Roman to early medieval cereal farming in the Rhineland: weeds, tillage, and the spread of the mouldboard plough.

A new model for gauging levels of soil disturbance (i.e. tillage) by analysing arable weed assemblages from archaeological contexts is applied to an extensive Roman-to-early medieval archaeobotanical sequence from the region west of Cologne. It tests the hypothesis that increasing use of the mouldboard plough, especially in a three-field system, would result in increased levels of soil disturbance which would be reflected in the kinds of weeds that grew in arable fields. The results point to clear differences in tillage regimes during the Roman period, providing support for the view that military sites were not provisioned by the same networks that supplied the civilian market. They also reveal generally low disturbance levels for the fifth and sixth centuries, indicating a continuing predominance of ard cultivation in the post-Roman period. The majority of seventh- to eighth-century samples had, however, been grown in 'high disturbance' conditions, a pattern that continued through the eighth and ninth centuries. Although use of the mouldboard plough within a fully developed three-field system may not have become widespread until the tenth or eleventh century, our evidence suggests that a plough capable of turning over the soil was in use in the Rhineland at a much earlier date.

New AMS 14C dates track the arrival and spread of broomcorn millet cultivation and agricultural change in prehistoric Europe.

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is not one of the founder crops domesticated in Southwest Asia in the early Holocene, but was domesticated in northeast China by 6000 BC. In Europe, millet was reported in Early Neolithic contexts formed by 6000 BC, but recent radiocarbon dating of a dozen 'early' grains cast doubt on these claims. Archaeobotanical evidence reveals that millet was common in Europe from the 2nd millennium BC, when major societal and economic transformations took place in the Bronze Age. We conducted an extensive programme of AMS-dating of charred broomcorn millet grains from 75 prehistoric sites in Europe. Our Bayesian model reveals that millet cultivation began in Europe at the earliest during the sixteenth century BC, and spread rapidly during the fifteenth/fourteenth centuries BC. Broomcorn millet succeeds in exceptionally wide range of growing conditions and completes its lifecycle in less than three summer months. Offering an additional harvest and thus surplus food/fodder, it likely was a transformative innovation in European prehistoric agriculture previously based mainly on (winter) cropping of wheat and barley. We provide a new, high-resolution chronological framework for this key agricultural development that likely contributed to far-reaching changes in lifestyle in late 2nd millennium BC Europe.