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Abstract:

Abstract The programme of radiocarbon dating undertaken at Stanwick, Northamptonshire, demonstrates the value of scientific dating of Romano-British sites, including those with good pottery sequences and large numbers of datable coins and other finds. It has refined and clarified the chronology and phasing of the site, particularly in its final phase of occupation. It confirmed some of our original dating of the human burials, and showed other dates were significantly wrong. It also addresses issues relating to the calibration of radiocarbon dates and dietary isotopes in the period. This has enabled us to identify activities, material culture and burial practices current at Stanwick and elsewhere in the immediate post-Roman period.

Abstract:

The population of England grew steeply in the Middle Ages, especially between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. This volume investigates how medieval farmers managed to produce the large harvests needed to sustain this growth, growth that in turn fuelled a major expansion of towns and markets. New evidence is presented for the development of the medieval farming regimes that shaped the English landscape in ways still visible today. Medieval farming is a contentious topic, not least because of the different approaches taken by historians, archaeologists and geographers and no consensus has been reached about the cultivation regimes that underpinned medieval cereal production. This volume presents a new perspective on this question, based on the results of a project that analysed the remains of medieval crops, arable weeds, livestock and pollen from hundreds of excavations. The new evidence that this generated reveals the conditions in which medieval crops were grown and how land use changed between the late Roman period and the Black Death. The authors relate the results to archaeological and written evidence for farms and farming, bringing an ecological perspective to the debate about the so-called medieval 'agricultural revolution'. The 'cerealisation' of England emerges as a regionally varied process lasting several centuries, whose overall impact was nevertheless revolutionary.

Abstract:

ISODATE is a complete dating package for stable oxygen isotope dendrochronology that offers a user-friendly workspace for processing, crossmatching and precisely dating stable isotope chronologies. ISODATE provides the first standardisation of approach for isotope laboratories and the heritage sector for dating and the reporting of dates. The software produces downloadable figures and CSV files containing series alignments and statistical results. The application is freely and publicly available online (isodate.swansea.ac.uk). A manual and guided example accompanies the software. It is hoped that community-led refinements and additional reference chronologies will be added to ISODATE as the technique develops and is adopted more widely.

Abstract:

Multiple pre-Columbian (pre-1492 CE) archaeological sites now challenge the traditional portrayal of Amazonia as a ‘pristine wilderness’. This is especially true within the forest-savanna mosaic landscapes of lowland Bolivia, where the pre-Columbian Casarabe Culture constructed hundreds of settlement mounds, integrated with a dense causeway-canal network – one of the most complex, stratified societies yet discovered in Amazonia. Excavations at previous sites indicate that this culture sustained itself by practicing large-scale, maize-based agriculture. However, the Casarabe Culture’s mounds have also been found within the riparian forests abutting major river systems, where their inhabitants could have benefitted from greater access to forest resources and local fish species. To determine whether these differences influenced how the Casarabe Culture utilised the landscape, we conducted palaeoecological analysis on the sediments collected from Laguna Loma Suarez (LLS), an oxbow lake situated adjacent to a monumental habitation mound within these riparian forests. Our analysis reveals that, despite significant differences in natural resource availability, the Casarabe Culture continued to cultivate maize locally around LLS for over a millennium, between 280 BCE and 1130 CE, with anthropogenic fires largely restricted to the open savannas. Our record also suggests that the Casarabe Culture possibly delayed either forest recovery or natural forest encroachment until after the nearby settlement mound was abandoned. These findings, when compared with those of other sites in the region, show that maize was an important crop in pre-Columbian times, irrespective of major differences in natural resource availability across the complex forest-savanna mosaic settings of Amazonian Bolivia.