G10 - The Palaeolithic Antecedents of the Neolithic Revolution: Insights from Hunter-Gatherer Archaeobotany

Session Organisers: Ceren Kabukcu, Eleni Asouti

Category: Domestication / Subsistence Economy

Session Abstract: Pre-agricultural traditions of plant food preparation are often overlooked in archaeological and anthropological discourses portraying culinary innovations as corollaries of 'Neolithisation', particularly in the context of Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean basin. This session brings together researchers using novel, cutting-edge archaeobotanical methods to explore the deep time histories and evolution of regional hunter-gatherer plant-based subsistence strategies. Recent archaeobotanical discoveries clearly demonstrate that the plant food consumption practices of late Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were complex, diverse and often included multiple steps of labour-intensive processing. Such practices have long been perceived by prehistorians as the hallmarks of Neolithic food producing societies and the origin of cuisine as we understand it today. These discoveries point to a much deeper and longer ancestry of culinary practices, predating the start of agriculture by thousands of years, and open new frontiers in hunter-gatherer archaeobotany beyond reconstructing plant resource choice. More significantly, they also question long-standing paradigms about the nature of the transition from foraging to cultivation and farming, including exploring homologous developments in pre-agricultural plant management and uses in Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean basin during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.

Room: B

07/11/2024

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
10:00 - 10:15	Ceren Kabukcu, Eleni Asouti	Plant use and subsistence practices during the Epipalaeolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the eastern Fertile Crescent
10:15 - 10:30	Marc Cardenas, Amaia Arranz-Otaegui	Plant food choices and culinary practices in the transition to food production in southwest Asia
10:30 - 10:45	Ernestina Badal, Yolanda Carrión-Marco, Carmen Maria Martínez-Varea, Guillem Pérez-Jordá	Before farming. Management and use of plants by hunter-gatherers of the western mediterranean
10:45 - 11:00	Tony Brown, Sam Hudson, David Jacques, Ben Pears	“Stonehenge Before Stonehenge” Mesolithic-Neolithic sedaDNA-based Environmental Reconstruction from the Avon Valley and Its Bearing on Hunter-Gatherer-Pastoralists Interactions
11:00 - 11:15	Oksana Yanshina, Elena Sergusheva	Evidence for ?illet ?onsumption in the Lower Amur River Basin during the Early Holocene