Abstract
Various sites in the valley of the Sant Cugat stream in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Catalonia) were subject to systematic archaeobotanical sampling to obtain an overview of the crops and agriculture of the area during the Iron Age and late antiquity. In all cases, the most numerous taxa were crop plants. Among these, cereals were clearly predominant at all sites investigated, especially Hordeum vulgare var. vulgare (hulled barley) and Triticum aestivum/durum (bread or macaroni wheat), both in numbers and frequency. Other cereals, such as Triticum dicoccum (emmer) or Setaria italica (foxtail bristle-grass), were regularly present in considerably lower numbers but in fairly high frequencies. Pulses were much less numerous, although their presence increases in terms of frequency. Among them, clearly the best represented was Lens culinaris (lentil). The results show that the agriculture in the period considered was principally based on winter cereals, with a gradual substitution of hulled barley by bread/hard wheat, accompanied by other cereals of minor importance, led by Triticum dicoccum (emmer), and pulses. The appearance of Vitis (grapevine) in the Iberian period is one of the important characteristics of agriculture in the Iberian world.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank everyone in the C.R.A.C. and especially Joan Francès and Marta Argelaguès for their work over all these years, as well as Montse Gené, who carried out part of the processing of the residues. We also thank F. Bittmann, C. Boswell, O. Brinkkemper and L. Zapata for their comments. This work was partly supported by the MCYT project HUM2005–06384/HIST. We also acknowledge the useful comments of the anonymous referees, which helped us to significantly improve the original manuscript. This contribution is dedicated to Prof. Dr Corrie Bakels on the occasion of her 65th birthday with many thanks for the hospitality in her laboratory and her stimulating role for Spanish archaeobotany in general and for my PhD thesis in particular.
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334_2007_113_MOESM1_ESM.xls
Table 1 Results of the first Iron Age and Iberian sites. For each taxon: number of remains recovered and number of samples where it has been identified (frequency) (XLS 28 kb)
334_2007_113_MOESM2_ESM.xls
Table 2 Results of Els Mallols site. For each taxon: number of remains recovered and number of samples where it has been identified (frequency) (XLS 15 kb)
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Alonso, N. Crops and agriculture during the Iron Age and late antiquity in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Catalonia, Spain). Veget Hist Archaeobot 17, 75–84 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-007-0113-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-007-0113-y