The Association of Arable Weeds with Modern Wild Cereal Habitats: Implications for Reconstructing the Origins of Plant Cultivation in the Levant

ABSTRACT

Reconstructing the origins of plant cultivation in southwest Asia is crucial for understanding associated processes such as the emergence of sedentary communities and domesticated crops. Among the criteria archaeobotanists developed for identifying the earliest plant cultivation, the presence of potential arable weeds found in association with wild cereal and legume remains has been used as a basis for supporting models of prolonged wild plant cultivation before domesticated crops appear. However, the proposed weed floras mainly consist of genus-level identifications that do not differentiate between arable weeds and related species that characterise non-arable habitats. Here we test, for the first time, whether the potential arable weed taxa widely used to identify wild plant cultivation also occur in non-cultivated wild cereal populations. Based on modern survey data from the southern Levant we show that the proposed weed taxa characterise both grasslands and fields. Our findings, therefore, do not support the use of these taxa for reconstructing early cultivation. Instead, for future studies we suggest an approach based on the analysis of plant functional traits related to major agroecological variables such as fertility and disturbance, which has the potential to overcome some of the methodological problems.

KEYWORDS:

• origins of agriculture
• cultivation
• arable weeds
• wild cereals
• Pre-Pottery Neolithic
• southwest Asia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tamar Avin-Wittenberg for her generous support during the fieldwork and the resources we received from the herbarium for our research. We also want to thank Albert Kaminer and Liat Hadar for the warm welcome at Ramat Hanadiv Nature Park and the helpful information they provided. We finally want to thank Katja Tielbörger for supporting earlier fieldwork that lead to the current project and for connecting us with our Israeli colleagues. The study was funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission [grant number 838395].

Notes on contributors

Alexander Weide

Alexander Weide holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the School of Archaeology of the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on the emergence of farming and related socio-cultural processes in southwest Asia and Europe.

John G. Hodgson

John G. Hodgson is an ecologist who uses functional trait ecology to interpret ecosystem function in plant communities. He is in active collaboration with archaeologists from the Universities of Oxford and Sheffield.

Hagar Leschner

Hagar V. Leschner is a botanist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the collection manager of the National Herbarium.

Guy Dovrat

Guy Dovrat is an ecologist specialising in plant and rangeland ecology with a main focus on the links between soil resources, plant community structure and ecosystem functions. He is a researcher in the Department of Natural Resources of the Agricultural Research Organization.

Jade Whitlam

Jade Whitlam is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Her research explores long-term people-plant relationships in Western Asia, with a particular focus on pre-agricultural plant management and the emergence of farming.

Neta Manela

Neta Manela is the scientific manager of the National Herbarium of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a plant ecologist interested in the relationship between environmental factors, plant traits and germination dynamics.

Yoel Melamed

Yoel Melamed is an archaeobotanist at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. His research focuses on prehistoric plant use and human-environment interactions in the southern Levant.

Yagil Osem

Yagil Osem is an ecologist interested in forest ecology and management in Mediterranean and semiarid environments. He is a researcher in the Department of Natural Resources of the Agricultural Research Organization.

Amy Bogaard

Amy Bogaard is an archaeologist interested in the reconstruction of ancient farming systems, and their implications for long-term ecologies, sustainability and inequality. She is Professor of Neolithic and Bronze Age Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford.