Robin Bendrey

The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking

Horse domestication revolutionized transport, communications, and warfare in prehistory, yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse metacarpals shows that Botai horses resemble Bronze Age domestic horses rather than Paleolithic wild horses from the same region. Pathological characteristics indicate that some Botai horses were bridled, perhaps ridden. Organic residue analysis, using δ13C and δD values of fatty acids, reveals processing of mares milk and carcass products in ceramics, indicating a developed domestic economy encompassing secondary products.

Preliminary ethnoarchaeological research on modern animal husbandry in Bestansur, Iraqi Kurdistan: Integrating animal, plant and environmental data

Abstract This paper presents preliminary results from an ethnoarchaeological study of animal husbandry in the modern village of Bestansur, situated in the lower Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. This research explores how modern families use and manage their livestock within the local landscape and identifies traces of this use. The aim is to provide the groundwork for future archaeological investigations focusing on the nearby Neolithic site of Bestansur. This is based on the premise that modern behaviours can suggest testable patterns for past practices within the same functional and ecological domains. Semi-structured interviews conducted with villagers from several households provided large amounts of information on modern behaviours that helped direct data collection, and which also illustrate notable shifts in practices and use of the local landscape over time. Strontium isotope analysis of modern plant material demonstrates that a measurable variation exists between the alluvial floodplain and the lower foothills, while analysis of modern dung samples shows clear variation between sheep/goat and cow dung, in terms of numbers of faecal spherulites. These results are specific to the local environment of Bestansur and can be used for evaluating and contextualising archaeological evidence as well as providing modern reference material for comparative purposes.

From wild horses to domestic horses: a European perspective

Abstract There is a period of some 5000 years or so in the prehistory of Europe when horse populations were greatly depleted and perhaps even disappeared in many places. Before this time, during the Upper Palaeolithic, wild horses were common; after, during the Bronze Age, domestic horses were being raised and used across Europe. What happened in between is uncertain, in part because of the sketchy archaeological record. Debates continue as to the origins (the when, where and how) of Europes domestic horses, including whether horse husbandry dispersed only from habitats favourable to horses on the Eurasian steppes or whether there was local domestication in temperate Europe. This paper reviews the evidence for the transition from wild horses to domestic horses in Europe.

Revisiting and modelling the woodland farming system of the early Neolithic Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), 5600–4900 b.c.

This article presents the conception and the conceptual results of a modelling representation of the farming systems of the Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK). Assuming that there were permanent fields (PF) then, we suggest four ways that support the sustainability of such a farming system over time: a generalized pollarding and coppicing of trees to increase the productivity of woodland areas for foddering more livestock, which itself can then provide more manure for the fields, a generalized use of pulses grown together with cereals during the same cropping season, thereby reducing the needs for manure. Along with assumptions limiting bias on village and family organizations, the conceptual model which we propose for human environment in the LBK aims to be sustainable for long periods and can thereby overcome doubts about the PFs hypothesis for the LBK farming system. Thanks to a reconstruction of the climate of western Europe and the consequent vegetation pattern and productivity arising from it, we propose a protocol of experiments and validation procedures for both testing the PFs hypothesis and defining its eco-geographical area.

Early animal farming and zoonotic disease dynamics: Modelling brucellosis transmission in Neolithic goat populations

Zoonotic pathogens are frequently hypothesized as emerging with the origins of farming, but evidence of this is elusive in the archaeological records. To explore the potential impact of animal domestication on zoonotic disease dynamics and human infection risk, we developed a model simulating the transmission of Brucella melitensis within early domestic goat populations. The model was informed by archaeological data describing goat populations in Neolithic settlements in the Fertile Crescent, and used to assess the potential of these populations to sustain the circulation of Brucella. Results show that the pathogen could have been sustained even at low levels of transmission within these domestic goat populations. This resulted from the creation of dense populations and major changes in demographic characteristics. The selective harvesting of young male goats, likely aimed at improving the efficiency of food production, modified the age and sex structure of these populations, increasing the transmission potential of the pathogen within these populations. Probable interactions between Neolithic settlements would have further promoted pathogen maintenance. By fostering conditions suitable for allowing domestic goats to become reservoirs of Brucella melitensis, the early stages of agricultural development were likely to promote the exposure of humans to this pathogen.

Environmental archaeologies of Neolithisation: Europe

The origins and spread of Neolithic life-ways represent a pivotal change in human ecology and society. Communities transformed their relationships with the world around them, shifting away from reliance upon hunted and collected wild resources, to the management and domestication of plants and animals, alongside a pattern of increasing sedentism. These processes were played out at differing temporal and spatial scales; from the life-cycle of a single organism of a population on the path to domestication, to the dissemination of ‘new’ farming economies around the world. The varied fields within environmental archaeology are providing an increasingly detailed understanding of the agencies, processes and pathways in these transformations. These include work in the established fields of geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology and archaeobotany (Bendrey et al. 2013). In recent

Care in the community? Interpretations of a fractured goat bone from Neolithic Jarmo, Iraq

A case study of a goat metatarsal exhibiting a complex diaphyseal fracture from Pottery Neolithic Jarmo in the Central Zagros region of the eastern Fertile Crescent is here described and analysed. The Central Zagros is one of the areas with the earliest evidence for goat domestication. The significance of the pathology may be viewed within the context of domestic goat ecology in the landscape of Jarmo, potentially impacting browsing behaviour (goats raise themselves on their hind limbs to browse) and movement with the herd in the landscape (the terrain around Jarmo is very steep in places, which would be difficult for an animal to navigate on three legs). In the light of this, possible levels of care that the Neolithic human community may have afforded this animal are discussed - from a situation where therapeutic intervention may have occurred, to one of stall confinement of the animal to allow the pathology to heal, to a position of simple awareness of the condition - and how this impacts on our understanding of changes in attitudes towards animals through the process of domestication.

Review of Ethnoarchaeology of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg: Pastoralism and Resilience in Central Sahara by Stefano Biagetti

AbstractThis volume presents an ethnoarchaeological study of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg of the central Sahara (south-west Libya). The study not only provides a useful and richly detailed framework for better understanding the archaeological record of this region, but also contributes a wider range of insights on the adaptability of pastoralists to desert environments. It will be of broad interest to practitioners and researchers engaged with both the past and present of pastoralist lifeways and will also be of relevance to those working in ethnoarchaeology and archaeology more generally. Book details Biagetti, S Ethnoarchaeology of the Kel Tadrart Tuareg: Pastoralism and Resilience in Central Sahara. Springer; 2014. Publisher location: Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London. 164 pages. 65 illustrations, 56 in colour. ISBN: 978-3-319-08529-6 (Print) 978-3-319-08530-2 (Online)

Environmental archaeologies of Neolithisation: Old World case studies

The origins and spread of Neolithic life-ways represent a pivotal change in human ecology and society. Communities transformed their relationships with the world around them, shifting away from reliance upon hunted and collected wild resources, to the management and domestication of plants and animals, alongside a pattern of increasing sedentism. These processes were played out at differing temporal and spatial scales; from the life-cycle of a single organism of a population on the path to domestication, to the dissemination of ‘new’ farming economies around the world. The varied fields within environmental archaeology are providing an increasingly detailed understanding of the agencies, processes and pathways in these transformations. These include work in the established fields of geoarchaeology, zooarchaeology and archaeobotany (Bendrey et al. 2013). In recent decades advances in archaeological science have opened up exciting and fruitful new avenues of research. Techniques such as stable isotope analysis, for example, are allowing understanding of life histories of individual animals and their interactions with their environments (Balasse et al. 2012). On a broader scale, genetic studies and geometric morphometrics give greater understanding of changes at the population level and can inform on the diffusion of farming economies (Larson et al. 2007; Ottoni et al. 2012). It is the inter-disciplinary applications of environmental archaeology that are significantly contributing to our understanding of processes of Neolithisation. The papers brought together in this volume were presented at the Association for Environmental Archaeology, Autumn Conference 2012, held at the University of Reading, UK. This meeting brought together a rich and diverse set of papers on the applications of environmental archaeology to the study of the origins and development of Neolithic life-ways, from the core areas of the origins of the Neolithic in the Near East out to more distant parts of the Old World where the transition to the first farmers happened millennia later. The papers are being published in two volumes. The first considers a regional sequence which in a global view is relatively well understood: the dissemination of farming economies across Europe (Bendrey et al. 2014). These papers explore detailed case studies along this trajectory, starting from southeast Europe around 6000 BC and finishing in northwest Europe some three millennia later, and together significantly add to the narrative of the Neolithisation of Europe (Tresset and Vigne 2011; Hadjikoumis et al. 2011). It is also the case that inter-regional variability is increasingly being recognised in the early stages of the transition to farming (e.g. Gangal et al. 2014; Linstädter 2008) and we must therefore move away from ‘one size fits all’models, to each region being discussed on its own terms. This volume, the second from the conference, contributes to this aim by presenting a series of diverse case studies from across the Old World that contribute to regional narratives, allow for comparative inter-regional studies and widen the scope for understanding these transitions. Şevketoğlu and Hanson (2015) present the results of rescue excavations at the site of Akanthou-Arkosykos on the north coast of Cyprus. Radiocarbon dates for possibly the earliest olive stone on the island and carbonised pistachio have established that occupation was contemporary with that at the site of Shillourokambos, in the late 9th to early 8th millennium BC. The permanent settlement has yielded evidence for a combination of both hunting and herding practices, and the highest concentration of obsidian finds seen at any site on the island, indicative of prolonged contact with the Anatolian mainland. Moving eastwards to Iraqi Kurdistan and the hilly flanks of the Zagros mountains, Iversen presents a microarchaeological study of edible land mollusc Correspondence to: Robin Bendrey, Department of Archaeology, School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, PO Box 227, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AB, UK. Email: robin.bendrey@reading.ac.uk

Harris, DR: Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An Environmental-Archaeological Study

Harris, DR: Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An EnvironmentalArchaeological Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; 2010. 304 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-934536-16-2 Porter, A: Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations: Weaving Together Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2012. 389 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-76443-8