Isotopic Evidence for Changes in Cereal Production Strategies in Iron Age and Roman Britain

ABSTRACT

Following the Roman conquest, agricultural production in Britain faced increasing demand from large urban and military populations. While it has long been thought that this necessitated an increase in agricultural production, direct archaeological evidence for changes in cultivation practices has been scarce. Using a model that conceptualises cereal farming strategies in terms of intensive or extensive practices, this paper is the first study to address this question using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data of crop remains. We report δ¹⁵N and δ¹³C values from 41 samples of spelt, emmer and barley from Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman Stanwick (Northants., UK), in order to assess the intensiveness of arable farming and investigate shifts in cultivation practices in prehistoric and Roman Britain. The results demonstrate a decline in δ¹⁵N in the Roman period, suggesting that farming practices moved to lower levels of manuring and, by implication, became more extensive. δ¹³C values are comparable in all periods, supporting the suggestion that changes observed in human stable isotope data between the Iron Age and Roman period are best explained by dietary change rather than a shift towards higher δ¹³C values in plants at the base of the food chain.

KEYWORDS:

• Iron Age
• Roman
• villa
• crop stable isotopes
• manuring
• diet

Acknowledgements

Stanwick excavations were undertaken by English Heritage (now Historic England) and directed by David S. Neal. GIS mapping for the Stanwick project was undertaken by Andrew Lowerre. The authors are grateful to Alice Ughi for assistance with isotope analysis, and to Amy Styring and Elizabeth Stroud for sampling advice. We are grateful to the reviewers for constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Lodwick is a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Her publications include the co-authored volume The Rural Economy of Roman Britain (Britannia Monographs, 2017). Her research interests are focussed on agricultural practices in the later prehistoric and Roman period and the utilisation of archaeobotanical and isotopic data to investigate human-plant relationships.

Gill Campbell is Head of Environmental Studies at Historic England, managing a team of six heritage scientists. Her research focuses on the utilisation of plant resources in the past, the ecological history of England and the development and improvement of environmental archaeological practice. Gill is chair of the Association for Environmental Archaeology (AEA) and a member of Forum for Information Standards in Heritage (FISH) terminology Working Group with responsibility for the Archaeological Sciences Thesaurus http://www.heritage-standards.org.uk/fish-vocabularies/

Vicky Crosby is an archaeologist working for Historic England's Archaeological Investigation Team. She specialises in Iron Age and Romano-British rural settlement and economy, and currently leads the Raunds Iron Age and Romano-British Project.

Gundula Müldner is an Associate Professor in Bioarchaeology at the University of Reading, where she specialises in isotope approaches for the reconstruction of diet and mobility in animals and humans. She has a special interest in dietary changes related to cultural and socio-economic transitions in the last 2000 years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Environmental Archaeology Research Grant and the Roman Research Trust.