Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond

Published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by

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Front cover: drawing by John Swogger

Dedicated to Renee Bevan and Kitty Streener in appreciation of the love and wisdom they have shared with me during my life.

Foreword

This book presents the proceedings of a seminar organised under the Neolithic Studies Group (NSG), forming part of an ongoing series of NSG seminar papers. The NSG is an informal organisation comprising archaeologists with an interest in Neolithic archaeology. It was established in 1984 and has a large membership based mainly in the UK and Ireland, but also including workers from the nations of the European Atlantic seaboard. The annual programme includes two to three meetings spread through the year and includes seminars held in London and field meetings at various locations in north-west Europe.

Membership is open to anyone with an active interest in the Neolithic in Europe. The present membership includes academic staff and students, museums staff, archaeologists from government institutions, units, trusts and amateur organisations. There is no membership procedure or application forms and members are those on the current mailing list. Anyone can be added to the mailing list at any time, the only membership rule being that names of those who do not attend four consecutive meetings are removed from the list (in the absence of apologies for absence or requests to remain on the list).

The Group relies on the enthusiasm of its members to organise its annual meetings and the two co-ordinators to maintain mailing lists and finances. Financial support for the group is drawn from a small fee payable for attendance of each meeting.

Anyone wishing to contact the Group and obtain information about forthcoming meetings should contact the co-ordinators at the following addresses:

Alternatively visit the NSG website: http//csweb.bournemouth.ac.uk/consci/text/nsghome.htm

Contents

Foreword

Preface and acknowledgements

List of contributors

1    Bringing plants into the taskscape (Alasdair Whittle)

2    High resolution mapping of Neolithic and Bronze Age chalkland landscapes and landuse: The combination of multiple palaeoenvironmental analyses and topgraphic modelling (Michael J Allen)

3    Coleopteran evidence for the Elm Decline, Neolithic activity in woodland, clearance and the use of the landscape (Mark A Robinson)

4    Plants by proxy: Plant resources on a Neolithic crannog as indicated by insect remains (Clive Warsop)

5    Floodplain vegetation history: Clearings as potential ritual spaces? (Anthony G Brown)

6    The emperor’s new garden: Woodland, trees, and people in the Neolithic of southern Britain (Phil Austin)

7    Evaluating the importance of cultivation and collecting in Neolithic Britain (Glynis Jones)

8    Further considerations of Neolithic charred cereals, fruit and nuts (Mark A Robinson)

9    Revising the wheat crops of Neolithic Britain (Frances S McLaren)

10  The Neolithization of the Netherlands: Two ways, one result (Come Bakels)

11  On the spread of plant crops across Neolithic Britain, with special reference to southern England (Andrew S Fairbaim)

12  Human consumption of plant foods in the British Neolithic: Direct evidence from bone stable isotopes (Michael P Richards)

13  Neolithic ale: Barley as a source of malt sugars for fermentation (Merryn Dineley and Graham Dineley)

14  Plants as the raw materials for crafts (Linda Hurcombe)

15  The altering eye: Reconstructing archaeobotany (John Swogger)

Bibliography

Preface and acknowledgements

The archaeology of plants has a long history and the origins of interest in plant remains from British Neolithic sites can be traced back to work of some of the great pioneers of Old World archaeobotany including Helbaek, Jessen and Godwin. Many early botanical forays into archaeology were sporadic and fleeting. In the last three decades archaeobotany has made huge leaps in its methodology and its procedures have become a widespread and almost routine part of archaeological work. This fact is demonstrated by the great increase in the number of researchers, applied techniques and recovered datasets.

Although greater efforts have been put into Neolithic archaeobotany, archaeological plant remain assemblages from British sites still have a reputation for being elusive, although the picture has vastly improved since Gordon Hillmans summary of 1981 (in Smith et al. 1981). A central problem for archaeobotanists is the inherent fragility and non-preservation of plant parts under most environmental conditions. Only scraps come to us through the ages, preserved by chane through charring, waterlogging and mineralisation, providing partial anddepauperate data. The deficiencies of the archaeobotanical record should mask neither the potential of plant studies for archaeology as a whole, nor the considerable position of plant-centred issues in the definitions and explanations of the Neolithic as a phenomenon. Plants are a fundamental part of human existence. They provide resources from which foods, beverages and medicines are made, material goods crafted and dwellings constructed, thus, playing a vital role in sustenance, completion of difficult tasks and in oiling the wheels of existence. As elements of ecosystems and vegetation they clothe the land: surrounding us; framing our vision; and, to a greater or lesser extent, play a role in creating and defining the spaces and places in which we live. In the Neolithic plants have appeared as crops, wild resources, symbolic resources, primary woodland, cleared vegetation and experienced landscapes as our understanding of the period has swung between the extremes of ‘agrarian invasion’ and ‘indigenous innovation’ or processual and post-processual interpretative paradigms.

The meeting from which this volume has developed was aimed to provide a forum for preservation of recent research illustrating the wide range of approaches now applied to Neolithic archaeobotany at site and landscape scales of resolution. It also provided an opportunity to air opinions about many of the issues surrounding plant use and landscape in the Neolithic, especially the continuing debate abut the role and importance of domestic crops. Speakers were invited to speak on a wide range of topics and to discuss interpretative issues as much as the methodological problems that commonly dominate archaeobotanical conferences. Most of the contributors to this book presented papers at the meeting in March 1998, although several additional papers were included to provide greater depth and balance to the range of subjects covered.

Studies at a landscape level include those using ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’ datasets including invertebrate assemblages (Chapters 3 and 4), pollen (Chapter 5), charcoals (Chapter 6) and multiple palaeoenvironmental sources (Chapter 1). They include vegetation reconstructions (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), considerations of the social dimensions of landscape use (Chapters 5 and 6) and long-term patterns of landscape change (Chapters 2, 3 and 6).

Discussions of the relative importance of cereals and wild foods in the economies and diets of British Neolithic folk concern Chapters 7 and 8, the latter being contributed after the meeting as, in part a response to the former. Further contributions discuss further identification and interpretation of crops (Chapters 9, 10 and 11), including details of the results of chemical analysis of cereals (Chapter 9) and a socially centred model of cereal distribution over Britain (Chapter 11). The latter was added after the conference to restore the balance to the consideration of this topic that was lost with the withdrawal of a paper on the day. Chapter 10 discusses the patterns plant use in the Netherlands. Corrie Bakels was invited to present this paper to show current thinking about the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Netherlands and shows that various explanations of crops and plant use need not be mutually exclusive.

Later chapters discuss the uses of plants as foods (Chapter 12), beverages (Chapter 13) and in crafts, including textiles and baskets (Chapter 14). They include the results of isotopic analysis (Chapter 12), re-interpretation of existing data (Chapters 13 and 14) and discussions of the social context of plant use (Chapters 12 and 14). Chapter 14 is, I feel, especially important as it discusses one of the most overlooked and potentially important spheres of plant use in the period: plants in material culture. The final chapter, by the cover illustrator John Swogger, provides a discussion of interpretative archaeobotanical illustration (Chapter 15). Cover illustrations are often simply used to clothe publications and while drawing on the textual content are neither explained, nor their role theorised in the relevant publications. Archaeobotany has a long history of using illustrations as a means of representation and the contribution presented here provides the illustrators viewpoint of that relationship and how it may be developed. The cover illustration itself forms part of a series of interpretative drawings in a variety of styles of plant use at Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure. Other drawings in the series are presented in Chapter 15 and the cover should not be viewed in isolation. Alasdair Whittle chaired much of the seminar in March 1998 and has contributed an introduction (Chapter 1) that reviews the papers, provides a broader archaeological perspective on the content of this book and provides timely challenges for our future research agenda’s.

The papers in this volume present fresh and, in several cases, muki-disciplinary approaches to investigating and interpreting plants in the British Neolithic. They show that the means of data-collection and interpretative approaches focused on outstanding questions surrounding plants in society and landscapes have diversified in recent years. The research presented here suggests that at the turn of a new century, archaeobotany is equipped with a range of tools to improve the visibility of some of the most archaeologically inconspicuous of entities. It also shows that interpretative debates are evolving and that perhaps a nascent ‘broad-church’ of interpretative approaches is developing to replace the currently narrow functionalist-empiricist dominant paradigm. I hope that the book provides a useful source for students and researchers alike and promotes further discussion and development within the subject.

I would like to thank: the co-ordinators of the NSG for their support and help in organising the meeting; the contributors, not only for speaking as promised on the day but also for the effort put into providing publishable texts; the Society of Antiquaries of London were excellent hosts and thanks go especially to Richard Meager for his help on the day; Alasdair Whittle and Martin Jones who expertly chaired the sessions; Amanda Kennedy who uncomplainingly acted as projectionist, tea-pourer and also provided vital support during organisation of the meeting and subsequent publication; Phil Austin, Louise Martin, Bill Bevan, Frances McLaren and Mark Pluccienik who all contributed enthusiasm and discussion during the planning stages. The experience of organising and publishing an NSG seminar was personally enriching and I hope that the product is one that enriches the debates of which it forms part.

Andy Fairbairn

March 2000

List of Contributors

MIKE J ALLEN

Wessex Archaeology

Old Sarum Park

Salisbury SP4 6EB

United Kingdom

PHIL AUSTIN

Institute of Archaeology

31–34 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PY

United Kingdom

CORRIE BAKELS

Faculteit der Archeologie

Reuvensplaats 4

Postbus 9515

2300 RA Leiden

The Netherlands

ANTHONY G BROWN

Centre for Wetland Research

School of Geography and Archaeology

Amory Buildings

University of Exeter

Exeter EX4 4RG

United Kingdom

MERRYN DINELEY AND GRAHAM DINELEY

Department of Art History and Archaeology

University of Manchester

Oxford Road

Manchester M13 9PL

United Kingdom

ANDREW S FAIRBAIRN

Catalhoyuk Research Project

Department of Archaeology

Downing Street

Cambridge CB2 3DZ

United Kingdom

LINDA HURCOMBE

Dept, of Archaeology

School of Geography and Archaeology

University of Exeter EX4 4QE

United Kingdom

GLYNIS JONES

Department of Prehistory and Archaeology

University of Sheffield

Northgate House

West Street

Sheffield S1 4ET

United Kingdom

FRANCES S MCLAREN

Department of Environmental Sciences and Mathematics

University of East London

Romford Road

London E15 4LZ

United Kingdom

MICHAEL P RICHARDS

Research Laboratory for Archaeology

University of Oxford

6 Keble Road

Oxford OX1 3JQ

United Kingdom

MARK A ROBINSON

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Parks Road

Oxford OX1 3PW

United Kingdom

JOHN SWOGGER

Gordon House

Llanarmon DC

Llangollen

Clywd LL20 7LF

United Kingdom

CLIVE WARSOP

Department of Archaeology

University of Edinburgh

The Old High School

Infirmary Street

Edinburgh EH1 1LT

United Kingdom

ALASDAIR WHITTLE

School of History and Archaeology

University of Wales

PO Box 909

Cardiff CF1 3XU

United Kingdom

Chapter 1

Bringing plants into the taskscape

Alasdair Whittle

Woodland, trees, natural clearings, people-made clearances, the colour green, the sound of leaves, seasonal growth and decay, wild plants, tended plants, grown crops, harvest, processing and use in routine meals and at special events: what should we look for from the study of plants and their settings, in Neolithic Britain and beyond? As my opening list suggests, the potential range of questions is vast, and the wide-ranging and stimulating studies collected here, the fruit of yet another productive meeting of the Neolithic Studies Group, successfully show how much there is to think about. It is the main aim of this short introduction, by someone outside the specialisms of plant remains research, to reflect on the implications of these papers, and especially to explore how their approaches could be both extended and incorporated into yet wider modelling of Neolithic ways of life. This can best be seen if the development of a range of approaches relevant to the use and setting of plants is briefly considered.

One recurrent strand of past interpretation has been to do with large-scale or totalising histories of plant use (I make no attempt at comprehensive referencing to the literature, which can be better found in the papers that follow). These can include the pre-Neolithic use of plants, the development of ‘intermediate’ forms of plant management including what Chase (1989, 43; cf. Politis 1999) has called domiculture, the nature of abrupt introductions, models of cereal cultivation systems, and trajectories of intensification (Harris and Hillman 1989; Harris 1996). A second strand has been close attention to the details of plant processing, from harvest to consumption and beyond, normally at a site-specific level with close examination of differing contexts and temporal phases (two recent examples are Nye and Scaife 1998 and Fairbairn 1999). These approaches have by now been followed for at least a generation of research, though the arrival of new techniques including DNA analysis (e.g. Brown 1999) should be noted. Another, closely related, focus of research is on how the products of such plant exploitation histories were actually used in human diets. This too is of course an older interest, made more realistic by the now more routine recovery of plant residues by flotation, but it has been given new zest in quite recent times by the emergence of further techniques for the direct and indirect examination of dietary residues or the effects of differing diets on the human skeleton: including the analysis of lipid and now protein residues in pottery, isotopic studies of human bone, and examination of wear on human teeth and on the human skeleton in general (e.g. Larsen 1997). There is newer interest too in the possible use of cereals and other plants for the making of alcoholic beverages, for animal foddering, and for medicinal and narcotic purposes.

For a couple of decades at least, considerable attention has been given to context (see the call for a ‘contextual archaeology’ in Hodder 1986) in studies of the British Neolithic; a Neolithic (or any other) archaeology without a strong sense of context is now inconceivable. Two manifestations have been particularly important. One has been the specific debate about the nature of patterns of residence, especially in the earlier Neolithic, which was raised in the 1980s (e.g. papers in Bradley and Gardiner 1984), made central by Thomas (1991) and hotly debated since (e.g. Barclay 1997; Cooney 1997). One contribution has been to try to move beyond generalised statements about sedentism versus mobility (e.g. Thomas 1991; Whittle 1996) to greater awareness of variation at seasonal, annual and lifetime scales across a spectrum of kinds of residence (Whittle 1997). Variation not only through time but also at any one phase may also be visible in actual case studies of the British Neolithic (Pollard 1999). The second form of interest has been in landscape. The scope of the term is vast, and it has been used in many ways, but as a generalisation most authors within Neolithic studies (mainly writing from the 1990s onwards; for an obvious example, see Tilley 1994) have been concerned to attempt understanding of the perception of and values ascribed to a natural environment ‘out there’, making use principally of a combination of landforms and the placing and character of monuments, with vegetational evidence also employed where possible; ethnographic and other analogies have also been important (e.g. Ucko and Layton 1999). There have been plenty of hunter-gatherers in nature and plenty of early farmers with culture. Rather fewer authors, perhaps, have heeded the argument of Ingold (1993, 1995, 1996) that landscape does not exist separately, nor in prior form, from people’s lived experience of the world.

This leads, finally, to two other issues, which deserve to become more integrated in plant remains research but which so far have tended to be treated rather separately. One is the matter of innovation seen from a symbolic perspective, rather than as purely technical change. This has been debated for years, but analogies such as the complex symbolic role of maize in America (Vogt 1969) and the importance of cosmology and ideological framework in for example native Amazonian patterns of plant and animal use (Politis 1999) are not perhaps as well known or quoted as they could be. (By way of foil, it is also worth underlining those analogies where it seems clear that innovation, and the rejection of innovation, was made on hard-headed grounds of practicality, such as in the case of animal introductions in native Florida: Reitz 1999). General attention at a European scale to the possible symbolic role of cereals as novelty has been given by Thomas (1996), and starting from the specific evidence of the Windmill Hill enclosure at a southern British scale by Fairbairn (1999).

The other issue is what Ingold has called the taskscape (1993), the routine, lived-in world of experience, habit and knowledge. This is more than simply a sense of context, or some kind of container within which human action is played out. Ingold has stressed (1995, 1996) the importance of what he calls a dwelling perspective, ‘taking the human condition to be that of a being immersed from the start, like other creatures, in an active, practical and perceptual engagement with constituents of the dwelt-in world’, which ‘is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it’ (Ingold 1996, 120-1; italics as in the original). The initial presentation of this concept (Ingold 1993) ended with the example of people in a landscape, attending to social relations while harvesting a field of cereals. Frustratingly, however, the example was not an archaeological one, but a scene from a Brueghel painting. The challenge remains of using the approach with archaeological evidence. This general kind of approach has been taken up recently largely by Edmonds (1997, 1999a), but it is fair to say that plant use and cultivation do not figure prominently in these accounts, though the woodland setting does. So how, how quickly and to what degree, did cereals become part of the taskscape and what sort of taskscape can we outline in the Earlier Neolithic and subsequently?

How then do the studies presented here fit into such a spectrum of approaches? They cannot of course be neatly confined to one theme each. The papers by Bakels, Robinson (both contributions), Warsop, Richards, Allen, the Dineleys, McLaren and Jones confront some of the big-scale issues of long-term history, closely linked to questions of on-site processing and contribution to diet. These strands of research are alive and well. One perhaps unexpected theme to emerge is the possibility of disruption and even hiatus, as suggested for the Netherlands in the earlier fifth millennium BC (Bakels), and another that of reversion, in the form of considerable use of wild plant resources in Later Neolithic contexts in Britain (Robinson Chapter 8 and Jones). Few of the claims for marked intensification through the Neolithic are yet very convincing, despite the model set out by Allen.

Perhaps the most striking picture to emerge is that of diversity. There is a central debate (crudely, Jones versus Robinson (Chapter 8)) between the view, on the one hand, that cereals were both more important than wild plants and were of central importance in the Neolithic diet overall, and the view, on the other hand, that cereals were frequently matched by or overtaken in importance by wild plants, and that their cultivation was in places and at times episodic or irregular, with the further implication (largely implicit here) that animals as a whole may have had the dominant role in the economy. It is important to keep individual lines of these arguments separate. The question of the relative balance of cereals versus hazelnuts is not the same as the question of the importance of plant foods in total versus that of animal products. There is an important issue of survival and visibility of the evidence. It seems unwise to consider the wild plant food spectrum as represented principally by hazelnuts. Fairbairn (in Whitde et al. 2000) has described finds of small wild seeds and fruits (not specifically identifiable) and vegetative parenchyma from the rhizomes of aquatic plants in a Later Neolithic context outside the enclosure on Windmill Hill, and this is one kind of remain that may be amenable to wider discovery. Some of the most important contributions have come not from direct study of plant remains but from insect remains (Robinson Chapter 3 and Warsop) and isotopic analysis of human bones (Richards; cf. Richards and Hedges 1999). In total, it does not strike me that the differing points of view or emphasis are fundamentally irreconcilable; if a synthesis is possible, the outcome must be a view that emphasises diversity, and indeed diversity at varying spatial and temporal scales.

There is quite a lot of emphasis in these papers on context and setting in a broad and rather neutral sense. The papers by Brown, Robinson (Chapter 3), Warsop and Bakels all offer important insights into aspects of the physical landscape, in different parts of Britain and the Netherlands. Of particular importance are the observation by Brown that not all clearings or clearances were necessarily heavily used and the demonstration by Robinson 1 that there is a rapid increase in insects associated with animal dung in still well wooded contexts at the beginning of the Neolithic. Only the papers by Jones and Robinson (Chapter 8) really confront the central issue of the duration of residence. As Jones notes, it remains possible that parts of traditional interpretation could still be valid, giving sustained cultivation from permanently occupied house bases. The counter-example of Yarnton, cited by Robinson (Chapter 8), is equally telling, with a large building, the presence of some kind of bread, but no other cereal remains despite extensive open-area excavation and extensive flotation. Note also that the building formerly seen as a house at Fengate is now interpreted as some kind of funerary structure (Pryor 1993). Whether or not particular large buildings were the focus for and locus of established social groupings, it remains an open question whether and in what sense occupation can also be considered to have been still mobile (cf. Evans 1999, 24). It may be the case that diversity is once again indicated: here some permanently established households, there other more mobile and more transient social groupings. But we badly need a better sense of context, first for what large post-framed structures may represent (see Darvill and Thomas 1996), and secondly for the temporal and spatial scales of occupation. Yarnton in the upper Thames (Hey 1997; and see examples elsewhere like the stretch of the lower Thames which includes the Eton Rowing Lake, Runnymede and Staines) may indicate a structured landscape characterised by routine. Certainly the floodplain and its edges, if not further afield, were constantly attended to, visited and used, and whether or not particular places were constantly occupied may simply be less of an issue than we have made it; cycles of consumption within such a frame could come to seem much more important.

A sense of how people engaged with this and other kinds of settings could be further developed. Only the paper by Austin really tackles the vast issue of how the treescape was experienced, felt and thought about (see also discussion by Whittle and Pollard 1999). There is a danger, however, of modelling a Neolithic worldview as though it was something which somehow came into existence independently and then was applied to a separate physical world, patiently waiting to be interpreted and tamed. The ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold 1995, 1996) would suggest otherwise; Mark Harris (1998) has emphasised how it is the experience of seasonality and its conditioning of sociality, rather than the objective frame of changes, that matters to people. There is a danger too of being content to list plants tended, grown or otherwise exploited and to record their relative dietary importance, hard and worthwhile though that is in its own right. This is to miss the ways in which using plants engaged people with their surroundings and with one another. From this perspective, the papers by the Dineleys and by Hurcombe have much to offer, even though their approach is necessarily speculative to a large degree, since they show ways in which people may have used plants other than for eating. They begin to open up a taskscape with plants. I would like to see difficult questions being asked. What were the cosmological and ideological dimensions of plant use within the treescapes of the Neolithic? What did people think about in relation to the past of plants, and what did they take for granted? How much of what people grew was actually consumed as food, and was this its main role? What were the shifting social encounters through the cultivation, tending, harvesting, processing, storage and consumption of cereals and other plants? Can we confine all this to the members of closed households, or must it be opened to a far wider and more fluid constituency? Would there be difference in processing and remains composition in two such broadly opposed social settings? A specific start can be made by thinking about the well known representation of the crop processing sequence, presented long ago by Gordon Hillman (1981, Figures 5-7). Important though this was and remains, the settings and associations are neutral and universal. And this cannot have been so, in the Neolithic or at other times. A more recent version of the same kind of diagram (Fairbairn 1999, Figure 107) usefully emphasises the possible symbolic references of plant use, and offers too a summary list of social contexts.

It is time to attempt more detailed socialisation of the whole process of growing, tending, harvesting, treating, storing and consuming cereals and other plants. This is not to decry the great skill and ingenuity applied to the understanding of the technical formation process as discussed by Hillman and many others, but to call for a similar but wider examination of the endless possibilities for social encounter and interaction. I tried at first to devise a flow chart or diagram in the style of Hillman’s to represent this, but the exercise rapidly became very difficult, as there are so many variables, and was abandoned. Context is everything; the diagram expanded in one direction of household-based production, and in another of more communal activity, and much depends on the goals of production. Renewed attention to differing kinds of drawings and images could be an important future direction, as the paper and illustrations by Swogger usefully show, as long as no one picture tries to include too much. But it is also possible to convey in words something more of the social field. The temporal and social scales are potentially very varied, from lifetime engagement in learning about a landscape to casual encounter with the fields or feasts of distant neighbours. Those involved may range from a handful of people, a household say or even members within a household, to far greater numbers mobilised for strenuous tasks of woodland clearance and perhaps harvest. The ancestors, the dead and spirits of woodland may variously have been involved, and there are possibilities