Current refurbishment of the archaeobotany laboratory and integration of its extensive reference collections are underway. In addition to archaeobotanical remains, there are more than 20,000 accessions of modern reference specimens, mainly seeds, fruits and wood. The history of how these collections have grown is summarised, starting with the first phase when Geoffrey Dimbleby was Professor of Human Environment (1964-79), and during which Cecilia Western built up reference collections of wood. A second phase dates from the 1980s and 1990s with Professor David Harris and Archaeobotany Lecturer Gordon Hillman, who undertook research, fieldwork and teaching, especially in relation to agricultural origins and Near Eastern seeds. Jon Hather's research complemented this with his work on tubers, woods and tropical nuts. The third phase, since 2000, has seen accessions added from broader geographical origins and including wood and seeds, as well as phytoliths, 'plant fibre samples' and historic British cereal samples.

This archive lists similar to 8000 Bronze Age British axeheads, alongside associated compositional analyses, isotopic measurements and radiocarbon dates. It integrates several major existing data collection efforts and published catalogues, whilst also providing a self-consistent basic typology. It is archived as four related flat-sheet text files and could be reused to support quantitative assessment of geographic and temporal patterns in metalwork style, deposition, recovery, hoard co-occurrence and/ or metallurgicalcompositions to name just a few salient topics.

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years(1). Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configuration and specific interactions(2,3). Here we provide detailed distributions of milk exploitation across Europe over the past 9,000 years using around 7,000 pottery fat residues from more than 550 archaeological sites. European milk use was widespread from the Neolithic period onwards but varied spatially and temporally in intensity. Notably, LP selection varying with levels of prehistoric milk exploitation is no better at explaining LP allele frequency trajectoriesthan uniform selection since the Neolithic period. In the UK Biobank(4,5) cohort of 500,000 contemporary Europeans, LP genotype was only weakly associated with milk consumption and did not show consistent associations with improved fitness or health indicators. This suggests that other reasons for the beneficial effects of LP should be considered for its rapid frequency increase. We propose that lactase non-persistent individuals consumed milk when it became available but, under conditions of famine and/or increased pathogen exposure, this was disadvantageous, driving LP selection in prehistoric Europe. Comparison of model likelihoods indicates that population fluctuations, settlement density and wild animal exploitation-proxies for these drivers-provide better explanations of LP selection than the extent of milk exploitation. These findings offer new perspectives on prehistoric milk exploitation and LP evolution.

AbstractThe focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible explanation is the reduction in yields in Neolithic cereal-based agriculture due to worsening climatic conditions. The suggestion of a correlation between Neolithic climate deterioration, agricultural productivity, and a decrease in population requires testing for northwestern Europe. Data for our analyses were collected during the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project. We assess the correlation between agricultural productivity and population densities in the Neolithic of northwest Europe by examining the changing frequencies of crop and weed taxa before, during and after the population “boom and bust.” We show that the period of population decline is coincidental with a decrease in cereal production linked to a shift towards less fertile soils.

Quaternary Research is an international journal devoted to the advancement of the interdisciplinary understanding of the Quaternary Period.We aim to publish articles of broad interest with relevance to more than one discipline, and that constitute a signifi cant new contribution to Quaternary science.

When compared with earlier periods, the Neolithic in Ireland (4000-2500 cal BC) witnessed enormous changes in the foods being produced, and the work involved in their production and processing. Several crops were introduced - archaeobotanical studies indicate that emmer wheat became the dominant crop, with evidence also for barley (hulled and naked) and flax. Gathered resources were not abandoned; on the contrary, there is substantial evidence for a variety of nuts, fruits and leafy greens. Zooarchaeological studies indicate that new animals also arrived, including domesticated cattle, pig and sheep. Recent studies have provided substantial information on the timing and nature of these new ways of farming and living, but the focus is often on ingredients rather than food products. There are many challenges in determining which foods were being made with these new crops and animals, and in assessing their dietary and social importance. While cereals have been found at many sites, for example, it is not clear if they are being ground, boiled or other techniques are used for their processing. In this paper we explore aspects of food production, processing and foodways in Neolithic Ireland, drawing upon evidence from archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, isotopes, human skeletal remains and artefacts.

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We present detailed accounts of the archaeobotanical remains recovered from the excavations of the southern Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Dhra', including metric and morphological analysis of barley grains. Comparisons with other early Epi-Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites indicate that the Dhra' grains are larger than recorded wild specimens, but fall at the lower range of domestic species, consistent with intermediary pre-domestication cultivation status. We contextualize these results in relation to associated evidence for food storage at Dhra', as well as the ecology of wild plants and early crops, and processing technologies across the Levant.

We consider the long-term relationship between human demography, food production, and Holocene climate via an archaeological radiocarbon date series of unprecedented sampling density and detail. There is striking consistency in the inferred human population dynamics across different regions of Britain and Ireland during the middle and later Holocene. Major cross-regional population downturns in population coincide with episodes of more abrupt change in North Atlantic climate and witness societal responses in food procurement as visible in directly dated plants and animals, often with moves toward hardier cereals, increased pastoralism, and/or gathered resources. For the Neolithic, this evidence questions existing models of wholly endogenous demographic boom-bust. For the wider Holocene, it demonstrates that climate-related disruptions have been quasi-periodic drivers of societal and subsistence change.

The beginning of farming in Croatia (ca. 6000 cal BC) is little understood and few archaeobotanical studies have been conducted to explore the nature of subsistence economies at this time. This paper presents new archaeobota nical data from the middle Neolithic site of Danilo Bitinj and the early/middle Neolithic site of Pokrovnik, providing a significant contribution to the current evidence on early farming in the region.

Significance Recent studies show that cultivation of wild and domesticated plants was a protracted process that developed across southwest Asia. However, there have not been sufficient data to evaluate whether cereal cultivation and domestication developed in parallel in all the regions or at different times. Our findings indicate that cultivation of wild cereal forms during Pre-Pottery Neolithic A was common only in specific regions such as the southern-central Levant. Domesticated-type cereal chaff (>10%) is found in southern Syria around 10.7–10.2 ka Cal BP but appears around 400–1,000 y later in the other regions. Regionally diverse plant-based subsistence during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic could have contributed to (if not caused) chronological dissimilarities in the development of cereal cultivation and domestication in southwest Asia.

Much recent work that has considered the phenomenon of human migration has emphasised the complexity of the process of population movement, its impact on population structures and its role in social transformation (e.g., Anthony 1990; Burmeister 2000; Goldstein and Chikhi 2002; Harke 1998). In addition, we maintain that large-scale population movement and, in particular, the movement of farmers into previously uncultivated areas, will have ecological impacts on the receiving environments that may be detected in archaeobotantical remains recovered from ‘first’ (or early) coloniser settlements. Migration is rarely, if ever, a single event and even the sudden (in archaeological terms) appearance of settlements in a previously uninhabited territory is typically preceded by earlier essential phases of exploration and ‘landscape learning’ (e.g., Anderson 2003; Rockman 2003; cf. Schwartz 1970). It is not unexpected that the first permanently inhabited settlements on islands were preceded by earlier, archaeologically invisible, visitations for the purpose of shortterm exploitation of island resources and, synchronously, obtaining information about the nature and structure of the landscape. This information, fed into the information networks that typify small-scale mobile communities, provides the requisite level of prior knowledge and confidence of success that underlies the directional, long-distance, colonisation of new landscapes. As we review in this paper, the evidence from the earliest agropastoralist settlement of Cyprus and Crete suggests that some prior knowledge of the target landscape and its suitability for settlement was held by the colonists (Broodbank and Strasser 1991; Peltenburg et al. 2000). We here show that the nature of the crop system also informs on the origins and connections between the inhabitants of Crete and Cyprus and mainland neolithic communities.

Ireland has often been seen as marginal in the spread of the Neolithic and of early farming throughout Europe, in part due to the paucity of available data. By integrating and analysing a wealth of evidence from unpublished reports, a much more detailed picture of early arable agriculture has emerged. The improved chronological resolution reveals changing patterns in the exploitation of different plant species during the course of the Neolithic that belie simplistic notions of a steady intensification in farming, juxtaposed with a concomitant decline in foraging. It is possible that here, as in other areas of Europe, cereal cultivation became less important in the later Neolithic.

The datasets described in this paper comprise the core spatial and temporal structure of the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project (EUROEVOL), led by Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL. This is one of three datasets resulting from the EUROEVOL project, the other two comprising the faunal (EUROEVOL Dataset 2) and archaeobotanical (EUROEVOL Dataset 3) data (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1469811/). The dataset offers the largest repository of archaeological site and radiocarbon data from Neolithic Europe (4,757 sites and 14,053 radiocarbon samples), dating between the late Mesolithic and Early Bronze Age (Figure 1). It also offers the core archaeological information structured at the site and phase level, which provide the primary links between the datasets.

The Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB) in southwest Asia is a fundamental period in research on the origins of domesticated plants. However, there are few archaeobotanical data with which to characterise the plant-based subsistence and crop husbandry activities during this time, which hinders the understanding of the factors that triggered the appearance of plant domestication. In this paper, analyses of non-woody plant macro-remains provide new insights into subsistence activities such as crop cultivation (husbandry activities and storage) and plant use (wild plant gathering and food preparation) during the EPPNB at Tell Qarassa North (south Syria). We make comparisons between Tell Qarassa North and the evidence at earlier and later periods as to how plants were used, and highlight similarities and differences in the practices attested, as well as describing some of the consequences that these plant-related activities may have had in terms of labour and social organization during EPPNB.