Reporting atmospheric CO 2 pressure corrected results of stable carbon isotope analyses of cereals remains from the arch
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Reporting atmospheric CO2 pressure corrected results of stable carbon isotope analyses of cereals remains from the archaeological site of Peñalosa (SE Iberian Peninsula): agricultural and social implications Adrián Mora-González 1,2 & Ricardo Fernandes 3,4 & Francisco Contreras Cortés 1 & Arsenio Granados-Torres 2 & Eva Alarcón García 1 & Antonio Delgado-Huertas 2 Received: 12 December 2016 / Accepted: 2 May 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The practice of agriculture across the Mediterranean basin has had significant social and economic consequences, including the development of social inequalities. To inform on plant water status and thus on agricultural management techniques and environmental conditions during the first half of the second millennium BCE, we measured stable carbon isotopes in a set of 280 seeds of Hordeum vulgare L. and Pisum sativum from the archaeological site of Peñalosa (Baños de la Encina, southern Iberian Peninsula). The ranges in stable carbon isotope values for archaeological samples were wider than those observed for modern reference samples collected in 2014 and 2015, suggesting that archaeological samples experienced more varied water status conditions. This variability was associated with the location of the seeds within the site and could be a consequence of the cultivation of different plots and/or from temporal variations in local environmental conditions. For absolute comparisons of water status between modern and past samples, we introduced a novel correction to account for temporal changes in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 in addition to the usual adjustment that accounts for the variability in atmospheric CO2 stable carbon isotope values. This comparison showed that past samples had greater water availability than modern references, and thus, irrigation or intentional selection of naturally irrigated soils was practiced at the site. Keywords Early agriculture . Carbon stable isotopes . Irrigation . Argaric culture
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0650-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Adrián Mora-González [email protected] 1
Departamento de Prehistoria y Arqueología, Universidad de Granada, Facultad Filosofía y Letras, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain
2
Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra (CSIC-UGR), Avda. de las Palmeras 4, 18100 Armilla, Granada, Spain
3
Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Kahlaische Strasse 10, D-07745 Jena, Germany
4
School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont St, OX1 2PG Oxford, UK
The development of agriculture across the globe played a vital role in adopted forms of human subsistence and how humans interacted with their local environments (Willcox 1998; Zhao 1998; Piperno and Flanney 2001; Gepts 2004; Gupta 2004). Past agriculture has been a subject of study across different disciplin
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