Wheat and barley morphometrics: a new method for quantifying ancient cereal varietals

Summary

Free-threshing wheat (Triticum aestivum and T. durum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were staple cereal crops in the ancient Near East. Although modern varietals of these species have significant variation in growing times, water requirements, and grain yields, few studies have distinguished varietals in the past. Traditional approaches have used grain seed size and shape to identify different crop varieties. These coarse metrics, including length:breadth and thickness:breadth ratios, give only a cursory understanding of ancient variation in seed shape. A recent method uses multidimensional analysis of grain morphometrics (GMM) to refine differences in shape that are poorly distinguished by basic measurements; this approach has considerable potential for adding nuance to discussions of cereal farming in the ancient Near East.

We present both basic measurements and multivariate GMM analyses of more than 1,000 complete wheat and barley grains from the site of Gordion in central Turkey, occupied from the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2500 BCE) to the Medieval period (ca. 14th century CE). We compare these data to grain measurement analysis from contemporaneous sites across the Near East to shed light on regional agricultural practices, and develop a comparative perspective on the value of seed morphometrics for reconstructing Near Eastern farming systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage