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Publications
Publications (64)
Plants depend fundamentally on establishment from seed. However, protocols in trait-based ecology currently estimate seed size but not seed number. This can be rectified. For annuals, seed number should simply be a positive function of vegetative biomass and a negative one of seed size.
Using published values of comparative seed number as the ‘gol...
The early Middle Ages saw a major expansion of cereal cultivation across large parts of Europe thanks to the spread of open-field farming. A major project to trace this expansion in England by deploying a range of scientific methods is generating direct evidence for this so-called ‘Medieval Agricultural Revolution’.
• Background and Aims While the ‘worldwide leaf economics spectrum’ (Wright IJ, Reich PB, Westoby M, et al. 2004. The worldwide leaf economics spectrum. Nature 428: 821–827) defines mineral nutrient relationships in plants, no unifying functional consensus links size attributes. Here, the focus is upon leaf size, a much-studied plant trait that sca...
Plant allometries help us to understand resource allocation in plants and provide insight into how communities are structured. For woody species, a triangular allometric relationship between seed size and leaf size occurs in which all combinations are all possible, except for species with big seeds and small leaves (Cornelissen 1999). This relation...
CPC requires the reforecast-calibrated Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) to support the production of their official 6-10- and 8-14-day temperature and precipitation forecasts. While a large sample size of forecast-observation pairs is desirable to generate the necessary model climatology and variances, and covariances to observations, samplin...
The transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of settled agriculture is arguably the most fundamental change in the development of human society (Lev-Yadun et al., 2000). The establishment of agricultural economies, emerging initially in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East (Nesbitt, 2002), required the domestication of crops; anci...
Charring is the most ubiquitous form of preservation of plant material on archaeological sites, occurring wherever people use heat. The usefulness of preserved seeds for a range of analytical techniques is dependent on the conditions under which they were heated. In this study, we investigate the effect of experimental heating on two types of glume...
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 study measured δ13C and δ15N of fresh and charred seeds from six different taxa of cereals and pulses. For each taxon, 12 different batches of seeds, all from the same growing context or field, were charred for 4, 8, or 24 hours at 215, 230, 245, or 260°C, with the thirteenth batch left uncharred. The least charred samples showed no average of...
The long-term excavation at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in central Turkey, have uncovered over 100 houses, which have been associated with at least 400 human skeletons and one million recorded animal bones. This large assemblage has enabled an extensive programme of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, which was designed to explore animal...
![Figure 7.6. S-spin [left] and z-spin [right] weaves.](profile/Dragana-Filipovic/publication/269730118/figure/fig4/AS:613865901551641@1523368444824/S-spin-left-and-z-spin-right-weaves_Q320.jpg)
http://www.catalhoyuk.com/downloads/Archive_Report_2014.pdf
http://www.catalhoyuk.com/downloads/Archive_Report_2014.pdf
Two widely used precipitation analyses are the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) unified global daily gauge analysis and Stage IV analysis based on quantitative precipitation estimate with multisensor observations. The former is based on gauge records with a uniform quality control across the entire domain and thus bears more confidence, but provides...
We describe a novel method for quantifying ecosystem drivers that potentially compromise the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes. We use three sources of data that for many countries are already in the public domain: governmental agricultural statistics, which provide a quantitative assessment of farming intensity in the ‘working landscape’,...
We evaluate local versus distant land-use models at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia, using strontium isotope analysis of sheep tooth enamel and charred plant remains. Interpretation of strontium in sheep tooth sequences is constrained by previous oxygen isotope work, which largely excludes summer movement to the mountains but cannot distingu...
The aim of this study is to assess the potential of charred archaeobotanical cereal grain and pulse seed δ13C and δ15N values to provide evidence of crop growing conditions and as a potential component of palaeodietary studies. In order to reliably interpret archaeobotanical δ13C and δ15N values it is necessary to take into account the impact of ch...
Stable carbon isotope analysis of plant remains is a promising tool for researchers studying palaeoclimate and past agricultural systems. The potential of the technique is clear: it offers a direct measure of the water conditions in which plants grew. In this paper, we assess how reliably stable carbon isotope discrimination can be used to infer wa...
Ethnographic observations in parts of southwest Asia and other semi-arid zones have shown that animal dung is a major source of fuel. Archaeobotanical research in this part of the world has revealed that significant proportions of the charred plant assemblages may represent material derived from the burning of animal dung as a fuel source. Burning...
This talk addresses the complex taphonomy of archaeobotanical remains at Neolithic Çatalhöyük in order to make direct inferences on agricultural activities and land use at the site. The residues from the two major formation processes - crop processing and dung burning - are mixed in many deposits. In a new analysis of archaeobotanical evidence from...
Emmer wheat, Triticum dicoccon Schrank was one of the founder crops of Neolithic agriculture. Though its cultivation was largely replaced by hexaploid wheats 2000 years ago, pockets of small scale cultivation can still be found. One such area is the Asturias region of Northern Spain, where emmer wheat remains a traditional crop for high value speci...
Understanding the evolution of cultivated barley is important for two reasons. First, the evolutionary relationships between different landraces might provide information on the spread and subsequent development of barley cultivation, including the adaptation of the crop to new environments and its response to human selection. Second, evolutionary...
Specific leaf area (SLA), a key element of the 'worldwide leaf economics spectrum', is the preferred 'soft' plant trait for assessing soil fertility. SLA is a function of leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and leaf thickness (LT). The first, LDMC, defines leaf construction costs and can be used instead of SLA. However, LT identifies shade at its lowest...
In this paper we summarize recent archaeobotanical work at Neolithic-Chalcolithic Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia, Turkey, with particular attention to on-site activities surrounding plant storage and consumption. In situ concentrations of plant material recovered from several burnt houses offer insights into choices made in the placement, scale and d...
New web address: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/archaeology/research/iar
The Integrated Archaeobotanical Research project (IAR) was funded by the EU Marie Curie Framework 6 Transfer of Knowledge programme at the University of Sheffield 2007–09. Traditionally, charred or waterlogged seeds and fruits, recovered from archaeological sites, have been the...
Genome size is a function, and the product, of cell volume. As such it is contingent on ecological circumstance. The nature of 'this ecological circumstance' is, however, hotly debated. Here, we investigate for angiosperms whether stomatal size may be this 'missing link': the primary determinant of genome size. Stomata are crucial for photosynthesi...
This paper brings together the results of five present-day studies of arable weed ecology, and applies these to the identification of past crop husbandry regimes on the basis of archaeobotanical weed assemblages. The contrasting husbandry regimes covered by the present-day studies include irrigation and dry farming, fallowing and rotation, intensiv...
This paper explores plant and animal distributions inside a Neolithic burned house in order to investigate domestic organization in an early farming society. We use GIS to analyze the spatial distributions of plant and animal remains found inside Building 52 at Catalhoyuk in central Anatolia. We examine how plant and animal stores, food and nonfood...
http://archaeobotany.dept.shef.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This Online Archaeobotany Tutorial is a product of the European Union funded Integrated Archaeobotanical Research project conducted at the University of Sheffield from 2007 - 2009. It was a Marie Curie Framework 6 Transfer of Knowledge program employing archaeobotanical researchers from...
A less common approach to thinking about the environmental and social challenges inherent to agricultural production examines food sharing, which provides both nutritional reserves and equally importantly, social bonding. Like extrasomatic food storage, food sharing links daily life to wider social issues such as household structures, community rel...
Excavations at Tell Brak in northeast Syria have uncovered two monumental non-domestic structures from the fourth and third
millennia b.c. respectively, containing evidence for large-scale supra-household economic organisation. The charred plant remains from these
structures include glume wheat, two-row hulled barley and flax, all found in storage...
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...
Excavations at Tell Brak in 2006–7 explored two key episodes in Mesopotamian political and social history, developing early social complexity in the fifth to fourth millennia BC and the shift from territorial state to early empire in the second millennium BC. Late Chalcolithic complexity is represented in Area TW on the main mound and at the outlyi...
Distinguishing human food from fodder in the archaeobotanical
record is a difficult task. These categories are culturally defined and,
therefore, not obvious from the plant species represented in archaeological
samples, while context, such as storage area or container is not necessarily
distinctive for each category. While grain can be consumed as...
A simple protocol is presented for a functional classification of European grassland species using attributes that can be quickly and easily measured. These attributes relate to habitat fertility, intensity of grazing and disturbance. As a surrogate for habitat fertility we use leaf nitrogen predicted by multiple regression from three leaf characte...
Reconstruction of crop sowing time and cultivation intensity, based on arable weed ecology, can resolve archaeological questions
surrounding land use and cycles of routine activity, but crop processing may introduce systematic ecological biases in the
arable weeds represented in products and by-products. Based on previous ethnoarchaeological work,...
Conservation initiatives are failing to arrest the global loss of biodiversity. From our mechanistic studies of ecology and economics, we suggest that for grazing lands the root cause of this failure is a powerful economic deterrent to measures designed to protect diversity. We identify an exponential relationship between monetary returns and inten...
Question: A set of easily-measured ('soft') plant traits has been identified as potentially useful predictors of ecosystem functioning in previous studies. Here we aimed to discover whether the screening techniques remain operational in widely contrasted circumstances, to test for the existence of axes of variation in the particular sets of traits,...
The region of Asturias, northwest Spain, is highly unusual in that a cereal crop (spelt wheat) is cultivated on a garden
scale using horticultural methods. A floristic survey was made of the weeds in 65 spelt plots in this region. The ecological
attributes of the weed species were then measured and compared to an earlier study of the functional cha...
Phytosociological data on weed communities associated with autumn- and spring-sown crops in Germany are subjected to correspondence analysis and, in addition to a primary separation of communities on acidic and basic soils, the two sowing regimes are clearly distinguished in terms of phytosociological character species. In order to facilitate the a...
An autecological method of analysis known as FIBS (Functional Interpretation of Botanical Surveys) is applied to quadrat survey data on the weeds growing in fields managed under three different rotation regimes (fallow–cereal, legume–cereal and legume–fallow–cereal) in northern Jordan in order to explore the potential of weed functional attributes...
The application of “FIBS” (Functional Interpretation of Botanical Surveys) to the interpretation of archaeobotanical weed floras, as evidence of past husbandry practices, is explored. To illustrate the potential of the approach, present-day cereal fields in N. Spain are analysed in terms of the functional attributes of the weed species represented...
In 1989 ANTIQUITY published a special section of papers on the archaeology
of the steppe zone, to notice tile special role of that great sweep of land that
links the northern ftinges of emlYprehistoric agriculture in Europe and Asia
A new international team has now returned to jeirun, the key early
'agIicu1tuml site in Turkmenistan,on the edge of t...
Projects
Projects (3)
This is a collaborative project between the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, aiming to improve understanding of the selective pressures acting on early crop domestication in Western Asia, combining elements of experimental plant ecology, molecular biology, archaeobotany (including morphometrics) and GIS analysis.
Please see the webpage here for more info:
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/archaeology/research/evolutionary-origins
We are using bioarchaeological evidence (archaeological plant and bone remains, isotope analysis and pollen) to investigate changes in farming across England in the Anglo-Saxon/medieval period. Please see our website here for more information, blog posts and team bios.
https://feedsax.arch.ox.ac.uk/
