An insight into Bronze Age subsistence strategy in forested Carpathian foothills, based on plant macro-remains
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ORIGINAL PAPER
An insight into Bronze Age subsistence strategy in forested Carpathian foothills, based on plant macro-remains Magda Kapcia 1 & Aldona Mueller-Bieniek 1 Received: 6 August 2017 / Accepted: 20 September 2018 # The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Lipnik site 5, from which a storage pit dated to the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1400–1100) was studied, gave more than 70 plant taxa in the extraordinarily well-preserved charred assemblage. In the paper, a detailed description of selected plants is presented followed by environmental interpretation. Acorns (Quercus) dominated in volume and proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) in the number of specimens. The first large find of that late incomer north of the Carpathian Mountains is presented here. The pit users also used hulled wheat (einkorn, emmer, and spelt); barley; and probably peas. In the pit, a large number of grassland plants were noted accompanied by a very few remains of aquatic (Elatine) and forest herbaceous plants (Astrantia major). Weeds and ruderal plants were also present. The composition of plant remains is very unusual for this type of archeological feature, suggesting a mixed type of food strategy for its users, dominated by plant gathering and animal husbandry. The site is located in a newly settled ecotone zone, on the margin of fertile loess areas and mountain foothills. Keywords Fruits . Seeds . Millet . Acorns . Grassland plants . Lipnik . The Trzciniec culture . SE Poland
Introduction In most Polish archeological sites, plant remains were preserved through contact with high temperature (charred, carbonized) while uncharred remains of differing degrees of decomposition are usually interpreted as modern contamination of past assemblages (Lityńska-Zając and Wasylikowa 2005; Pearsall 2009; Mueller-Bieniek 2011). High temperature usually influences seed and fruit morphology, both in shape and surface view. Additionally, taxonomical composition of charred archeobotanical assemblages is strongly influenced by past economic activity of the settlers representing only a small part of plant remains present at any site at the time of its occupation (Jacomet et al. 1989; van der Veen 2007; Colledge and Conolly 2014; Mueller-Bieniek et al. 2015a). The studied material from a Bronze Age storage pit at Lipnik site 5 was collected during excavation because of the large number of charred acorn Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0720-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Aldona Mueller-Bieniek [email protected] 1
W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences, Lubicz 46, 31-512 Kraków, Poland
remains, well visible during field work (Przybyła and Blajer 2008). Two small subsamples of the soil taken from the pit were analyzed showing extraordinarily good preservation of the charred remains and very considerable taxonomical diversity (Bieniek 2008), which is exceptional for a storage pit, which usually contains crop deposits (Lityńska-Zając 2005)
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