Reinier Cappers

Cereal cultivation at Swifterbant?: Neolithic Wetland Farming on the North European Plain

The transition to early agriculture on the North European Plain is a much debated issue in which emphasis is placed on the available pollen evidence. It has been suggested that cereal cultivation was probably practiced in the upland areas and surplus yields were brought to the wetland sites. An alternative model that gives special attention to crop assemblages, flooding, and yields and is illustrated with evidence from the type‐location sites of Swifterbant, dated between 4300 and 4000 BC, envisions cereal cultivation in the wetlands themselves. Evidence for early agriculture is found in particular in pollen diagrams, diatom analysis, and large numbers of cereal remains. It appears that small‐scale cereal cultivation may have been possible and attractive in addition to hunting and gathering in wetland sites because of their variety of biotopes, including areas suitable for agriculture.

Digital atlas of economic plants in archaeology

The third part of the Digital Plant Atlas presents illustrations of subfossil remains of plants with economic value. These plant remains mainly derive from excavations in the Old World (Europe, Western Asia and North Africa) that the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut (DAI, Berlin) and the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) have conducted or participated in. Plant material is usually very perishable, but can nevertheless be preserved in archaeological sites if the biological decay of the material is blocked. Many plant remains are discovered during excavations in carbonized form, where despite having been in contact with fire, they have not been completely reduced to ash. Extremely dry climatic conditions, like those in Egypt, can also preserve plant material in a completely dessicated condition. Most of the economically valuable plants illustrated here have been carbonized or desiccated. So this atlas links up very well with the Digital Atlas of Economic Plants.Like the other atlasses, this atlas is a combination of a book and a website.The Book:Just as in part two of the series, this part will not only include illustrations of seeds and fruits, but also of other plant parts. The resulting variety in seed and fruit forms will be illustrated by examples from different excavations. To support their identification and determination, also pictures of recent plants and relevant plant parts have been included.The Website: To supplement the photographs, the website will also include morphometric measurements of the subfossil seeds and fruits. These measurements can be compared with own measurements of the plant taxa in question.Summary: Plant families: 56 Plant species (Taxa): 191 Photographs: 773 photographs of subfossil plant parts, 1137 photographs of recent plants and plant parts Languages: English and 15 indices (scientific plant name, pharmaceutical plant name, English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Arab, Arab in transliteration, Turkish, Chinese, Pinyin (Chinese in transliteration), Hindi, Sanskrit, and Malayalam) Purchase of the book grants access to the protected parts of the websites of the project.

A palaeoecological model for the interpretation of wild plant species

The interpretation of subfossil records of wild plant species with respect to both environmental conditions and past vegetation is complicated by the following: (1) production and dispersal of plant remains including diaspores, (2) the formation of the soil flora, (3) taphonomic processes and differential preservation that act on subfossil assemblages and (4) methods applied to produce subfossil records. Whereas the similarity between recent plant communities and seed banks is often weak, the relationship between past vegetation and subfossil assemblages is still more complicated. It is therefore unlikely that macrofossil assemblages derived from soil samples can be considered as pure samples representing particular palaeobiocoenoses. The assumption that plant communities, in the past, may have been in some way aberrant with respect to composition and that the ecological ranges of species varied during the Quaternary has to be rejected, if not based on well considered assumptions or evidence from pure samples. Only if a sufficient number of suitable studies is available, which enable evaluation between all kinds of plant communities and their respective seed floras, can progress be made with regard to the reconstruction of past vegetation and environmental conditions. As long as these data are not available, the ecological interpretation of particular subfossil assemblages isolated from soil samples has to be carefully evaluated within their particular context.