Dataset Information

Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans.

ABSTRACT: The application of biomolecular techniques to archaeological materials from the Balkans is providing valuable new information on the prehistory of the region. This is especially relevant for the study of the neolithisation process in SE Europe, which gradually affected the rest of the continent. Here, to answer questions regarding diet and subsistence practices in early farming societies in the central Balkans, we combine organic residue analyses of archaeological pottery, taxonomic and isotopic study of domestic animal remains and biomolecular analyses of human dental calculus. The results from the analyses of the lipid residues from pottery suggest that milk was processed in ceramic vessels. Dairy products were shown to be part of the subsistence strategies of the earliest Neolithic communities in the region but were of varying importance in different areas of the Balkan. Conversely, milk proteins were not detected within the dental calculus. The molecular and isotopic identification of meat, dairy, plants and beeswax in the pottery lipids also provided insights into the diversity of diet in these early Neolithic communities, mainly based on terrestrial resources. We also present the first compound-specific radiocarbon dates for the region, obtained directly from absorbed organic residues extracted from pottery, identified as dairy lipids.

SUBMITTER: Stojanovski D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7444498 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans.

Stojanovski Darko D Živaljević Ivana I Dimitrijević Vesna V Dunne Julie J Evershed Richard P RP Balasse Marie M Dowle Adam A Hendy Jessica J McGrath Krista K Fischer Roman R Speller Camilla C Jovanović Jelena J Casanova Emmanuelle E Knowles Timothy T Balj Lidija L Naumov Goce G Putica Anđelka A Starović Andrej A Stefanović Sofija S

PloS one 20200820 8

The application of biomolecular techniques to archaeological materials from the Balkans is providing valuable new information on the prehistory of the region. This is especially relevant for the study of the neolithisation process in SE Europe, which gradually affected the rest of the continent. Here, to answer questions regarding diet and subsistence practices in early farming societies in the central Balkans, we combine organic residue analyses of archaeological pottery, taxonomic and isotopic ...[more]

PMID: 32817620

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Project description:Habitat alterations resulting from land-use change are major drivers of global biodiversity losses. In Africa, these threats are especially severe. For instance, demand to convert land into agricultural uses is leading to increasing areas of drylands in southern and central Africa being transformed for agriculture. In Zimbabwe, a land reform programme provided an opportunity to study the biodiversity response to abrupt habitat modification in part of a 91,000 ha dryland area of semi-natural savannah used since 1930 for low-level cattle ranching. Small-scale subsistence farms were created during 2001-2002 in 65,000 ha of this area, with ranching continuing in the remaining unchanged area. We measured the compositions of bird communities in farmed and ranched land over 8 years, commencing one decade after subsistence farms were established. Over the study period, repeated counts were made along the same 45 transects to assess species' population changes that may have resulted from trait-filtering responses to habitat disturbance. In 2012, avian species' richness was substantially higher (+8.8%) in the farmland bird community than in the unmodified ranched area. Temporal trends over the study period showed increased species' richness in the ranched area (+12.3%) and farmland (+6.8%). There were increased abundances in birds of most sizes, and in all feeding guilds. New species did not add new functional traits, and no species with distinctive traits were lost in either area. As a result, species' diversity reduced, and functional redundancy increased by 6.8% in ranched land. By 2020, two decades after part of the ranched savannah was converted into farmland, the compositions of the two bird communities had both changed and became more similar. The broadly benign impact on birds of land conversion into subsistence farms is attributed to the relatively low level of agricultural activity in the farmland and the large regional pool of nonspecialist bird species.

Dataset Information

Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans.

Publications

Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans.

Similar Datasets

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