Sue Colledge

University College London | UCL

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years1. Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configu...

The authors of this article consider the relationship in European prehistory between the procurement of high-quality stones (for axeheads, daggers, and other tools) on the one hand, and the early mining, crafting, and deposition of copper on the other. The data consist of radiocarbon dates for the exploitation of stone quarries, flint mines, and co...

The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture....

When compared with earlier periods, the Neolithic in Ireland (4000–2500 cal BC) witnessed enormous changes in the foods being produced, and the work involved in their production and processing. Several crops were introduced – archaeobotanical studies indicate that emmer wheat became the dominant crop, with evidence also for barley (hulled and naked...

We present detailed accounts of the archaeobotanical remains recovered from the excavations of the southern Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Dhra‘, including metric and morphological analysis of barley grains. Comparisons with other early Epi-Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites indicate that the Dhra‘ grains are larger than recorded wild spec...

Significance The relationship between human population, food production, and climate change is a pressing concern in need of high-resolution, long-term perspectives. Archaeological radiocarbon dates have increasingly been used to reconstruct past population dynamics, and Britain and Ireland provide both radiocarbon sampling densities and species-le...

Significance Recent studies show that cultivation of wild and domesticated plants was a protracted process that developed across southwest Asia. However, there have not been sufficient data to evaluate whether cereal cultivation and domestication developed in parallel in all the regions or at different times. Our findings indicate that cultivation...

The beginning of farming in Croatia (ca. 6000 cal BC) is little understood and few archaeobotanical studies have been conducted to explore the nature of subsistence economies at this time. This paper presents new archaeobotanical data from the middle Neolithic site of Danilo Bitinj and the early/middle Neolithic site of Pokrovnik, providing a signi...

The Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (EPPNB) in southwest Asia is a fundamental period in research on the origins of domesticated plants. However, there are few archaeobotanical data with which to characterise the plant-based subsistence and crop husbandry activities during this time, which hinders the understanding of the factors that triggered the a...

Ireland has often been seen as marginal in the spread of the Neolithic and of early farming throughout Europe, in part due to the paucity of available data. By integrating and analysing a wealth of evidence from unpublished reports, a much more detailed picture of early arable agriculture has emerged. The improved chronological resolution reveals c...

The datasets described in this paper comprise the core spatial and temporal structure of the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project (EUROEVOL), led by Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL. This is one of three datasets resulting from the EUROEVOL project, the other two comprising the faunal (EUROEVOL Dataset 2) and archaeobotanical (EUROEVOL Data...

The collection of this dataset was carried out under the auspices of the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project (EUROEVOL) led by Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL. The dataset represents one of the largest collections of archaeobotanical data for the Neolithic of Europe (Figure 1), comprising c.8300 records for c.1500 different species, gener...

It has long been recognised that the proportions of Neolithic domestic animal species-cattle, pig and sheep/goat-vary from region to region, but it has hitherto been unclear how much this variability is related to cultural practices or to environmental constraints. This study uses hundreds of faunal assemblages from across Neolithic Europe to revea...

It has long been recognised that the Neolithic spread across Europe via two separate routes, one along the Mediterranean coasts, the other following the axis of the major rivers. But did these two streams have a common point of origin in south-west Asia, at least with regard to the principal plant and animals species that were involved? This study...

This dataset comprises the primary data collected for the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project (EUROEVOL), led by Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL. The dataset offers the largest repository of archaeological site and radiocarbon data from Neolithic Europe (4,757 sites and 14,131 radiocarbon samples), dating between the late Mesolithic and E...

In a previous study we presented a new method that used summed probability distributions (SPD) of radiocarbon dates as a proxy for population levels, and Monte-Carlo simulation to test the significance of the observed fluctuations in the context of uncertainty in the calibration curve and archaeological sampling. The method allowed us to identify p...

Archaeologists have long sought appropriate ways to describe the duration and floruit of archaeological cultures in statistical terms. Thus far, chronological reasoning has been largely reliant on typological sequences. Using summed probability distributions, the authors here compare radiocarbon dates for a series of European Neolithic cultures wit...

In this paper we estimate the degree to which the range and proportion of wild plant foods are under-represented in samples of charred botanical remains from archaeological sites. We systematically compare the differences between central European Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages that have been preserved by charring compared to those preserved...

Following its initial arrival in SE Europe 8,500 years ago agriculture spread throughout the continent, changing food production and consumption patterns and increasing population densities. Here we show that, in contrast to the steady population growth usually assumed, the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pat...

a b s t r a c t A multi-disciplinary study assessing the evidence for agriculture in Neolithic Ireland is presented, exam-ining the timing, extent and nature of settlement and farming. Bayesian analyses of palaeoenvironmental and archaeological 14 C data have allowed us to re-examine evidential strands within a strong chronological framework. While...

Results of analyses of the photoperiod response gene (PPD-H1) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in modern landraces of cultivated barley were used as evidence for the mechanism of agricultural spread in Neolithic Europe. In particular, we explored the usefulness of considering adaptive genes as indicators of past selective pressures acting on crop...

Species distribution models are widely used by ecologists to estimate the relationship between environmental predictors and species presence and abundance records. In this paper, we use compiled faunal assemblage records from archaeological sites located across southwest Asia and southeast Europe to estimate and to compare the biogeography of ancie...

Terraces are ubiquitous, in some ways defining, features of Mediterranean environments, yet their longer-term history and relationship to human populations and food economies are not well understood. This paper discusses a complete system of terraces across the small island of Antikythera, Greece. We bring together the evidence from archaeology, et...

Charred plant remains from the Cypriot Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Krittou Marottou ‘Ais Yiorkis, situated in the foothills of the Troödos Mountains and dated to ca. 7500cal. b.c., demonstrate the early introduction of two-grained einkorn (Triticum monococcum sensu lato). Grain measurements of two-grained einkorn from ‘Ais Yiorkis are compared to...

The episodic periods of climate change between the end of the Pleistocene and the Early Holocene had significant effects on vegetation in the Levant. The three Late Epipalaeolithic phases at Tell Abu Hureyra (c. 13·1 kya cal. BP to 12·0 kya cal. BP) span the onset of the Younger Dryas when there was a reversion to cold and dry conditions from the p...

Antikythera is a small, relatively remote Mediterranean island, lying 35 km north-west of Crete, and its few contemporary inhabitants live mainly in the small village at the only port. However, an extensive network of terraces across the island bears witness to the past importance of farming on the island, although the intensity of use of these cul...

We have collated and reviewed published records of the genera Panicum and Setaria (Poaceae), including the domesticated millets Panicum miliaceum L. (broomcorn millet) and Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv. (foxtail millet) in pre-5000 cal b.c. sites across the Old World. Details of these sites, which span China, central-eastern Europe including the Ca...

Table 3 Table of radiocarbon dates associated with pre-5000 cal B.C. sites with Panicum and/or Setaria. * = raw date not available, calibrated range as given in Lee et al.

We document and quantify a significant reduction in crop diversity in the early central European Neolithic using a large multi-site database of archaeobotantical remains we compiled from published Neolithic sites across southwest Asia and Europe. Two hypotheses are proposed to account for the observed changes: one which claims that the different en...

Phylogenetic techniques are used to analyse the spread of Neolithic plant economies from the Near East to northwest Europe as a branching process from a founding ancestor. The analyses are based on a database of c. 7500 records of plant taxa from 250 sites dated to the early Neolithic of the region in which they occur, aggregated into a number of r...

A project that focused on providing approximate dates for the arrival of cereals in five geographic regions that include Balkans, south-central Europe, central Europe, northwest Europe, and Iberia has been provided. The first dating indicates that cereal cultivation spread rapidly along the Mediterranean coast to Italy and into Iberia and was estab...

In this major new volume, leading scholars demonstrate the importance of archaeobotanical evidence in the understanding of the spread of agriculture in southwest Asia and Europe. Whereas previous overviews have focused either on Europe or on southwest Asia, this volume considers the transition from a pan-regional perspective, thus making a signific...

Book description: In this major new volume, leading scholars demonstrate the importance of archaeobotanical evidence in the understanding of the spread of agriculture in southwest Asia and Europe. Whereas previous overviews have focused either on Europe or on southwest Asia, this volume considers the transition from a pan-regional perspective, thus...

The spread of agriculture is here examined from the perspective of changes in the composition of archaeobotantical assemblages. We apply multivariate analysis to a large database of plant assemblages from early Neolithic sites across South-West Asia and Europe and show that there are coherent and meaningful changes in their composition over time, t...

A major topic of debate in Old World prehistory is the relative importance of population movement versus cultural diffusion in explaining the spread of agriculture into and across Europe following its inception in southwestern Asia. An important set of data that has surprisingly been largely absent from this debate is the preserved crops and associ...

Reference collections of accurately identified, recent seeds are an essential resource for seed identification in archaeobotany, agronomy, palaeoecology and studies of wildlife diet. Recommendations are given for sourcing of seed materials and storage systems. The usefulness of computer databases for cataloguing of seed collections is emphasised, a...

Agriculture is widely recognized as a defining characteristic of the Neolithic period in Southwest Asia and Europe, but, despite many years of research, and the discovery of much new arch a eobotanical evidence, there have been few attempts to investigate its origins and spread in the region as a whole. Now, in a new project at the Institute of Arc...

Hitherto, the earliest archaeological finds of domestic cereals in southwestern Asia have involved wheats and barleys dating from the beginning of the Holocene, 11-12000 calendar years ago. New evidence from the site of Abu Hureyra suggests that systematic cultivation of cereals in fact started well before the end of the Pleistocene-by at least 130...

The earliest agro-pastoralists of the Near East are generally held to have emerged in a narrow Levantine Corridor. Agricultural life initially spread from this discrete core zone in the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B to adjacent inland regions, only reaching the Mediterranean coast of Syria by the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. Recent discoveries on...

Unexpectedly early evidence for the precocious spread of farming has recently emerged in Cyprus. It is argued that the transmission occurred as a result of migration related to ecosystem stress in the Levant. So strong are the connections of the colonists with the mainland that we suggest the term Cypro-Pre-Pottery Neolithic B to describe what has...

Recent excavations in the south-west Azraq Basin (Jordan) have shed significant new light on the origins of pastoralism, the “burin site” phenomenon and arid-land adaptations between the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and the Early Phase of the Late Neolithic. This article outlines results of excavations at four neighbouring sites in the Wadi el-Jil...

Recent excavations in the south-west Azraq Basin (Jordan) have shed significant new light on the origins of pastoralism, the "burin site” phenomenon and arid-land adaptations between the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and the Early Phase of the Late Neolithic. This article outlines results of excavations at four neighbouring sites in the Wadi el-Jil...

Ce rapport resume les resultats des recherches sur le paleoenvironnement et la paleosubsistance dans le bassin ďAzraq en Jordanie centre est. Des etudes geomorphologiques et sedimentologiques de sequences fluviales, eoliennes, lacustres datees, suggerent une alternance d'episodes humides et secs entre 25 000 et 14 500 P.B. et, posterieurement, des...

Four-post buildings were found in the Outer Camp on a 1 in 6 slope, facing north-east. They had been rebuilt several times since their foundation c. 900 B.C. and were burnt c. 420 B.C. The village was then reduced to the Inner Camp but within a hundred years the Outer Camp was probably re-occupied. The hillfort was finally abandoned following a fir...

Book description: In this major new volume, leading scholars demonstrate the importance of archaeobotanical evidence in the understanding of the spread of agriculture in southwest Asia and Europe. Whereas previous overviews have focused either on Europe or on southwest Asia, this volume considers the transition from a pan-regional perspective, thus...

Book description: The move towards a sedentary way of life had a profound effect on the human way of life: the development of complex societies can be directly attributed to the beginnings of farming in place of a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. When Gordon Childe coined the term 'Neolithic revolution' he meant it to reflect these vast changes t...