Paul Halstead

Bad year economics : cultural responses to risk and uncertainty

Bad Year Economics explores the role of risk and uncertainty in human economics within an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and ancient and modern history, the contributors range widely in time and space across hunting, farming and pastoralism, across ancient states, empires, and modern nation states. The aim, however, is a common one: to analyse in each case the structure of variability - particularly with regard to food supply - and review the range of responses offered by individual human communities. These responses commonly exploit various forms of mobility, economic diversification, storage, and exchange to deploy local or temporary abundance as a defence against shortage. Different levels of response are used at different levels of risk. Their success is fundamental to human survival and their adoption has important ramifications throughout cultural behaviour.

Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

Significance One of the most enduring and widely debated questions in prehistoric archaeology concerns the origins of Europe’s earliest farmers: Were they the descendants of local hunter-gatherers, or did they migrate from southwestern Asia, where farming began? We recover genome-wide DNA sequences from early farmers on both the European and Asian sides of the Aegean to reveal an unbroken chain of ancestry leading from central and southwestern Europe back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. Our study provides the coup de grâce to the notion that farming spread into and across Europe via the dissemination of ideas but without, or with only a limited, migration of people. Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

Traditional and ancient rural economy in Mediterranean Europe: plus ça change?

The study of recent ‘traditional’ Mediterranean rural economy has long been a predilection of ancient historians and archaeologists working in that area. Traditional practices and production norms have been used by ancient historians in the interpretation of the often enigmatic testimony of the ancient agronomic writers, while archaeologists have used the same information to fill in the many gaps in the material record supplied by the spade. Much of the relevant data on traditional rural economy are gleaned from the accounts of early travellers or of modern geographers, ethnographers and agronomists. But comparanda acquired at first-hand enhance the credibility of archaeologists and ancient historians as fieldworkers, and chance summer encounters with Cretan shepherds or Cycladic fishermen are valuable currency in competitive displays at academic conferences.

Pastoralism or household herding? Problems of scale and specialization in early Greek animal husbandry

Abstract Recent strategies of animal husbandry in Greece range from pastoralism to mixed farming. Pastoralists tend to keep larger herds, schedule grazing to enhance nutrition and productivity, and specialize in particular products for exchange. Each of these tendencies has implications for the species and age/sex composition of livestock which are amenable to archaeozoological investigation. Faunai assemblages from seventh‐second millennium BC Greece match small‐scale mixed farming better than large‐scale pastoralism. Written records from the second millennium BC palaces indicate large‐scale specialization in wool production, but as a component of mixed farming ‘estates’. In this heterogeneous landscape, pastoralism faces recurrent scarcity of labour, particularly if not subsidized by exchange with farmers. In questioning the existence of pastoralism in prehistoric Greece, this paper stresses the need to consider the full range of recent models of animal husbandry and suggests ways of harnessing archaeoz...

Agrarian ecology in the Greek islands: time stress, scale and risk

A botanical study of crop processing was undertaken on the semi-arid, southern Aegean islands of Karpathos and Amorgos. The present article provides details of the crop processing activities, and some contextual information concerning the wider agricultural economy. Attention is drawn to three aspects of this wider economy (time stress, scale and risk) which are of particular significance for understanding both recent ‘traditional’ and ancient farming practice in the region. Amorgos is discussed in greater detail as the period of fieldwork was longer.

Maslins, mixtures and monocrops: On the interpretation ofarchaeobotanical crop samples of heterogeneous composition

Abstract Botanical data from an ethnoarchaeological study of cereal and pulse crops in Greece are used to explore alternativesources of mixed crop samples. In addition to more or less pure “monocrops”, deliberately mixed “maslins” were grown to exploit the tendency of individual maslin components to perform more or less well under different growing conditions. Inevitably, therefore, the composition of these maslins was highly variable. Crop processing may introduce systematic bias into the composition of crop samples and is also deliberately used to manipulate the relative proportions of maslin components in a highly flexible manner. Both monocrops and maslins contain low-level contamination by other cultigens, and it is shown that these were mainly introduced with the seed corn and not through crop rotation or mixing on the threshing floor. Minor contaminants resembling the dominant cultigen(s) in growth habit, seed size, etc., are not only hard to remove but also tend to be tolerated. The implications of these observations are discussed for the interpretation of mixed archaeobotanical crop samples.

Identifying the intensity of crop husbandry practices on the basis of weed floras

A question of broad economic and social significance is the extent to which farming in prehistoric times, and perhaps even in historical times, was characterised by cultivation on a small scale and with intensive methods. Archaeobotanically, a distinction may be possible between intensive and extensive cultivation on the basis of the weed seeds associated with ancient grain samples. To this end, an ecological study was carried out in central Ewia of the weeds of winter-sown pulses grown both intensively in gardens and extensively in fields. The recorded weed flora was demonstrably influenced by relevant husbandry variables, such as method of tillage (with hoe or plough), weeding, manuring and soil organic content. The closest correspondence, however, was with the size, type and location of cultivated plots, suggesting that the weed flora was determined by a combination of these husbandry variables. In conclusion, the potential is briefly discussed of disentangling these variables for application in an archacobotanical context.

Waste not, want not: traditional responses to crop failure in Greece

On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.

Ask the Fellows who Lop the Hay: Leaf-Fodder in the Mountains of Northwest Greece

As recently as the first half of this century, leaf- and twig-fodder cut from trees played a major role in animal husbandry across most of Europe and, in many areas, stored leafy hay was of critical importance to the survival of stalled livestock over winter (e.g. Brockmann-Jerosch, 1936; Radley, 1961; Spray, 1981; Salvi, 1982; Sigaut, 1982; Haas and Rasmussen, 1993). In addition to its importance to livestock, leaf- and twig-foddering also played a major role in shaping the cultural landscapes of the continent, and in particular the structure and composition of vegetation cover (e.g. Moreno, 1982; Austad, 1988). During this century, the use of arboreal fodder has declined dramatically to the point of almost total abandonment and, in consequence, this once important practice is both poorly understood and largely ignored by historians, geographers and ecologists alike.

Stable carbon isotope analysis as a direct means of inferring crop water status and water management practices

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 water conditions, through the analysis of present-day crop plants grown at multiple locations across the Mediterranean and south-west Asia. The key findings are that: (1) ∆¹³C, as expected, provides an indication of water conditions, (2) even for plants grown in similar conditions there is variation in ∆¹³C and (3) ∆¹³C may reflect crop water status for a period beginning well before the grain filling period. A new framework is presented which increases the robustness with which ∆¹³C values of plant remains can be interpreted in terms of the water conditions in which ancient crops grew.