Disentangling Human–Plant–Animal Dynamics at the Microscale: Geo-Ethnoarchaeological Case Studies from North Africa and the Near East

Marta Portillo,Aroa García-Suárez

doi:10.3390/app11178143

Abstract

Livestock dung is a suitable material for delineating the complexity of interactions between people, plants and animals as it contains critical information on environmental and ecological issues as well as socio-economic dynamics and cultural lifeways. However, animal faecal remains and other coprogenic materials are commonly overlooked in most archaeological research programs due, in part, to methodological challenges in its recovery and identification. This paper evaluates the contribution of integrated geoarchaeological approaches, together with comparative reference ethnoarchaeological records, to interdisciplinary microscopic analyses on the identification of animal dung and its archaeological significance within farming built environments. It brings together records from a selection of recent geo-ethnoarchaeological case studies across the Near East, one of the heartlands of plant and animal domestication, and from northern Africa, an understudied key area with critical implications for neighbouring regions such as the Sahara. This article examines the state-of-the-art of dung material identifications within agricultural and pastoral settlements and their potential for tracing ecological diversity, animal management strategies, penning, grazing and foddering, seasonality, and dung use. This review highlights the value of modern reference frameworks of livestock dung as a primary source of information for disentangling human–plant–animal dynamics through time and space.

Highlights

The shift towards a sedentary lifestyle at the beginning of the Holocene entailed a key transformation in the ways prehistoric communities related to animals and the environment
The arid and semi-arid regions of the study areas provide favourable conditions for the preservation of archaeological faecal materials via rapid desiccation [73], within earthen architecture, which shelters these remains from environmental agents and erosion, and in middens, where rapid burial prevents the action of faecal decomposers such as mites, fungi, and flies [74]
Whereas ethnographic research has proven valuable in the study areas for establishing a comparative framework of reference with the materials recovered from archaeological contexts, improving our understanding of dung deposition, activities, seasonality, and burial conditions, methodological techniques such as portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for detecting the presence of phosphates in sediments have yielded promising results for the rapid identification of faecal materials during excavations [16,17]

Summary

Introduction

The shift towards a sedentary lifestyle at the beginning of the Holocene entailed a key transformation in the ways prehistoric communities related to animals and the environment. The occurrence of dung in prehistoric sites preceding domestication is an indicator of greater human proximity to animals and of the emergence of herd management practices [4]. The collection and burning of dung from wild herbivores were suggested by archaeobotanical studies to be an occasional practice in Levantine hunter–gatherer communities undergoing an initial process of sedentarisation [5]. These early studies came under scrutiny mainly due to the difficulties entailed in securely detecting faecal matter in the archaeological record, a material prone to degradation. Since animal faecal matter constitutes a highly valuable and culturally charged material, defining the circumstances under which the earliest management of dung by humans developed is critically important for our understanding of how and why the cultural control of animals began

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion