Charlene A Murphy

Although world-renowned, Pompeii, the first Roman site to be excavated and one of the most visited and best-studied archaeological sites in the world, still has unanswered
questions to yield, especially in terms of its long-term development from pre-Roman times.
The extensive excavations (1995–2006) by the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii (AAPP) has provided a rare insight into chronological change within the city of Pompeii. This
research was significant as an insula block within the city of Pompeii has never previously been excavated in its entirety. The analysis of all the recovered seeds, fruits and cereal
remains has provided a unique research opportunity to undertake a diachronic study of urban Roman plant food consumption and discards. Over the past two centuries of
excavations at Pompeii only a handful of published works dealing with botanical evidence have been published. The results from this study demonstrate a standard Mediterranean
archaeobotanical assemblage recovered from Insula VI.1 which included wheat, barley, legumes, olives, grapes and figs. A wider diversity of fruits, pulses, and additional cereals,
especially broomcorn millet were also found. These results support the established view that Pompeii was a fully urbanised city in the 1st century B.C

Horsegram has been an important cropsince the beginning of agriculture in many parts ofSouth Asia. Despite horsegram’s beneficial prope rtiesas a hardy, multi-functional crop, it is still regarded asa food of the poor, particularly in sout hern India.Mistakenly regarded as a minor crop, largely due toentrenched biases against this under-utilised crop,horsegram has received far less research than otherpulses of higher status. The present study provides anupdated analysis of evidence for horsegram’s origins,based on archaeological evidence, historical linguis-tics, and herbarium collections of probable wildpopulations. Our survey of herbarium specimensprovides an updated map of the probable range of thewild progenitor. A large database of modern refer-ence material provides an updated baseline fordistinguishing wild and domesticated seeds, whilean extensive dataset of archaeological seed measure-ments provides evidence for regional trends towardslarger seed size, indicating domestication. Separatetrends towards domestication are identified for north-western India around 4000 BP, and for the IndianPeninsula around 3500 BP, suggesting at least twoseparate domestications. This synthesis provides anew baseline for further germplasm sampling, espe-cially of wild populations, and furtherarchaeobotanical data collection.

Keywords Domestication · Biogeography ·Macrotyloma uniflorum · Morphometric ·Archaeobotany · Linguistics · South Asia

Although world-renowned, Pompeii, the first Roman site to be excavated and one of the most visited and best-studied archaeological sites in the world, still has unanswered questions to yield, especially in terms of its long-term development from pre-Roman times. The extensive excavations (1995–2006) by the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii (AAPP) has provided a rare insight into chronological change within the city of Pompeii. This research was significant as an insula block within the city of Pompeii has never previously been excavated in its entirety. The analysis of all the recovered seeds, fruits and cereal remains has provided a unique research opportunity to undertake a diachronic study of urban Roman plant food consumption and discards. Over the past two centuries of excavations at Pompeii only a handful of published works dealing with botanical evidence have been published. The results from this study demonstrate a standard Mediterranean archaeobotanical assemblage recovered from Insula VI.1 which included wheat, barley, legumes, olives, grapes and figs. A wider diversity of fruits, pulses, and additional cereals, especially broomcorn millet were also found. These results support the established view that Pompeii was a fully urbanised city in the 1st century B.C

<p>The workshop has the goals of addressing the technical and representativeness challenges of combining archaeobotanical, and other data specifically for olive; and movement towards an economic model for olive production and consumption in Lazio/Campania.</p

Archaeological research in Bangladesh is a relatively new discipline with archaeological excavations beginning in the late 20th century. The first Archaeology Department in Bangladesh was established at Jahangirnagar University in 1992. As in other tropical areas, palaeo-environmental research has been slow to be adopted and investigated in Bangladesh. This article uses the excavations of Wari-Bateshwar and Vikrampura as successful case studies of the first systematic environmental archaeological recovery undertaken by a joint Anglo-Bangladesh team led by Mizanur Rahman from the Department of Archaeology, Jahangirnagar University (JU) with collaboration from University College London (UCL), Institute of Archaeology. Contrary to the long-held assumptions regarding the poor preservation and recovery of archaeobotanical remains in tropical conditions flotation, results from Wari-Bateshwar and Vikrampura proved to be successful. The recovered archaeobotanical remains suggest that the inhabitants at these sites likely practised rice and millet agriculture in permanent settlements, and importantly, further demonstrate that environmental sampling is worthwhile even in the tropical conditions found in Bangladesh.

Agriculture has been crucial in sustaining human populations in South Asia across dramatically variable environments for millennia. Until recently, however, the origins of this mode of subsistence in India have been discussed in terms of population migration and crop introduction, with limited focus on how agricultural packages were formulated and utilised in local contexts. Here, we report the first measurements of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values in well-preserved charred crop remains from sites spanning the Neolithic/Chalcolithic to the Early Historic in two very different environmental zones: tropical East India and the semi-arid Deccan. The results show that this approach offers direct insight into prehistoric crop management under contrasting environmental constraints. Our preliminary results plausibly suggest that early farmers in India experimented with and made strategic use of water and manure resources in accordance with specific crop requirements and under varying environmental constraints. We suggest that the development of modern crop isotope baselines across India, and the application of this methodology to archaeological assemblages, has the potential to yield detailed insight into agroecology in India's past.

Cereal grain measurements (length, width, breadth) are among the most widely reported form of archaeobotanical data after species identification and counts, and yet this have featured little in archaeobotanical analyses. The present paper compiles and analyses a large number of measurements from barley, einkorn wheat, and emmer wheat (n = 21,771 measured grains) from sites across Europe and Southwest Asia from the beginnings of the Neolithic on Southwest Asia through the Bronze Age (n = 147 sites). Three kinds of pat-terns are identified in these data: first, differences in the average metrics be-tween cereal varieties, such as between einkorn and emmer wheat, or between hulled and naked barley. Second there are clear chronological trends of increas-ing grain size, associated with domestication in Southwest Asia. The extent of size change during the first 3,000 years of cereal cultivation are greater than changes over the subsequent 5,000 years of the European Neolithic and Bronze Age. Third there are apparent regional differences in average grain size in different parts of Europe that suggest varietal differentiation as cereals became adapted to different regions.

The earliest attempts to identify economic and edible plants from Pompeii came from ancient textual and art historical research. However, in more recent excavations of the site’s bicentennial ‘archaeological history’, a handful of influential publications on the archaeobotanical evidence, mainly from material in the storerooms, have been produced and added key information to this discussion. This growing corpus of data, in combination with the legacy archaeobotanical record, has shed new light on the diachronic patterns of food and cuisine for the city of Pompeii, regarding it as a fully urban consumer society by the first century AD within the Roman Empire. This article synthesizes the available legacy and recent archaeobotanical evidence that both testifies to the established ‘standard’ Mediterranean diet for Pompeii and demonstrates changes in the number and diversity of plant species recovered. These changes represent a significant shift in the economic division of the city’s in...

India possesses a unique Neolithic transition to sedentism and agriculture which has shaped the cultural and ecological trajectory of the subcontinent. In the early Holocene South Asia was a subcontinent of hunter-gatherers. By 2000 years ago it was mostly inhabited by farmers, supporting densely populated river valleys, coastal plains, urban populations, states and empires. South Asia appears to have been host to a mosaic of processes, including local domestication of plants and animals, the dispersal of pastoral and agro-pastoral peoples between regions and the adoption of food production by indigenous hunter-gatherers from neighboring cultures. While some of the crops that supported these early civilizations had been introduced from other centres of origin (the Near East, China, Africa), a large proportion of important crops were indigenous wild plants from the subcontinent. This paper will incorporate the relatively new complimentary theories of Niche Construction and Entangleme...

The present paper reports the first systematic archaeobotanical evidence from Bangladesh together with direct AMS radiocarbon dates on crop remains. Macro-botanical remains were collected by flotation from two sites, Wari-Bateshwar (WB), an Early Historic archaeological site, dating mainly between 400 and 100 BC, with a later seventh century AD temple complex, and Raghurampura Vikrampura (RV), a Buddhist Monastery (vihara) located within the Vikrampura city site complex and dating to the eleventh and sixteenth centuries AD. Despite being a tropical country, with high rainfall and intensive soil processes, our work demonstrates that conventional archaeobotany, the collection of macro-remains through flotation, has much potential towards putting together a history of crops and agricultural systems in Bangladesh. The archaeobotanical assemblage collected from both sites indicates the predominance of rice agriculture, which would have been practiced in summer. Spikelet bases are of dome...

We model the prehistoric dispersals of two rice varieties, japonica and proto- indica, across Asia using empirical evidence drawn from an archaeobotanical dataset of 400 sites from mainland East, Southeast and South Asia. The approach is based on regression modelling wherein goodness of fit is obtained from log–log quantile regressions of the archaeologically inferred age versus a least-cost distance from the origin(s) of dispersal. The Fast Marching method is used to estimate the least-cost distances based on simple geographical features. We explicitly test three hypotheses for the arrival of japonica rice to India where, it has been proposed, it hybridized with the indigenous proto- indica, subsequently spreading again throughout India. Model selection, based on information criteria, highlights the role of the Inner Asia Mountain Corridor in introducing japonica rice into northeast India, followed closely by a ‘mixed-route’ model, where japonica was also almost simultaneously intr...

Reduction of seed dormancy mechanisms, allowing for rapid germination after planting, is a recurrent trait in domesticated plants, and can often be linked to changes in seed coat structure, in particular thinning. We report evidence for seed coat thinning between 2,000 BC and 1,200 BC, in southern Indian archaeological horsegram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), which it has been possible to document with high precision and non-destructively, through high resolution x-ray computed tomography using a synchrotron. We find that this trait underwent stepped change, from thick to semi-thin to thin seed coats, and that the rate of change was gradual. This is the first time that the rate of evolution of seed coat thinning in a legume crop has been directly documented from archaeological remains, and it contradicts previous predictions that legume domestication occurred through selection of pre-adapted low dormancy phenotypes from the wild.

The period from the late third millennium BC to the start of the first millennium AD witnesses the first steps towards food globalization in which a significant number of important crops and animals, independently domesticated within China, India, Africa and West Asia, traversed Central Asia greatly increasing Eurasian agricultural diversity. This paper utilizes an archaeobotanical database (AsCAD), to explore evidence for these crop translocations along southern and northern routes of interaction between east and west. To begin, crop translocations from the Near East across India and Central Asia are examined for wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) from the eighth to the second millennia BC when they reach China. The case of pulses and flax (Linum usitatissimum) that only complete this journey in Han times (206 BC-AD 220), often never fully adopted, is also addressed. The discussion then turns to the Chinese millets, Panicum miliaceum and Setaria italica, peaches...

This chapter explores patterns in the available evidence for Indian plant domestication, focusing on the southern Deccan and placing the evidence within a broader context of other centers of domestication. It also discusses domestication in western India and the Ganges region. The Neolithic period in the Deccan Plateau of South India appears to have begun near the start of the third millennium BCE, based on radiocarbon dating from Kodekal and Utnur, and continued to about 1000 BCE. The earliest well-documented ashmound sites are Utnur, which was in use from 2600 to 2400 BCE and Budihal, which was slightly later at 2300-1700 BCE. Compared with other types of material culture, pottery seems to reflect cultural changes in South Asian society relatively rapidly, perhaps indicating the central role ceramics played in culinary ideologies and heritage of taste. It is the food preparation traditions that are usually strongly conservative, not the ceramic traditions.

Examining the evidence for millet in the Roman empire, during the period, circa 753 BC–610 AD, presents a number of challenges: a handful of scant mentions in the ancient surviving agrarian texts, only a few fortuitous preserved
archaeological finds and limited archaeobotanical and isotopic
evidence. Ancient agrarian texts note millet’s ecological preferences and multiple uses. Recent archaeobotanical and isotopic evidence has shown that millet was being used throughout the Roman period. The compiled data suggests that millet consumption was a more complex issue than the ancient
sources alone would lead one to believe. Using the recent
archaeobotanical study of Insula VI.I from the city of Pompeii,
as a case study, the status and role of millet in the Roman
world is examined and placed within its economic, cultural
and social background across time and space in the Roman
world.

India possesses a unique Neolithic transition to sedentism and agriculture which has shaped the cultural and ecological trajectory of the subcontinent. In the early Holocene South Asia was a subcontinent of hunter-gatherers. By 2000 years ago it was mostly inhabited by farmers, supporting densely populated river valleys, coastal plains, urban populations, states and empires. South Asia appears to have been host to a mosaic of processes, including local domestication of plants and animals, the dispersal of pastoral and agro-pastoral peoples between regions and the adoption of food production by indigenous hunter-gatherers from neighboring cultures. While some of the crops that supported these early civilizations had been introduced from other centres of origin (the Near East, China, Africa), a large proportion of important crops were indigenous wild plants from the subcontinent. This paper will incorporate the relatively new complimentary theories of Niche Construction and Entanglement theory to examine the local transitions from foraging to farming in India. Specifically, this paper will focus on patterns in the available data for native Indian pulses including Horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), Urd Bean (Vigna mungo) and Pigeon Pea (Cajanus cajan) to explore current ideas on evolutionary change and plant domestication in the subcontinent of India.

The olive was one of the most valuable and versatile crops of ancient Italy and a staple of the Roman diet. Subjected to intense climatic and anthropogenic manipulation the olive tree is considered one of the most versatile and essential crops of the Mediterranean and a staple of the Roman diet. Olives have been present in Greece since at least the Minoan era, around 3000 BC. Greeks of this period were using olives as both food and the olive oil as fuel for their small clay lamps. From ancient Greece the olive tree spread throughout the Mediterranean through human intervention. The olive tree is more easily propagated than other fruit trees, through both sexual and asexual modes, which is thought to have facilitated its relatively quick dispersal throughout the Mediterranean following both land and maritime routes to Italy, Spain, North Africa and France.

This paper will provide a general overview of the known archaeobotanical evidence of olive from the region of Campania. The macrobotanical evidence will be augmented by a general presentation of the scant historical evidence, including ancient sources, wall paintings, and artefacts which provide additional evidence for the presence and use of olive in Campania.

The main corpus of data for this presentation will be from the city of Pompeii including the early finds of olives and relatively recent archaeological evidence from several international teams. This data set is composed of different properties throughout Pompeii and Herculaneum including gardens, and domestic and commercial properties.

During the Republican and Imperial periods the Pompeian economy was thought to have been a hard-driven traditional agricultural economy. This is evident from the intensive agrarian methods of inter-cultivation and combination cropping practices with vines, olives and grain and crop rotation with legumes and fodder crops. Thus, it is inferred that the stress in place at the time of Imperial Rome on the vegetation of Italy was at least as great as any the Mediterranean experienced before the 19th century industrial age. Therefore it is likely that in Campania amongst the olive grooves other crops would have been grown as well.

The relatively late cultivation of olive trees at Pompeii is surprising given that olive stones are present in other prehistoric sites in southern Italy. The wreckage of the Etruscan ship Giglio yielded olives preserved in brine dated to 600 BC. Olive pits were also discovered from the so-called Tomb of the Olives in Caere, 575-550 BC, as it is believed that olive pits were considered an offering to the dead. Archaeological research at Lepine Hills, in southern Latium, has unearthed several platforms dating to the Late Republican period, from the late 4th century BC, constructed on hill slopes and interpreted by the researchers as being related to olive cultivation. It is possible that olive cultivation occurred much earlier in other regions of Italy. Also, this does not rule out the exploitation and use of wild olives before domestication is visible in the archaeological record around Pompeii. Thus archaeological evidence for the intensification of olive cultivation in central Italy is present despite olives absence in the earlier deposits in Pompeii.

The early discoveries of botanical remains in Pompeii made upon its re-discovery were easily recognisable and present in large quantities include dolia filled with olives and pine cones from the marine warehouse of M. Cellius Africanus near the ancient port of Pompeii.

Unfortunately, we have no detailed description of a `standard´ Roman meal recorded in the surviving ancient sources. The diet of the Roman middling and lower classes, aside from local variations, was most likely heavily concentrated upon cereals, along with olives and grapes and other less important crops such as millets, oats, and rye. Supplementing this diet would have been dried or fresh vegetables and fruits, honey, a variety of nuts including walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pinenuts, and chestnuts, and animal protein from milk, cheese, meat, and fish. The majority of the poorer ancient Greek and Italian people would not have seen the great quantities of luxury foods described by the ancient authors such as Appicus's famous cookbook .

In terms of taphonomy, due to their preferential preservation olive stones are fairly ubiquitous and usually recovered from most Mediterranean archaeological sites. It is likely that most parts of the olive were used in the past including the leaves, flowers, fruits, bark of the root, ash of the tree, and the oil, especially the green oil. However , preservation-wise these parts of the olive are rarely preserved. A rare example being the burnt hay and fodder from Oplontis which had olive leaves. Neef (1990) has suggested that the round edges of the carbonised fragments of olive endocarps may indicate that they may have been broken before charring occurred and this could be an indication of burning lees, the residue from pressing, and possible evidence for fuel use. However, the presence of rounded edges may also represent regular fracture and deposition pattern on certain sites. Pliny (NH XV.22) recommends making use of these olive stones rather than wood as a fuel because olive stones generate a good heat with little ash produced and would have made ideal kindling, or lighting material within the household. In contrast Robinson (1999) interprets the charred olive stones, dating to the same period from the House of Amarantus (I.IX.xii), as evidence of the culinary practice of preparing pickled olives.

There is limited artefactual or visual artistic evidence from Pompeii of olives. Compiling the dataset on the published literature on olives will begin to focus empirical data on olives in order to begin to visualisation and interpreting changes in olive usage through time and exploring the multiple uses of olive in Roman Campania. In addition, a review of current issues of taphonomy regarding olive preservation, sampling bias, and methodological issues of quantification will be undertaken.

Looking for the evidence of millet, a generic term for a large group of small seeded-grasses, that includes both Setaria italia (L.) P. Beauv. and Panicum miliaceum L., used during the Roman empire, circa 753 BC–610 AD, presents a number of challenges. Millets are only mentioned a handful of times in the ancient surviving texts, there are only a few well-documented preserved archaeological finds of millet and limited scientific evidence, including archaeobotanical (ancient preserved plant remains) and isotopic evidence (based upon plants using either C3 and C4 photosynthesis). All these lines of evidence are problematic in terms of their representativeness but together they offer a more complete glimpse into the growing understanding of millet and its use and importance in the Roman world.

ABSTRACT

Despite its world renown as an archaeological site, the past twelve years of archaeological excavations (1995-2006) by the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii (AAPP) provides one of the few examples of chronological depth in Pompeii. The main focus of this doctoral research was the analysis of the archaeobotanical assemblage recovered during the course of the excavation of Regione VI, insula I, Pompeii, Italy by the AAPP.

Pompeii provides a well-situated and firmly documented historical context from which to examine issues of food distribution and consumption in a complex urban society and highlights the role that archaeobotanical analysis can contribute to studies of social and economic differentiation. This research attempted to provide a diachronic analysis of wider patterns of food consumption across contemporaneous households, from a variety of domestic and commercial contexts over the nearly three hundred year occupation of Insula VI.I.

Aside from a few primary deposits there was a general paucity of archaeobotanical remains from the properties of Insula VI.I. Urban archaeobotany presents a number of problems, including the presence of intact floors, mosaics, re-building and construction events and lack of rubbish deposits or middens. The low scatter of standard Mediterranean taxa or archaeobotanical background `noise´ from the majority of contexts examined in this study suggests that they were composed of secondary fill.

The archaeobotanical evidence from this study yielded no firm evidence of trade or conclusive information regarding the different cultural influences upon Pompeii. The general lack of evidence for crop-processing within Insula VI.I, from all properties examined, suggest that within this section of Pompeii cereal processing was no longer occurring and was likely taking place in the nearby countryside outside the city gates. These results support the established view that Pompeii was a fully urbanised city in the 1st century AD.