Archaeobotanical evidence of crop growing and diet within the areas of the Karanovo and the Linear Pottery Cultures: a quantitative and qualitative approach

© 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany. For the interpretation of the transition process to the European Neolithic, it is important to understand the archaeobotanical on-site display of plant remains in different investigation areas and different archaeological contexts. As regionally diverse archaeological feature types have been sampled in varying ways, they might bring to light different assemblages of plant remains for methodological reasons. Therefore, this paper uses the underlying fully quantified archaeobotanical data from 67 Neolithic sites and 2,279 samples from 832 features in Bulgaria, Austria and Germany. Also, a feature based quantitative comparison was made between the Early to Late Neolithic crop spectra from Bulgaria and those of the Early Neolithic Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) of central Europe. This touches the hypothesis of agricultural risk management and the question whether an ecological barrier may have prevented the LBK farmers from growing all of the original crops of the Balkan area and southwest Asia, so that they changed to a less diverse crop spectrum as well as new dietary preferences.status: publishe