Understanding the formation of early weed floras in the Neolithic period in southwest Asia

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• Alexander Weide
• Friday 20 September 2024, 13:00-14:00
• Zoom or in-person at Sainsbury Laboratory, 47 Bateman St, Cambridge CB2 1LR.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sainsbury Laboratory.

Ecologically, weeds are annuals or short-lived perennials that grow in disturbed habitats, where they can inform about processes related to soil disturbance and habitat productivity. This makes archaeobotanical remains of weeds valuable for understanding the development of disturbance-related activities in the past, such as the early development of plant cultivation during the Neolithic period. Crucially, in southwest Asia, most species that successfully reproduce in crop fields also grow in habitats subjected to various types of ‘natural’ disturbance, which makes it impossible to isolate individual taxa as markers for initial cultivation. We challenge this problem using plant functional ecology, and present the results of two research projects that focused on understanding soil disturbance and productivity in modern grasslands and ‘traditionally’ managed arable fields in the Levant. The constructed ecological models distinguish between these modern habitats, and our results suggest that they also successfully identify conditions of soil disturbance and productivity from archaeobotanical weed assemblages dating to the early and late Neolithic periods (ca. 12,000 – 8,250 cal. BP). Moreover, our models can identify self-shading as an ecological factor, which characterises some of the surveyed grasslands and may represent an indicator of vegetation density. Taken together, plant functional ecology provides a promising tool for understanding agro-ecological processes in the formation of early weed floras, which we can use to reconstruct specific plant management practices that underpin crop domestication and the economic strategies of the world’s first farmers.

This talk is part of the Branching Out Talk Series series.

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• Branching Out Talk Series
• Zoom or in-person at Sainsbury Laboratory, 47 Bateman St, Cambridge CB2 1LR

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