Modeling Early Medieval Agricultural Practices through Archaeobotany

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Medieval landscape archaeologists have described the Middle Saxon (650-850 AD) and Late Saxon (850-1100 AD) periods in England as times of increased agricultural production and economic expansion, but archaeobotanical analyses are not often integrated with these studies. Archaeobotanists have developed several methods of linking ecological properties of identified plants to past agricultural practices. Examples of agricultural practices inferred through archaeobotany include manuring, sowing season, and plowing. These models utilize comparisons of archaeobotanical assemblages to modern plant community observations (phytosociology) or analyze known growing conditions of weed species present in the archaeobotanical assemblage (autecology).

This paper will apply both phytosociological and autecological models to samples from a database of Saxon archaeobotanical reports for England. The aim is to assess whether model selection causes different interpretations of agricultural practices for the same data. This research will also consider whether these models can address archaeobotanical preservation challenges that cause underrepresentation of some seeds. By directly comparing interpretations generated from one dataset via different models, this paper will provide insight into how to interpret past agricultural practices from archaeobotanical data and the significance of archaeobotanical data to understanding increased Saxon agricultural production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23941