Middle Neolithic farming of open-air sites in SE France: new insights from archaeobotanical investigations of three well
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Middle Neolithic farming of open‑air sites in SE France: new insights from archaeobotanical investigations of three wells found at Les Bagnoles (L’Isle‑sur‑la‑Sorgue, Dépt. Vaucluse, France) Ana Jesus1 · Georgina Prats1 · Franziska Follmann1 · Stefanie Jacomet1 · Ferran Antolín1 Received: 27 January 2020 / Accepted: 19 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Previous reviews of Middle Neolithic agricultural practice (4400–3500 cal bc) in southern France have highlighted a change in crop assemblages after 4000 cal bc, with a reduction of naked wheat and an increase of emmer and partly of einkorn. The recent investigation of three wells from the site of Les Bagnoles (4250–3800 cal bc) in the periphery of the southern Rhône valley yielded an unprecedented amount of waterlogged uncharred and charred plant macro remains that offer new insights into crop diversity and its changes over time. The results from the wells at Les Bagnoles were compared with other dated sunken features from open-air sites (in contrast to caves and rock shelters), with the aim of identifying patterns suggesting changes in the crop spectra between the early (MN1) and late (MN2) Middle Neolithic phases from taphonomically comparable contexts. The results from Les Bagnoles demonstrate that oil crops and pulses are underrepresented in dry sites and that they were a significant part of Middle Neolithic agriculture. They also indicate an increase in the representation of einkorn (instead of emmer) during MN2 that is also visible in other open-air sites. The comparison of the archaeobotanical results with silo storage capacity values as a proxy for average production capacity per household leads us to propose a possible drop in naked wheat productivity and opens new questions in factors affecting crop choice at the beginning of the 4th millennium cal bc. Keywords Pits · Neolithic storage · Crop diversity · Wells · Waterlogged preservation
Introduction Middle Neolithic farming practices in southern France have received the attention of archaeobotanists in the last decades, either as site publications, reports or as reviews at a site scale (Phillips 1982; Marinval 1988a, b, 2003; Heinz et al. (1992; Beeching et al. 2000; Savard 2000; Thiébault et al. 2004; Vital et al. 2007; Martin et al. 2016; Bouby
Communicated by C.C. Bakels. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00793-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ana Jesus [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Sciences, Integrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science (IPAS), University of Basel, Spalenring 145, 4055 Basel, Switzerland
et al. 2018; Antolín et al. 2020b), but large-scale detailed analyses at a context level have not been undertaken to date. One of the reasons that explain this broad-scale approach is the existence of much data in old reports resulting from grab or non-systematic sampling, sieving with large mesh sizes, and/or work
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