Did Late Neolithic farming fail or flourish? A Scottish perspective on the evidence for Late Neolithic arable cultivation in the British Isles

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the recent claim (Stevens and Fuller 2012) that cereal agriculture was abandoned in the Late Neolithic of the British Isles. The Scottish archaeobotanical dataset is considered in detail to test the universal applicability of the model proposed by Stevens and Fuller (2012) and a series of alternative hypotheses are suggested to explain the nature of the current evidence. It is argued that the importance of arable agriculture probably varied on a local as well as a regional scale and that caution should be exercised when attempting to apply unitary models to complex datasets.

Keywords:

• Neolithic
• agriculture
• cereal cultivation
• archaeobotany
• British Isles
• Britain

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Don O’Meara for inspiring me to make the conference presentation on which this paper is based, and Andrew Millard, Peter Rowley-Conwy, Mike Church and Kurt Gron of Durham University for helpful discussions on the interpretation of the presented datasets and for commenting on the paper prior to submission. I am also very grateful to Antonia Thomas and Dan Lee of UHI/ORCA for information and permission to include all the unpublished information, photos and radiocarbon dates from their excavations at the Braes of Ha’Breck, Wyre, Orkney and to Duncan Garrow of the University of Reading for permission to include the radiocarbon dates funded through his Neolithic Stepping Stones project. I would also like to thank Alexandra Shepherd and Peter Rowley-Conwy for permission to include unpublished information about the Skara Brae cereals and to Rod McCullagh of Historic Scotland and Gordon Cook of SUERC for information about the Lairg radiocarbon dates. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosie R. Bishop

Rosie Bishop completed her PhD on Mesolithic-Neolithic plant use in Scotland in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University in 2013 and is now a Post-doctoral Research Associate for the Uig Landscape Project in the same department. She is also currently involved in archaeobotanical research in Scotland, England and Iceland.