Alternative strategies to agriculture: the evidence for climatic shocks and cereal declines during the British Neolithic and Bronze Age (a reply to Bishop)

Abstract

Our suggestion that agriculture was temporarily abandoned for several centuries throughout much of mainland Britain after 3600 BC has provoked criticism, notably the claim by Bishop (2015) that we have missed continuity in Scotland. We demonstrate that firm evidence for widespread agriculture within the later Neolithic is still unproven. We trace the disappearance of cereals and the associated population collapse to a probable climatic shift that impacted the abundance of rainfall and lowered temperatures, thus affecting the reliability of cereals. Divergent strategies and patterns are identified on the Scottish Islands versus the mainland, which has more in common with England, Wales and Ireland. We argue that climate shocks disrupt existing subsistence patterns, to which varied responses are represented by divergent island and mainland patterns, both in the Late Neolithic and during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. Favourable climates encouraged population growth and subsistence innovation, such as at the start of the Neolithic and in the Beaker period.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• demography
• population
• radiocarbon summed probability
• archaeobotany
• cereal agriculture

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council, ComPAg project [Advanced grant no. 323842].

Notes on contributors

Chris J. Stevens

Chris J. Stevens is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He currently works on the ERC-funded Comparative Pathways towards Agriculture Project. He completed his PhD at Cambridge (1996) on Iron Age and Romano-British agriculture, and has worked on English archaeobotany for over 20 years, including for the Cambridge Archaeological Unit and Wessex Archaeology. He has also worked in Italy, Amarna, Egypt, China and Iraqi Kurdistan. He is co-editor of The Archaeology of African Plant Use (Left Coast Press, 2014) and co-author of Environmental Archaeology: Approaches, Techniques & Applications (Tempus, 2003).

Dorian Q Fuller

Dorian Q Fuller is Professor of Archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He completed his PhD in Cambridge (2000) on the origins of agriculture in Southern India. Since then he has expanded his studies in domestication to include all of India, China, Sudan, Ethiopia, West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Near East. He jointly edits the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. He is co-editor of The Archaeology of African Plant Use (Left Coast Press, 2014), Climates, Landscapes, and Civilizations (American Geophysical Union, 2012) and co-author of Trees and Woodlands of South India: Archaeological Perspectives (Left Coast Press, 2008).