| Summary: | Excavations at Knossos have uncovered faunal and archaeobotanical archives spanning the
Neolithic and Bronze Age (7
th to 2nd millennia BCE), during which one of Europe’s earliest
known farming settlements developed into its first major urban settlement and centre of one of
its oldest regional states. Through stable isotope (δ
13C, δ
15N) analysis of seeds and bones (as
evidence for the growing conditions of cereal and pulse crops and for the types of forage
consumed by livestock), land use and, ultimately, political economy are explored. Changing
husbandry conditions overwrite any effects of long-term aridification. Early (7th
-6
th millennium
BCE) Knossian farmers grew intensively managed cereals and pulses (probably in rotation) that
were closely integrated (as manured sources of forage) with livestock. Through the later
Neolithic and Bronze Age, settlement growth accompanied more extensive cultivation
(eventually with cereals and pulses not in rotation) and greater use of rough graze and, by goats,
browse. Pasture on cultivated land remained central, however, to the maintenance of sheep, cattle
and pigs. Variable diet of early sheep suggests management at the household level, while
thereafter progressive dietary divergence of sheep and goats implies their separate herding. Until
the Old Palace phase (early 2nd millennium BCE), urban growth was matched by increasingly
extensive and probably distant cultivation and herding, but somewhat more intensive conditions
during the New and Final Palace phases (mid-2
nd millennium BCE) perhaps reflect greater
reliance on surplus from prime land of previously rival centres that now came under Knossian
control.
|
|---|