. Its capacity to produce adequate yields on nutrient-deficient upland and sandy soil, by virtue of its extensive root system, made it of great economic importance in parts of North and West Europe. Other marginal soil types occurred in the coastal marshes of Germany and the Netherlands, where there was large-scale occupation from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages, eventually associated with mounded settlements known as terpen or wurten. Archaeobotanical evidence from sites such as the Wurt Elisenhof and the Feddersen Wierde indicates a farming system based on salt marsh grazing and arable production. Barley, a salt-tolerant crop, was the main cereal associated with an early form of broad bean, oats, flax, and where conditions permitted, other crops. Early 1990s excavations at Anglo-Saxon sites dating from around the eighth century A.D. in the fens of eastern England indicate development of comparable farming systems, perhaps independently. Economic change, and in particular a shift to more extensive forms of production, was associated in parts of Northeast England (and perhaps in the lower Rhineland) with a replacement of emmer wheat by spelt, a hardier crop more tolerant of marginal soils.

Plant macrofossils can also provide information on the economic function and status of sites. It is assumed that the types of plant wastes discarded at a farm (where cereals were being threshed, winnowed, and sieved on a large scale) would differ from those at a higher-status "consumer" site (which might receive only cleaned grain). The relative proportions of grain, chaff, and weed seeds in samples from a site can therefore be informative in terms of the types of activities undertaken there. In fact interpretation is not simple due to the complex range of processes leading to incorporation of macrofossils into archaeological deposits (taphonomic processes). Archaeobotanical results have to be considered alongside other archaeological data and may also draw on ethnographic information from studies of modern peasant agriculture. Martin Jones (1984) has proposed a model for economic interrelationships between Iron Age sites in the hinterland of the hillfort at Danebury, southern England, based on sample composition. He proposes that partially processed crops were brought to the hillfort for communal processing and storage. A similar study of plant material from a hilltop settlement dating from the sixth to the ninth centuries in the Biferno Valley, Molise, Italy, produced samples composed mainly of grain with few chaff fragments or weed seeds. This may indicate that the site was not a peasant farming village but a higher-status settlement supplied with largely cleaned cereals by farms in its hinterland.

Evidence also indicates long-distance exchange of crop products. For example, the Roman writer Strabo records grain as one of the exports of Late Iron Age Britain, and the depiction of cereal ears on gold coins issued in the early first century A.D. by the British king Cunobelin could well be seen as a statement of the economic basis of his power (fig. 1). Archaeobotanical evidence for trade in plant foodstuffs is tantalizingly sparse throughout the period under consideration, although exotic cornfield weed seeds in charred grain samples from early medieval Dorestad, Netherlands, suggest importation of cereals from areas farther up the Rhine. It is possible that new techniques, including analysis of DNA and stable isotopes, will enhance understanding of early trade in crops. A few macrofossils of imported Mediterranean foods (e.g., dried figs) have been reported from tenth-century deposits at Cologne, Germany, and York, England, but indications of imported foods are otherwise very rare in North and West Europe before the twelfth century. The highest-status commodity traded appears to have been wine. Remains of Italian amphorae have been reported from Late Iron Age burials in Southeast England (see the report by Rosalind Niblett), and barrels of silver fir originating in the upper Rhine have been found in eighth-to-tenth-century-A.D. deposits at the southern Baltic trading settlement of Hedeby and at Dorestad. As an expression of conspicuous consumption, wine drinking seems to have been the preserve of the warrior and proto-urban elite throughout North and West Europe.

While wine was the drink of civilization (and of those who aspired to it), beer or ale was the common drink of much of Europe. Production of beer from cereal grain involves several stages, the first of which is a controlled germination to allow conversion of starch to sugar that can subsequently be fermented (malting). Finds of charred germinated grains can be evidence for the process (fig. 2). The earliest material reasonably interpretable as malt comprised charred germinated barley grains in pots from a burned first-century-A.D. house at O⁄sterbo⁄lle, Denmark. During the Roman period malt was generally produced from wheat, but evidence from cellars of early medieval buildings destroyed by fire at Ipswich, England, indicates that oats and barley were used. Flavorings were commonly added, including hops and bog myrtle. Hops also contain polyphenolic preservative compounds. Large deposits of hop fruits have been reported from ninth- and tenth-century-A.D. contexts at Haithabu, Germany, and in England from a tenth-century boat at Graveney and from contemporary deposits at Ipswich.

Other plant products include medicinal drugs. Seeds of opium poppy have been found in Bronze Age and later deposits throughout much of Europe, whereas Cannabis is known from Iron Age contexts in Romania and Hungary and from Roman and later deposits in the north and west. Native wild plants would also have provided a pharmacopoeia, but direct evidence for this is sparse. Patricia Wiltshire found abundant Artemisia pollen within corrosion products in the spout of a bronze infusing vessel, which was found in a first-century-A.D. grave of non-Roman native type at Stanway, Essex, in association with a complete set of medical instruments. The Artemisia genus of plants includes species that produce antimalarial and vermifuge compounds.

Dyes, too, were produced. Tenth- and eleventh-century Anglo-Scandinavian deposits at York, England, have produced remains of dye plants (madder, dyer's greenweed, woad, and a club moss probably of Scandinavian origin). Colors produced would have varied depending on the mordant, but red, blue, and yellow were certainly available.

Limitations of space preclude discussion of the exploitation and management of natural and semi-natural habitats—particularly woodlands, heathlands and grasslands—but suffice to say that these, too, provided fuel, wild plant foods, drugs, dyes, tanning agents, and grazing and hay for domestic animals.

See also Crops of the Early Farmers (vol. 1, part 3); Danebury (vol. 2, part 6); Ipswich (vol. 2, part 7).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bayley, Justine, ed. Science in Archaeology: An Agenda for the Future. London: English Heritage, 1998.

Bayliss, Alex. "Some Thoughts on Using Scientific Dating in English Archaeology and Buildings Analysis for the Next Decade." In Science in Archaeology: An Agenda for the Future. Edited by Justine Bayley, pp. 95–109. London: English Heritage, 1998.

Behre, Karl-Ernst. "The History of Rye Cultivation in Europe." Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 1, no. 3 (1992): 141–156.

Behre, Karl-Ernst, and S. Jacomet. "The Ecological Interpretation of Archaeobotanical Data." In Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany. Edited by Willem Van Zeist, Krystyna Wasylikowa, and Karl-Ernst Behre, pp. 81–108. Rotterdam and Brookfield, Vt.: Balkema, 1991.

Crowson, A., T. Lane, and J. Reeve. Fenland Management Project Excavations 1991–1995. Lincolnshire Archaeology and Reports Series no. 3. Heckington, U.K.: Fenland Management Project, 2000.

Jones, Martin. "The Plant Remains." In Danebury: An Iron Age Hillfort in Hampshire. Vol. 2, The Excavations, 1969–1978: The Finds. Edited by Barry Cunliffe, pp. 483–495. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 52. London: Council for British Archaeology, 1984.

Kenward, H. K., and A. R. Hall. "Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits at 16–22 Coppergate." Archaeology of York 14, no. 7 (1995): 435–797.

Niblett, Rosalind. The Excavation of a Ceremonial Site at Folly Lane, Verulamium. Britannia Monograph Series 14. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1999.

Renfrew, Jane M. New Light on Early Farming: Recent Developments in Palaeoethnobotany. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Stokes, Paul, and Peter Rowley-Conwy. "Iron Age Cultigen? Experimental Return Rates for Fat Hen (Chenopodium album L.)." Environmental Archaeology 7 (October 2002): 95–100.

Van der Veen, Marijke. "An Early Medieval Hilltop Settlement in Molise: The Plant Remains from D85." Papers of the British School at Rome 53 (1985): 211–224.

Van der Veen, Marijke, and T. O'Connor. "The Expansion of Agricultural Production in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain." In Science in Archaeology: An Agenda for the Future. Edited by Justine Bayley, pp. 127–144. London: English Heritage, 1998.

Van Zeist, Willem, Krystyna Wasylikowa, and Karl-Ernst Behre, eds. Progress in Old World Palaeoethnobotany. Rotterdam and Brookfield, Vt.: Balkema, 1991. (A comprehensive review of European paleoethnobotany in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Van Zeist, Willem, and W. A. Casparie, eds. Plants and Ancient Man: Studies in Palaeoethnobotany. Rotterdam and Boston: Balkema, 1984.

Wiltshire, Patricia E. J., and Peter L. Murphy. "Current Knowledge of the Iron Age Environment and Agrarian Economy of Norfolk and Adjacent Areas." In The Land of the Iceni: The Iron Age in Northern East Anglia. Edited by John Davies and Tom Williamson, pp. 132–161. Norwich, U.K.: University of East Anglia, 1999.

PETER MURPHY