The Origin and Spread of Neolithic Plant Economies in the Near East and Europe
Stephen J. Shennan, James Conolly, 2007. https://doi.org/10.5284/1000093. How to cite using this DOI
Data copyright © Prof Stephen J. Shennan, Prof James Conolly unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under the ADS Terms of Use and Access.
Primary contact
Prof
Stephen J.
Shennan
Institute of Archaeology
University College London
31-34 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PY
England
Tel: 0171 3877050
Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 452
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1000093
- How to cite using this DOI
Overview
The origins of agriculture and its spread from southwest Asia to Europe have been the most intensively discussed and debated topics in Old World archaeology for at least the last 40 years. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that over the years so little attention has been paid in these discussions to the interpretative significance of analyses of the newly exploited resources, and this is particularly the case for the fundamental elements of the plant-based subsistence economy, i.e., the domestic crops. The aims of the (ongoing) project are to establish precisely the nature of the changes that the food production systems underwent during the first phases of the adoption of agriculture, and to isolate the causal factors that brought about such changes (e.g., whether environmental, cultural, or even random) across different regions of southwest Asia and Europe.
To address these questions a database was constructed by Sue Colledge which comprised archaeobotantical records taken from both published and unpublished reports. (Note that in some instances analysts indicated that they did not want their unpublished data to be made publicly available in this archive.) For further reference, two recent papers present analyses of data derived from the database (Colledge, Conolly and Shennan 2004, 2005).
The dataset consists of four tables:
- sites.csv, which contains the site name [P], its location by country and the bibliographic reference for the archaeobotanical data
- phases.csv, which contains the site name [S], a phase code [P], and the broad cultural designation of each phase
- samples.csv, which contains the phase code [P1], a taxon code [P2] and a field indicating whether or not the specimen is possibly a contaminant
- taxa.csv, which links the taxa code [P/S] to full taxonomic details
The dataset is intended to be used in a relational database, with [P] designating a primary key, and [S] a secondary (linking) key. The tables are comma delimited, use the " character as a text qualifier and are encoded using the UTF-8 character set. These elements need to be specified when importing the tables into database.
References
- Colledge, S., Conolly, J. and Shennan, S. 2004 Archaeobotanical Evidence for the Spread of Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean. Current Anthropology Volume 45 Supplement:S35-S58.
- Colledge, S., Conolly, J. and Shennan, S. 2005 The evolution of Neolithic farming from SW Asian origins to NW European limits. European Journal of Archaeology. 8(2):137-156
