Did Late Neolithic farming fail or flourish? A Scottish perspective on the evidence for Late Neolithic arable cultivation in the British Isles

Bishop, R.R.

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the recent claim (Stevens and Fuller 2012) that cereal agriculture was abandoned in the Late Neolithic of the British Isles. The Scottish archaeobotanical dataset is considered in detail to test the universal applicability of the model proposed by Stevens and Fuller (2012) and a series of alternative hypotheses are suggested to explain the nature of the current evidence. It is argued that the importance of arable agriculture probably varied on a local as well as a regional scale and that caution should be exercised when attempting to apply unitary models to complex datasets.

Citation

Bishop, R. (2015). Did Late Neolithic farming fail or flourish? A Scottish perspective on the evidence for Late Neolithic arable cultivation in the British Isles. World Archaeology, 47(5), 834-855. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2015.1072477

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 6, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Aug 17, 2015
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Aug 6, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Journal: World Archaeology
• Print ISSN: 0043-8243
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1375
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 834-855
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2015.1072477
• Keywords: Neolithic, Agriculture, Cereal cultivation, Archaeobotany, British Isles, Britain
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1404347