What drives domestication? An ecological perspective on the emergence of cereal agriculture in...
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 12/05/2023

Alexander Weide (University of Oxford)

The development of farming in southwest Asia during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. 12,000–
8,000 cal. BP) involved profound social and economic changes, involving the emergence of 
plant and animal husbandry, a changing organisation of the built environment, and the advent 
of households as central socio-economic units. This transformation of human life has often 
been framed within a nature-culture dichotomy focusing on domestication, where humans 
control plant and animal reproductive cycles. During the last years, however, scholarship on 
global plant domestication developed an evolutionary-ecological approach, arguing that plant 
ecological strategies affect human management practices and shape human-plant interactions. 
This paper builds on recent weed ecological research in the Levant, showing that early 
sedentary communities with large-scale cereal storage did not engage in soil tillage but 
harvested wild cereals from habitats as little disturbed as untilled grasslands. Our findings 
imply that early sedentary communities in the Levant relied on the exploitation and possibly 
management of cereal-dominated grasslands for centuries instead of cultivating cereals in 
annually tilled soils. We argue that the ecological strategies of the exploited cereals provide a 
new perspective to understand this human economic adaptation, focusing on the ability of wild 
cereals to dominate annual plant communities in the absence of regular human disturbances. In 
this ecological perspective, human exploitation practices responded to the competitive abilities 
of the cereals, while the later creation of arable habitats reflects the entrenchment of this 
human-cereal collaboration. Wild cereals, and other crop progenitors, can therefore be seen as 
key agents in domestication processes instead of mere objects subjected to human management 
practices.