The Emergence of Civilisation by Renfrew Colin & John Cherry

Author:Renfrew, Colin & John Cherry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Ancient / General
ISBN: 9781785707735
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

AGRICULTURE

The principal change at this period in cereal cultivation, which was already well-established and diversified previously, is the shift from wheat to barley. Six-row barley is the principal crop reported from Thessaly, and it is the chief cereal at early bronze age Sitagroi. Just as today, in warmer and drier southern Greece barley was the dominant cereal–at Lerna III for instance, and Early Minoan II Myrtos. Wheat, but no barley, however, was found in the First and Second Cities of Troy (ibid., 40) so that no overriding generalisation is possible.

A very marked feature of the Sitagroi finds is that cereal crops were found less often than pulse crops (notably vetch) and acorns. Beans, peas and vetch have been found also at various sites, including Troy, and Lerna, where lentils were also reported. Clearly all the crops already exploited in the later neolithic were utilised. At Lerna, linseeds occur for the first time (Hopf 1962, 4): while flax may have been grown to produce linen, the aim may have been to obtain oil from the seeds, a common practice in Egypt (Lucas 1962, 333) and elsewhere.

The apparent decline in the relative importance of cereal cultivation at Sitagroi may just possibly be due to some exhaustion of the soil. Alternatively it may reflect a marked increase in the collection of pulses and acorns without any diminution in cereal production, possibly accompanying a population increase. One may speculate whether the preference for barley as against wheat observed in bronze age Thessaly may not be related to similar factors, or again conceivably to a hypothetical change to a drier climate in the later third millennium referred to above. But there is far from sufficient evidence at present to substantiate either notion.

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