Plant cultivation has a long and successful history that is tightly linked to environmental and climate change, social development and to cultural traditions and diversity. This is true also for the high latitudes of northern Europe, where cultivation started thousands of years before the earliest written records. The long history of cultivation can be studied by archaeobotany, which is the study of ancient seeds, pollen and other plant remains found on archaeological sites.

This book presents recent advances in North-European archaeobotany. It focuses on plant cultivation and brings together studies from different countries and research environments, both at universities and within contract archaeology.

The studies cover the Nordic countries and adjacent parts of the Baltic countries and Russia, and they span more than 5.000 years of agricultural history, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages. They highlight and discuss many different aspects of early agriculture, from the first introduction of cultivation, to crop choices, expansions and declines, climatic adaptation, and vegetable gardening.

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Contents

Santeri Vanhanen & Per Lagerås
Introduction to Archaeobotanical studies of past plant cultivation in northern Europe   1

Dawn Elise Mooney & Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir
Barley cultivation in Viking Age Iceland in light of evidence from Lækjargata 10-12, Reykjavík   5

Eli-Christine Soltvedt
Cereal cultivation in south-western Norway: Boom and bust in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age   21

Marianne Høyem Andreasen
Free-threshing wheat in Danish prehistory   37

Peter Mose Jensen, Livija Ivanovaitė & Anja Vegeberg Jensen
A Bronze Age house at Hestehaven: An early example of storage and cultivation of hulled barley (Hordeum vulgare var. vulgare) in Denmark   53

Christin Eldegard Jensen
Tracing pioneer agriculture in northern Norway   69

Sara Westling & Christin Eldegard Jensen
Indications of rye (Secale cereale) cultivation from 7th century south-western Norway   83

Wiebke Kirleis, Magdalena Wieckowska-Lüth, Henny Piezonka, Nadezhda Nedomolkina, Sebastian Lorenz, Vanessa Elberfeld & Jens Schneeweiss
The development of plant use and cultivation in the Sukhona basin, north-west Russian taiga zone   101

Kirstine Krath Helweg
Gardening at medieval farmsteads: Archaeobotanical indications of horticulture in Denmark and southern Sweden, AD 1000-1500   119

Santeri Vanhanen
Roman Iron Age and Migration period plant cultivation at Salo Isokylä, south-western Finland   131

Terttu Lempiäinen, Maija Helamaa, Heli Lehto, Ulla Moilanen, Markku Oinonen, Sakari Salomaa & Kari Uotila
New cereal grain finds from southern Satakunta, Finland, dated from the Late Bronze Age to the Middle Ages   145

Mindaugas Grikpėdis, Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute
From barley to buckwheat: Plants cultivated in the Eastern Baltic region until the 13th-14th century AD   155