Marco Madella

• PhD, University of Cambridge
• Professor at University Pompeu Fabra & IMF-CSIC

The transition from foraging to plant cultivation represents the most important shift in the economic history of early Holocene societies. This process unfolded independently in different regions of the globe, resulting in varied plant assemblages, cultivation strategies, dietary practices, and landscape modifications. To investigate the drivers of...

While it is clear that current human impact on the earth system is unprecedented in scope and scale, much less is known about the long-term histories of human land use and their effects on vegetation, carbon cycling, and other factors relevant to climate change. Current debates over the possible importance of human activities since the mid second m...

Indigenous knowledges are being increasingly recognized as fundamental for environmental governance, ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. However, they tend to be recognized by Western science only when they converge with Western scientific knowledge, while ontological differences are generally treated as irrelevant or unreasonable b...

In this study we investigate the relationship between phytolith formation and transpiration rate in Eleusine coracana (finger millet), Cenchrus americanus (syn. Pennisetum glaucum, pearl millet) and Sorghum bicolor (sorghum). The aim is to produce a prediction model to reconstruct water management for agriculture in archaeological contexts in dryla...

Animal dung is still considered a secondary by-product of domestication, even though a growing body of evidence is showing that humans recognized its properties as fuel and fertilizer and utilized dung prior to-and alongside-the process of animal domestication. In this paper, we review the advancements made in dung identification over the last deca...

Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) models, commonly used for climate modeling, tend to utilize relatively simplistic models of human interaction with the environment. They have historically relied on unsophisticated assumptions about the temporal and spatial variability of the area needed to support one person: per capita land use (PCLU). To he...

Puntland is a critically relevant and yet virtually unexplored region for the past of Eastern Africa. Here we present a newly documented cave with multi-layered rock art found surveying Nugaal region, Somalia, in the framework of an international project aimed at cultural heritage preservation and cooperation.

The open research movement has gained momentum in the last decade and no academic can ignore the necessity to make research more open, as it improves reliability, sustainability and reusability of data. In this paper, we present the results of a community-based survey concerning the extent to which open practices are known and applied within the ph...

Lithic tools are generally considered secondary artefacts when it comes to the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also known as the Harappan Civilisation. However, they were utilized for an array of different functions and formed part of day-today life of people. Until now, scholars have worked exhaustively to understand the technology behind manufac...

Phytoliths are essential palaeoecological proxies that play an immensely important role in palaeoclimatic studies. Their inert composition and general hardiness allow phytoliths to be preserved in geological settings, even when other plant fossils perish. This partially explains their utility for investigating plant communities and plant-human inte...

Phytolith research contributes to our understanding of plant-related studies such as plant use in archaeological contexts and past landscapes in palaeoecology. This multi-disciplinarity combined with the specificities of phytoliths themselves (multiplicity, redundancy, naming issues) produces a wide variety of methodologies. Combined with a lack of...

In the Cerrado, a Savannah-like environment of Brazil, ancient indigenous peoples have been exploiting, managing, and cultivating plants for thousands of years. This chapter presents an archaeological perspective with a summary of what is known of the archaeobotanical evidence in the region, both in terms of macro remains – for example, charcoal an...

Finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum are amongst the most important drought-tolerant crops worldwide. They constitute primary staple crops in drylands, where their production is known to date back over 5000 years ago. Compared to other crops, millets and sorghum have received less attention until very recently, and their production has been prog...

Archaeobotany is a well‐established field of archaeology that studies plant remains recovered from archaeological sites. The vast majority of archaeobotanical studies so far published have dealt with reconstructing how humans exploited plants rather than human‐plant interactions. The grand challenges in which archaeobotany plays a primary role are...

The interpretation of crop water management practices has been central to the archeological debate on agricultural strategies and is crucial where the type of water strategy can provide fundamental explanations for the adoption and use of specific crops. Traces of water administration are difficult to detect and are mostly indirect, in the form of...

The domestication of plants and the origin of agricultural societies has been the focus of much theoretical discussion on why, how, when, and where these happened. The ‘when’ and ‘where’ have been substantially addressed by different branches of archaeology, thanks to advances in methodology and the broadening of the geographical and chronological...

Human beings are an active component of every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Although our local impact on the evolution of these ecosystems has been undeniable and extensively documented, it remains unclear precisely how our activities are altering them, in part because ecosystems are dynamic systems structured by complex, non-linear feedback proc...

The emergence of Neolithic economies and their spread through Eurasia was one of the most crucial transitions of the Holocene, with different mechanisms of diffusion—demic, cultural—being proposed. While this phenomenon has been exhaustively studied in Europe, with repeated attempts to model the speed of Neolithic diffusion based on radiocarbon dat...

Considerable confusion and uncertainty persist on the cultural and chronological contexts of Holocene microlithic assemblages reported from South Asia. The paucity of securely dated sites with microlithic remains has compounded the confusion. Evidence from sites securely attributed to the Mesolithic based on a holistic approach (including direct ev...

Drylands cover more than 40% of the earth’s land surface, are found on all continents, and are home to 30% of the world’s population. Due to water scarcity, they are generally considered unsuitable for lasting human settlement. While pastoralism has been reconceptualized recently as a rational, efficient, and sustainable way to live in drylands, ag...

Biosilica accumulation in plant tissues is related to the transpiration stream, which in turn depends on water availability. Nevertheless, the debate on whether genetically and environmentally controlled mechanisms of biosilica deposition are directly connected to water availability is still open. We aim at clarifying the system which leads to the...

Modern plant tissues are often processed for phytolith analysis. They represent a fundamental source of comparison for archeological and palaeoenvironmental phytolith assemblages; they efficiently serve for morphological studies of phytolith shapes and dimensions and, in the last two decades, they have been increasingly involved in physiological st...

Modern plant tissues are often processed for phytolith analysis. They represent a fundamental source of comparison for archeological and palaeoenvironmental phytolith assemblages; they efficiently serve for morphological studies of phytolith shapes and dimensions and, in the last two decades, they have been increasingly involved in physiological st...

This study attempts a holistic approach to past foodways in prehistoric northern Gujarat, India, by considering evidence of food production, distribution, preparation and consumption. We present here the results of a pilot residue study, integrating lipid and starch grain analyses, conducted on 28 ceramic vessels from three Chalcolithic/Harappan se...

This paper presents the results of the new archaeobotanical analysis carried out at the site of Shahr-i Sokhta, in the light of the new data emerging from the 2019 excavations of 'Building 33' and the new palaeoenvironmental research strategies inside the site (Trench 36) and in the immediate surroundings. The recent research campaign also adopted...

The rhythms and organisation of daily life at Çatalhöyük were influenced by seasonal variation in the natural and social world its residents navigated. Seasonal changes in day length, temperature and rainfall shape overall productivity of the landscape (Fairbairn et al. 2005a). These biophysical cycles would have been punctuated by seasonal changes...

The domestication of plants and the origin of agricultural societies has been the focus of much theoretical discussion on why, how, when, and where these happened. The 'when' and 'where' have been substantially addressed by bioarchaeology, thanks to advances in methodology and the broadening of the geographical and chronological scope of evidence....

In this paper, we present a pilot study aimed at investigating the impact of subsistence strategies and environmental pressure on the distribution of ethnographically documented strategies to cope with drought and its effects across 35 current societies in Africa. We use freely accessible ethnographic databases to retrieve data on how a number of A...

Mackay in 1938 had said that, ‘no arrowheads nor weapons of flint have as yet been found, and though this has been termed a Chalcolithic owing to the presence of these long flint flakes, copper and bronze already practically entirely ousted stone’. But when we looks at the artefacts found from most of the Harappan civilization/Indus Valley Civiliza...

The expansion of forest farmers across tropical lowland South America during the Late Holocene has long been connected to climate change. The more humid conditions established during the Late Holocene are assumed to have driven the expansion of forests, which would have facilitated the dispersal of cultures that practised agroforestry. The Tupi, a...

Recently, Agnihorti et al. reported on the unique discovery of seven 'organic rich balls' from the Early-Mature Harappan period site of 4MSR (Binjor). Using a combination of microbotanical, geochemical and isotopic analysis they argued that the objects were multi-grained food-balls that had ritual and social functions, with further reaching implica...

Çatalhöyük is a renowned archaeological site in central Anatolia, best known for its Neolithic occupation dated from 7100 to 6000 cal BC. The site received worldwide attention early on for its large size, well-preserved mudbrick architecture, and elaborate wall paintings. Excavations at the site over almost three decades have unearthed rich archaeo...

In this paper we present the results of phytolith investigations at two archaeological sites in northwestern Morocco: Khil (Tangier) and Kaf Taht el-Ghar (Tétouan). The two sites located in Western Maghreb, one on the Atlantic and one on the Mediterranean coast, were investigated in the framework of the AGRIWESTMED project. Phytolith analysis compl...

In this chapter, we review archaeobotanical evidence for indigenous people’s uses of food plants during the Holocene in what is now Brazil. We present the diversity of plant species used, which includes native crops, such as manioc; exotic crops, such as maize; as well as fruit trees, nut trees, and palms. We discuss their association with varied h...

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in e...

First described over 120 years ago in Brazil, Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are expanses of dark soil that are exceptionally fertile and contain large quantities of archaeological artefacts. The elevated fertility of the dark and often deep A horizon of ADEs is widely regarded as an outcome of pre-Columbian human influence. Controversially, in their...

Archaeological research provides clear evidence that the widespread formation of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical lowland South America was concentrated in the Late Holocene, an outcome of sharp demographic growth that peaked towards 1000 BP. In their recent paper, however, Silva et al. propose that the high fertility of ADE is not of anthr...

Although Rapa Nui has been proposed as a classic example of cultural collapse, this hypothesis has been repeatedly questioned. This paper investigates cultural continuity on Rapa Nui following the onset of deforestation through a study of red ochre pits. Red ochre pigments are well-known from various contexts on Rapa Nui, but until recently its ori...

Terra Incognita se ha configurado como un Libro Blanco que pretende identificar tendencias y reflexionar sobre las diferentes concepciones y prácticas de la investigación no disciplinar en nuestro entorno académico (el Sistema Español de Ciencia y Tecnología). Esta es una transición que implica un cierto cambio de paradigma, muy alineado con la inv...

Significance This paper illustrates the potential of machine learning-based classification of multisensor, multitemporal satellite data for the remote detection and mapping of archaeological mounded settlements in arid environments. Our research integrates multitemporal synthetic-aperture radar and multispectral bands to produce a highly accurate p...

Seasonal variation in the natural world of Neolithic Çatalhöyük shaped the organization of daily life and social world of its residents. Seasonal cycles in climatic patterns, hydrology, growing seasons of wild and domestic plants, and seasonal behaviors of herded, hunted and gathered animals would have affected the overall productivity of the lands...

FAO guidelines on water requirements for plant growth in the absence of irrigation, stipulate that cultivation is not viable in areas with less than 450mm of annual rainfall. Indeed, in all maps of agricultural land use, most hyper-arid, arid, and semi-arid drylands are considered unproductive. Yet, modern societies in arid and semi-arid drylands s...

Human expansions motivated by the spread of farming are one of the most important processes that shaped cultural geographies during the Holocene. The best known example of this phenomenon is the Neolithic expansion in Europe, but parallels in other parts of the globe have recently come into focus. Here, we examine the expansion of four archaeologic...

Most research on the plant genus Phoenix has focused on Phoenix dactylifera (date palm) due to its worldwide economic importance. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to other species within this genus that are also socio-economically important at a local scale, such as Phoenix theophrasti (Cretan date palm). The aim of this paper is to br...

Anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during the pre-industrial Holocene could have affected regional and global climate. Existing scenarios of LULC changes during the Holocene are based on relatively simple assumptions and highly uncertain estimates of population changes through time. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental recons...

Geoarchaeological investigations on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) revealed several hundred pits filled with reddish silty material. These pits were discovered in a fluvial terrace in a tributary valley east of the Quebrada Vaipu on the southern slope of Maunga Terevaka. The shape of the pits and the structure of the fillings leave no doubt about their a...

The last decades have seen a steep rise in attention in Eurasian archaeology for the millets Panicum miliaceum and Setaria italica. While various identification criteria are available for finds of these taxa in the archaeological record, these mostly concern remains of the flowering part of the plant. Methods to differentiate other plant remains ar...

The archaeology and ethnoarchaeology of rain-fed cultivation in arid and hyper-arid North Africa - Volume 93 Issue 370 - Carla Lancelotti, Stefano Biagetti, Andrea Zerboni, Donatella Usai, Marco Madella

Part of the session: Upscaling palaeoecological, archaeological and historical records of land-use and land-cover change 1. Chair Marie-Jose Gaillard. Presentation abstact :The PAGES LandCover6K group is concerned with whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional and global climate...

Anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during the pre-industrial Holocene could have affected regional and global climate. Current LULC scenarios are based on relatively simple assumptions and highly uncertain estimates of population changes through time. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions have the potential to...

RESUMO:Este trabalho apresenta uma revisão bibliográfica acerca de estudos ambientais realizados nos últimos onze anos no Brasil utilizando o bioindicador fitólitos, partículas de opala biogênica depositadas nas células vegetais. O objetivo é disponibilizar à comunidade científica trabalhos relevantes sobre a utilização dos fitólitos em estudos pal...

Since 2007, the German Archaeological Institute and Kiel University have undertaken archaeolo- gical excavations on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile). Excavations in 2011 and 2014 revealed pits at various locations on the island that contained alternating thin layers of reddish iron oxide, phytoliths and charred material, representing a new type of a...

Dung has been an important material used by humans since at least the early Neolithic Period. It accumulated within domesticated animal enclosures and it was used as fuel and fertiliser as well as construction material. While the formers were studied in details, to date, the use of dung as a construction material received less attention. Here, we p...

Many societal and environmental changes occurred between the 2nd millennium BC and the middle of the 2nd millennium AD in western Africa. Key amongst these were changes in land use due to the spread and development of agricultural strategies, which may have had widespread consequences for the climate, hydrology, biodiversity, and ecosystem services...

This article presents a cross-cultural study of the relationship among the subsistence strategies, the environmental setting and the food sharing practices of 22 modern small-scale societies located in America (n = 18) and Siberia (n = 4). Ecological, geographical and economic variables of these societies were extracted from specialized literature...

This study provides new data on the evolution of the landscape in south-western Amazonia during the Holocene and the impact of climate change and fluvial dynamics on the region's ecosystems. South-western Amazonia is covered by an extensive seasonally flooded savannah, known as the Llanos de Moxos. Severe drought during the southern hemisphere wint...

Many societal and environmental changes occurred from the 2nd millennium BC to the middle of the 2nd millennium AD in western Africa. Key amongst these were changes in land use due to the spread and development of agricultural strategies, which may have had widespread consequences for the climate, hydrology, biodiversity, and ecosystem services of...

The LandCover6K group is concerned with whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional climates. Climate model simulations have shown that land use data sets can have large regional impacts on climate in the recent past and may have also done so during prehistory. However, there are ma...

A pilot archaeological survey has revealed evidence for forty monumental stone cairns preserved in good conditions in the Mudug region, Puntland, in the Horn of Africa. These monuments were digitally recorded and are presented here as part of a first assessment of the archaeological potential of the region. While such monuments are not uncommon in...

The LandCover6K Working group is concerned with the question of whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover (i.e. anthropogenic land cover change due to land use) were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional climates. Climate model simulations have shown that land use data sets can have large regional impacts on climate in the...

In the context of geoarchaeological investigations on Easter Island several hundred human-made pits filled with reddish silty material were discovered in fluvial terraces of two valleys on the southern slope of Maunga Terevaka, the highest volcano of the island. Micromorphological analysis of one representative pit filling and comparison of its geo...

Tropical forests have been an important human habitat and played a significant role in early human dispersal and evolution. Likewise, the use of fire, besides being one of the exceptional characteristics of humans, serves as a marker for human evolution. While the use of fire by prehistoric hunter-gatherers is relatively well documented in arid and...