A multi-disciplinary study assessing the evidence for agriculture in Neolithic Ireland is presented, examining the timing, extent and nature of settlement and farming. Bayesian analyses of ...palaeoenvironmental and archaeological 14C data have allowed us to re-examine evidential strands within a strong chronological framework. While the nature and timing of the very beginning of the Neolithic in Ireland is still debated, our results – based on new Bayesian chronologies of plant macro-remains – are consistent with a rapid and abrupt transition to agriculture from c. 3750 cal BC, though there are hints of earlier Neolithic presence at a number of sites. We have emphatically confirmed the start of extensive Neolithic settlement in Ireland with the existence of a distinct ‘house horizon’, dating to 3720–3620 cal BC, lasting for up to a century. Cereals were being consumed at many sites during this period, with emmer wheat dominant, but also barley (naked and hulled), as well as occasional evidence for einkorn wheat, naked wheat and flax. The earliest farmers in Ireland, like farmers elsewhere across NW Europe, were not engaged in shifting cultivation, but practised longer-term fixed-plot agriculture. The association between early agriculture and the Elm Decline seen in many pollen diagrams shows that this latter event was not synchronous across all sites investigated, starting earlier in the north compared with the west, but that there is a strong coincidence with early agriculture at many sites. After this early boom, there are changes in the nature of settlement records; aside from passage tombs, the evidence for activity between 3400 and 3100 cal BC is limited. From 3400 cal BC, we see a decrease in the frequency of cereal evidence and an increase in some wild resources (e.g. fruits, but not nuts, in the records), alongside evidence for re-afforestation in pollen diagrams (3500–3000 cal BC). Changes occur at a time of worsening climatic conditions, as shown in Irish bog oak and reconstructed bog surface wetness records, although the links between the various records, and assessment of causes and effects, will require further investigation and may prove complex. This period seems to have been one of environmental, landscape, settlement and economic change. The later 4th millennium BC emerges as a period that would benefit from focused research attention, particularly as the observed changes in Ireland seem to have parallels in Britain and further afield.
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•Abrupt uptake of agriculture associated with ‘house horizon’ 3720–3620 cal BC.•Fixed plot ‘garden’ agriculture inferred.•Elm decline asynchronous, but associated in many places with early agriculture.•Early boom followed by major archaeological & landscape changes 3500–3000 cal BC.•Observed changes in Ireland have parallels in Britain and further afield.
Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East: A Guide surveys the lithic record for the East Mediterranean Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, and adjacent territories) from the ...earliest times to 6,500 years ago. It is intended both as an introduction to this lithic evidence for students and as a resource for researchers working with Paleolithic and Neolithic stone tool evidence. Written by a lithic analyst and professional flintknapper, this book systematically examines variation in technology, typology, and industries for the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic; the Epipaleolithic; and Neolithic periods in the Near East. It is extensively illustrated with drawings of stone tools. In addition to surveying the lithic evidence, the book also considers ways in which archaeological treatment of this evidence could be changed to make it more relevant to major issues in human origins research. A final chapter shows how change in stone tool designs points to increasing human dependence on stone tools across the long sweep of Stone Age prehistory.
This book studies the formation of complex societies in prehistoric China during the Neolithic and early state periods, c. 7000–1500 BC. Archaeological materials are interpreted through ...anthropological perspectives, using systematic analytic methods in settlement and burial patterns. Both agency and process are considered in the development of chiefdoms and in the emergence of early states in the Yellow River region. Interrelationships between factors such as mortuary practice, craft specialization, ritual activities, warfare, exchange of elite goods, climatic fluctuations, and environmental changes are emphasized. This study offers a critical evaluation of current archaeological data from Chinese sources, and argues that, although some general tendencies are noted, social changes were affected by multiple factors in no pre-determined sequence. In this most comprehensive study to date, Li Liu attempts to reconstruct developmental trajectories toward early states in Chinese civilization and discusses theoretical implications of Chinese archaeology for the understanding of social evolution.
This paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In ...spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken as indications for large-scale migrations during two major periods: the Early Neolithic expansion into Europe (6500–4000 BC) and the third millennium BC “steppe migration.” Rather than massive migration events, I argue that both major genetic turnovers are better understood in terms of small-scale mobility and human movement in systems of population circulation, social fission and fusion of communities, and translocal interaction, which together add up to a large-scale signal. At the same time, I argue that both upticks in mobility are initiated by the two most consequential social transformations that took place in Eurasia, namely the emergence of farming, animal husbandry, and sedentary village life during the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of systems of centralized political organization during the process of urbanization and early state formation in southwest Asia.
Domesticated chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are a dominant part of the global human diet. Although the early domestication history of this species remains disputed, Mainland Southeast Asia ...(MSEA) is assumed to have been the initial domestication center. The eastward spread of chickens into Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and the Pacific is typically attributed to human‐mediated dispersals. Chicken remains are relatively common at Pacific Neolithic sites but are extremely rare in the archaeological records of MSEA and ISEA. Therefore, the exact routes and timing of the human‐mediated spread of chickens from their native range in MSEA into the Pacific remain questions of interest. Here, we present the earliest evidence of Gallus on the Indonesian island of Flores at Liang Bua. This site has yielded an extensive stratigraphic sequence that spans from ~190,000 calendar years (ka) ago until the present and includes dense accumulations of faunal remains. Twelve bones from the cave's Holocene deposits have been identified as Gallus. The oldest remains, a right and left coracoid, were each directly dated to ~2,250 calibrated radiocarbon years before present (ka cal. BP), whereas the youngest Gallus elements are ~0.3 ka old. Although wild Green Junglefowl (Gallus varius) and Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus) are found on Flores today, the absence of either of these species in deposits at Liang Bua older than ~2.5 ka as well as the size and shape of the oldest coracoids suggests that these remains likely represent domesticated G. gallus. This is the first evidence for domesticated chickens in the Neolithic of Flores and the first directly dated Gallus remains in Wallacea. The absence of chickens in the fossil record of ISEA suggests that Red Junglefowl (and perhaps Green Junglefowl also) reached Wallacea via human‐mediated dispersal(s) at least ~2.25 ka cal. BP.
This is the first book-length study of the Yayoi and Kofun periods of Japan (c.600 BC–AD 700), in which the introduction of rice paddy-field farming from the Korean peninsula ignited the rapid ...development of social complexity and hierarchy that culminated with the formation of the ancient Japanese state. The author traces the historical trajectory of the Yayoi and Kofun periods by employing cutting-edge sociological, anthropological and archaeological theories and methods. The book reveals a fascinating process through which sophisticated hunting-gathering communities in an archipelago on the eastern fringe of the Eurasian continent were transformed materially and symbolically into a state.
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