Reaction to “Cereal Cultivation at Swifterbant? Neolithic Wetland Farming on the North European Plain”

Abstract

The article by Cappers and Raemaekers (2008) on small-scale crop cultivation as part of the extended broad-spectrum economy within the Swifterbant culture develops for the first time in detail a model that has been used only implicitly in the earlier Dutch debate (e.g., Bakels 1981, 45). It is elegantly embedded in the international discussion on early farming and offers new ideas on aspects of agricultural practices of the Swifterbant culture. However, responses to this article indicate that it touches on many aspects of early cultivation that cannot be discussed effectively in a single paper. The authors reject the modernistic view that wetland environments on the fringe of the Northwest European Plain were unsuitable for crop cultivation (see “Conclusions,” Cappers and Raemaekers 2008), based on discussion of five sites. The discussion could have included at least three other Swifterbant (-related) sites where cereals have been found, including Hude in Germany (Kampffmeyer 1991) and Brandwijk (Bakels 2000; Out 2008c). Importantly, the evidence from Brandwijk is inconclusive and interpretable in more than one way (cf. Lillie 2008). The same can be argued for the sites and evidence discussed by Cappers and Raemaekers. The authors reason that the coastal sites of the later Hazendonk group, unlike the Swifterbant sites, are not relevant to the discussion owing to their younger age and because the coastal environment is considered suitable for cultivation in our modern view (see “Reply,” Cappers and Raemaekers 2008). There are, however, two reasons to include sites of the Hazendonk group in the debate. First, some of the inland Hazendonk sites are located in freshwater environments (unlike the coastal sites) and subsistence in these sites was based on an economy similar to that in the Swifterbant culture. Secondly, as the authors stress, the history of the debate shows that it should be guided by the archaeobotanical and archaeological evidence, not our modern expectations about the suitability of an environment for crop cultivation. For Cappers and Raemaekers to exclude the coastal sites from the discussion based on the modern view that these sites were suitable for cultivation appears to be contradictory. The coastal sites are especially relevant because they have provided strong evidence of local cultivation in the form of sickle gloss