Weed finds as indicators for the cultivation regime of the early Neolithic Bandkeramik culture?
Angela Kreuz
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Eva Schafer
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A. Kreuz (&) E. Schafer Landesamt fur Denkmalpflege Hessen, Archaologische und Palaontologische Denkmalpflege, SG Naturwissenschaften- Archaobotanik, Schlo Biebrich/Ostflugel, 65203 Wiesbaden,
Germany
Ethnographic data combined with the characteristics of the weed species from Bandkeramik settlement sites give hints for the reconstruction of Early Neolithic agricultural practises in Central Europe. In contrast to the Balkan situation with a high diversity in cultivated crops, Bandkeramik field management can be reconstructed as a simple agricultural system with emphasis on summer crop growing. Permanent fields were treated with hoes, digging sticks or similar tools, sown in spring and grazed in autumn and winter. The intensity of field management seems to increase through time as shown by diachrone comparison of archaeobotanical data from Neolithic, Iron Age and Roman times. The absence of winter-cereals such as naked wheat, grown in the Balkan Peninsula, gives a hint of a certain emphasis on stock breeding. Summer crop growing would have had the advantage that the Bandkeramik fields could be grazed after harvest until next spring and would therefore be manured at the same time.
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During the second half of the sixth millennium B.C. a new
farming system occurred in western Hungary and beyond.
In contrast to the cultural groups of the StarcevoKoros
Cris complex and its transition phase of south-west and
eastern Hungary and south-eastern Europe, in
Transdanubia the farmers belonging to the Bandkeramik culture
started cultivating a crop spectrum that was reduced to half
that occuring in the Balkan agriculture (Kreuz 2007; Kreuz
in press; Kreuz et al. 2005).
Early Neolithic crop growing has been interpreted by
other authors as small scale, intensive garden cultivation.
Examples of this are Halstead (1981, pp. 319334) small
scale, stable gardening with crop rotation and regular
manuring and Bakels (1978, p. 77) The fields on which
the plants were grown, were of small size and lay between
tall vegetation. It is not clear whether they were used for a
short time or for a long period. Further examples are
Gregg (1988, pp. 98, 132) small, scattered fields for
cereals and small garden plots for legumes and oil plants
and Bogaard (2004, p. 160) intensive garden cultivation
of fixed plots that were sown in the autumn (for the
discussion see also Luning 2000, pp. 181ff; van der Veen
2005; Willerding 1980, 1988). Today small scale intensive
garden cultivation still can be found in the tropics for
example, where high yielding crops like manioc or plantain
are grown effectively on several levels on small garden
plots. Here intensive management of the plots is necessary
as these crops grow slowly and are planted relatively large
distances apart. Due to the high yields (manioc up to 25
t/ha; http://fdcl-berlin.de/publikationen/fdcl-veroeffentlich
ungen/agroenergie-glossar/maniok-agroenergie-glossar-fdcl;
plantain up to 400 bananas per plant; http://www.der-gar
ten.eu/gartenpflanzen/bananenpflanze.html) of the crops
grown, the work involved in hoeing and weeding the
spaces between the individual plants is worthwhile. In
contrast, the Bandkeramik situation would be different as
the Bandkeramik cereals pulses and oil/fibre plants are not
so high yielding. In addition, in the case of a group of
merely ten people, which is much less than assumed for a
Bandkeramik hamlet, cereal field areas of about five
hectares would have been needed (0.5 ha/capita, Kreuz in
press, chap. 8). Calculated without fallow this is an area of
at least five football grounds and appears to be more a park
than a garden. It has already been concluded by Luning that
Neolithic cereal growing was practised on areas beyond the
space of a garden: deren Gr oenordnung uber einen
Gartenbau hinausging Luning (2000, p. 181). Therefore
the whole subject merits further discussion.
Field management tools and related practices
The Bandkeramik farmers colonized chernozem areas ideal
for crop cultivation. Due to these fertile soils and the
assumed weather conditions at Bandkeramik times no
shifting cultivation or irrigation, but rather permanent fields
on terrestrial soils outside the river valleys might be
expected (Bogaard 2002, 2004). In addition manuring by
the grazing animals after harvest combined with crop
rotation might have been sufficient for the nutrient regime
of the crops grown. This fits with the fact that the
Bandkeramik weed species found regularly in the samples, such
as Bromus cf. secalinus, Chenopodium album, Galium cf.
aparine, G. spurium, Lapsana communis, Phleum pratense,
Polygonum convolvulus, Setaria-species, Solanum nigrum
etc. grow on nitrogen-rich sites today.
Following Sherratt (1981, 1983), Fries (1995, p. 169)
and the state of archaeozoological research (Arbogast et al.
2001; Benecke 1994, pp. 142ff.) the management of the
fields was performed by hand without ploughs (for
discussion and further references (...truncated)