While there are many books on the emergence and spread of agriculture, to date there has not been a book that focuses specifically on the archaeobotanical evidence related to this important transition. This book therefore corrects a major shortcoming in studies of the Neolithic transition by: (i) focussing on the vital clues provided by charred and waterlogged plant remains, which have tended to be downplayed or even misrepresented in terms of their contribution to our understanding of the transition to agriculture, and (ii) by considering the transition from an intercontinental perspective.
Editors' Introduction; Methodological Approaches to Comparative Analysis
of Archaebotanical Assemblages and Review of Earliest Dispersal Events; The
Evolution of Cereal Assemblages from Early Agriculture Sites on the Euphrate;
Earliest Agriculture in Western Central Asia: Indigenous or Introduced? Crop
Domestication and Subsistence Economies in Neolithic Turkey: Local Origins
and Regional Context; Emergence of Farming in Central Anatolia, Cypus and
Crete; Transitions to Agriculture in the Aegean; Archaeobotanical Data from
the Early Neolithic of Bulgaria; The Spread of Cultivated Plants in the
Region between the Carpthians and the Dniester (VI-IV millennia BC); Seed and
Fruit Remains Associated With the Neolithic Movement in the Carpathian Basin
(Hungary); Early Farming in Slovakia; Neolithic Settlements in Italy;
Neolithic Subsistence Economies During the Late 5th and Early 4th Millennia
cal. BC in the Northern Alpine foreland; First farmers in Central Europe;
Early Agriculture in Southern and Central Spain; Crop Evolution; First
Agriculture in Atlantic Iberia; The Early Neolithic Plant Husbandry in the
Kujawy Region, Central Poland; Wangels: a Funnel Beaker Site at the Baltic
Sea Shore; Nature or Culture? Cereal Crops Raised by Neolithic Farmers on
Dutch Loess Soils; A View of Neolithic and Bronze Age Agriculture in Southern
Scandinavia; A Half-way House? The British Neolithic and its Place Between
Mesolithic Foraging and Bronze Age Farming Communities; Neolithic Cereals in
Britain: The Context of Deposition.
Sue Colledge is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. James Conolly is Canada Research Chair, Department of Anthropology, Trent University, Canada.
