Abstract
Archaeobotanical evidence from southwest Asia is often interpreted as showing that the spectrum of wild plant foods narrowed during the origins of agriculture, but it has long been acknowledged that the recognition of wild plants as foods is problematic. Here, we systematically combine compositional and contextual evidence to recognise the wild plants for which there is strong evidence of their deliberate collection as food at pre-agricultural and early agricultural sites across southwest Asia. Through sample-by-sample analysis of archaeobotanical remains, a robust link is established between the archaeological evidence and its interpretation in terms of food use, which permits a re-evaluation of the evidence for the exploitation of a broad spectrum of wild plant foods at pre-agricultural sites, and the extent to which this changed during the development of early agriculture. Our results show that relatively few of the wild taxa found at pre- and early agricultural sites can be confidently recognised as contributing to the human diet, and we found no evidence for a narrowing of the plant food spectrum during the adoption of agriculture. This has implications for how we understand the processes leading to the domestication of crops, and points towards a mutualistic relationship between people and plants as a driving force during the development of agriculture.
Highlights
Using a different quantification method to that used by Weiss et al (2004), they suggest that the use of small-seeded grasses did not fall sharply after the Epipalaeolithic period in the eastern Fertile Crescent, but rather that these grasses or other nongrass species continued to form a significant component of the diet throughout the PPNA, suggesting an opportunistic approach to the collection of wild plant foods
Relatively few of the wild taxa found at pre- and early agricultural sites can be confidently recognised as contributing to the human diet at one time or another during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN), though we acknowledge that this group represents the minimum number of wild taxa used as food
While we do not interpret this contrast as indicating an increase in the diversity of wild plant foods collected at these later PPN sites, we have found no evidence for a narrowing of the plant food spectrum during the adoption of agriculture
Summary
The collection of wild plant foodsThe emergence of agriculture in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) of southwest Asia marked a major change in human subsistence strategies, with a shift from communities based on the gathering of wild plants to those reliant primarily on the cultivation of eight founder crops (einkorn, emmer, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and flax). The rise and fall of a broad spectrum of food resources has been linked to notions of optimal foraging theory whereby, in the face of resource depletion due to population increase and/or environmental change, foragers increasingly exploited lower ranked resources which subsequently declined in importance with the advent of higher ranking resources such as domesticated plants and animals (Flannery 1969; Stiner et al 2000; Stiner 2001; Stiner and Munro 2002; Winterhalder and Kennett 2006; Gremillion et al 2014) Following this view, Weiss et al (2004) have argued that a broad range of small-seeded grasses contributed to the forager diet in the Upper Palaeolithic but that their contribution declined in comparison with that of wild cereals until the PPNA (early PPN), after which their significance was negligible. The arguments of both Weiss et al (2004) and Savard et al (2006) are based on the assumption that the plant remains present on early sites were primarily collected as food
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