Explaining and Exploring Diversity in Agricultural Technology

By Oxbow Books

This volume is the outcome of collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists, and frequently uses experiments in archaeology. It aims to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches and for viewing agriculture from the standpoint of the human actors involved. Each chapter provides an interdisciplinary overview of the skills used and the social context of the pursuit of agriculture, highlighting examples of tools, technologies and processes from land clearance to cereal processing and food preparation. This is the second of three volumes in the EARTH monograph series, The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8,000 years of resilience and innovation , which shows the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms, in their social, political, cultural and legal contexts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782970217

Book preview

Preface

Patricia C. Anderson and Leonor Peña-Chocarro

Scientific Overview

This book takes an interdisciplinary look at European preindustrial agriculture, including its origins and its diffusion outside Europe. Agriculture and its origins have long been lively and innovative subjects of research, involving people working in a variety of disciplines. Initial impetus to this area came from several quite separate disciplines. Archaeologists working in the 1940s and 1950s, studied flint blades found on archaeological sites in the Middle East and in Europe, which they hypothesised had been inserts forming the working parts of agricultural tools. Such identifications were based upon intimate knowledge of ethnographic tools (Steensberg 1943), and by examining the microscopic traces of use on their edges (Semenov 1964). Agronomists, in turn, interested in the origins of agriculture studied the behaviour of wild cereals still growing in their natural habitats and explored the way human activities may have influenced crop evolution (Harlan 1975). This area of study, pioneered by a few researchers like O. Heer (1865), lead agronomists and botanists towards the beginnings of archaeobotanical research (e.g. Hopf 1954, 1955). Over time, however, the study of agriculture evolved towards an interdisciplinary approach which tried to fully understand its multiple facets: plants, techniques, soil types, environment, agronomic practices, the attendant animal husbandry, impact on landscape, traditions, etc. In other words, the cross-disciplinary character of the subject implied the integration of the various historical, anthropological, archaeological and scientific records in order to fully appreciate the complex and interrelated issues involved.

Thus, archaeobotanists have looked at prehistoric seeds of ancient crops throughout the world to determine the presence of domesticated plants and explore the possible uses of the species identified. Other studies combined analysis of archaeological plant remains with field and genetic studies of equivalent crops still surviving today (Zohary and Hopf 2012; Harlan 1999), and documented the origin and spread of the domesticated plants from the Near East throughout Europe. Weeds have also been a subject of interest, used to explore crop husbandry practices (Charles et al. 1997, Jones et al. 2010). In particular, crop processing has been a major topic of interest in the study of agriculture. Ethnographic observations of the various steps within the crop processing sequence have allowed researchers to produce models (Hillman 1981, 1984; taken up later by e.g. Peña-Chocarro 1999) and statistical methods (e.g. Jones 1984, 1987; Pearsall 1988) to identify these from crop remains, which in dry sites are usually preserved by charring. This experimental approach was applied by archaeobotanists using reconstructions of specific archaeological tools preserved in European lake sites, again to see the effect on the crops (Meurers-Balke and Lüning 1999). Waterlogged archaeological sites with exceptional preservation of plant remains have allowed detailed studies of plant use with interesting insights into processing activities, among other things (Herbig 2009, Jacomet 2009) as have rare finds from permafrost (Rollo 2002; Heiss and Oeggl 2009; Dickson 2011).

Pollen analysis has also contributed to treating the question of cereal domestication (Bottema 1999), reconstructing archaeological fields and characterising agricultural practices such as the identification of the slash-and-burn technique in the Nordic areas (Vuorela 1986). And, on a more general level, palynologists have shown the role of both the natural environment and prehistoric human activities in the shaping of landscapes, both based on pollen evidence itself (Kalis et al 2003; Carrión et al. 2007) and on other microfossils in pollen records, the so-called NPPs (‘non-pollen palynomorphs’, such as fungal and fern spores, remains of green algae and cyanobacteria, or invertebrate eggs; e.g. Van Geel et al. 2003).

Experimental archaeology has also proven to be a powerful approach to the study of agriculture, with a myriad of examples focusing on specific processes. Agricultural field experiments were carried out in northern Europe by archaeologists, for example using reconstructed ploughs and ards to work fields (Lerche and Steensberg 1980). This led to precise reconstructions of marks in the soil, as well as of archaeological finds of ploughs and ards (Lerche 1994). Other experiments focused on soil, climate and yield of ancient cereal types (Reynolds 1981; Steensberg 1943). By combining soil micromorphology and archaeobotany with an experimental approach (Boissinot and Brochier 1997), it was possible to show field use patterns from as early as the Neolithic in southern Europe (Rösch et al. 2002).

Historical records and agronomy were combined to evaluate the cultural influence on concepts of yield (Sigaut 1999) while historians interested in archaeology carried out research into the effect on the soil and the crops of certain farming techniques in large-scale field experiments (Reynolds 1974, 1979, 1981, 1999). Storage pits, for instance, were reproduced and tested using historic and ethnographic references, and were shown to be effective for storing grain similar to ancient varieties (Reynolds 1974). This allowed new interpretations of such archaeological features (Gast and Sigaut 1979–85).

Some field experiments were also carried out using reconstructions of harvesting tools based on prehistoric finds which involved measuring the harvesting yield with different kinds of tools, and then studying the experimental tools for traces of use (Korobkova 1981). High-power microscopy, combined with the experiments, allowed finer distinctions of different tool uses and their contact with plant material (Anderson 1999).

New field experiments were designed on a regional basis to test specific tools on ancient crops grown under climatic conditions similar to the past, or on wild cereals (Anderson et al. 1991; Anderson 1999; Hillman 1999). These new analyses often disproved or greatly nuanced another archaeological assumption: that all flint tools with gloss were agricultural harvesting tools (Juel Jensen 1988, 1994; Van Gijn 1999). Historical and ethnographic studies (e.g. Sigaut 1978) came to similar conclusions, that ‘sickles’ were sometimes used to obtain other materials such as reeds and straw or were not even sickles at all, but rather inserts in threshing tools (Anderson and Inizan 1994). In addition, specialised threshing tools, threshing floors and storage facilities were increasingly being found in the archaeological record in the Near East and southern Europe (Avner 1998; Skakun 1999; Gast and Sigaut 1979–85; Kuijt and Finlayson 2009; Miret i Mestre 2006; Cunningham 2011). These were identified by means of experiments (Anderson et al. 2004), ancient descriptions and ethnography (Kardulias and Yerkes 1996; Grégoire in Anderson and Inizan 2004; Ataman 1999). Experiments were also part of the research carried out to investigate the effects of different grinding and pounding tools on the grain and to seek to find a full range of wear and archaeobotanical criteria to identify the function of ancient tools (Procopiou et al. 2002).

Examination of historical documents such as the earliest cuneiform tablets, combined with these experiments, gave further insight into grain processing and social organisation during the third millennium in the Near East (Grégoire 1999). The same applies to agricultural techniques and tools from Medieval Europe, thanks to the study of historical texts (Comet 1992) and ethnographic and archaeological investigation (Mingote Calderón 1996).

Diet and the social context of food are other rich topics of research, involving historical documents (Carpinschi 2002), ethnoarchaeobotanical studies (Sarpaki 2000), and archaeobotanical analysis including funerary offerings (Marinval 1993; Rottoli and Castiglioni 2011) and of luxury foods (Bakels and Jacomet 2003; Van der Veen 2003; Palmer and Van der Veen 2002; Van der Veen 2008). New methods for identifying microscopic food remains (e.g. Winton and Winton 1932, 1935; Gassner et al. 1989) used the analysis of plant tissue fragments, phytoliths and starch (Dickson 1987; Hansson and Isaksson 1994; Cummings 1992; Perry et al. 2007; Gong et al. 2011; Valamoti et al. 2008; Henry et al. 2009; Revedin et al. 2010) or the chemical analyses of pottery residues (Evershed et al. 2008), all of which opened up new avenues of research.

The complexity of agricultural processes and their organisation within particular communities and societies requires a broad analytical scale on which to investigate them. The archaeology, anthropology and history of the landscape has been popular for some thirty years, linked by a common concern with going ‘beyond the site’ and situating human activity in its broadest context (Kardulias 1994). During the last twenty years there has been a considerable output of theory and methodology for investigating social and cultural as well as physical landscapes (e.g. Anschuetz et al. 2001; Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Francovich and Patterson 2000; Behre and Jacomet 1991). This has been complemented by a series of highly intensive, interdisciplinary surveys carrying out empirical analyses of particular landscapes within these theoretical frameworks (e.g. Astill and Davies 1999; Barker 1996; Cherry et al. 1991; Given and Knapp 2003; Kohler-Schneider 2001; Fischer and Rösch 2010; Stika et al. 2008).

This rapid overview shows some of the important scientific results of the above research approaches, and the many new insights they have provided into the human experience of agriculture. These approaches, however, have far greater potential to grow further if allowed to work closely together. Archaeological data and historical records on their own are often not specific enough for the identification of particular agricultural practices. Scientists analysing pollen, phytoliths, seeds and wear traces on tools can now identify particular species and techniques and develop sophisticated taxonomies, but are often forced by practical limitations to work in relative isolation from other interpretative sources. In both cases, disciplines have usually become highly specialised, and paradoxically isolated by their very development and institutionalisation. This has often created a barrier to the investigation of the broader agricultural system with all its actors, strategies and landscapes.

The Origin of the Programme

During the 1980s and early 1990s, a European working group met which was concerned with ‘agro-(for agrarian) archaeology’, combining archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists, around experiments in archaeology. The principal impetus was given by Jutta Meurers-Balke in Cologne, the late Sytze Bottema in Groningen, Holland, the late Peter Reynolds of Butser farm in England, Grith Lerche and the late Axel Steensberg in Copenhagen, and the late François Sigaut in Paris, France.

Following on this, in 1998 a new group concerned with preserving the knowledge and cultural heritage of agricultural processes began to meet, its members combining several different strands of research from the earlier group. In addition, its organisers felt it was urgent to record the knowledge and skills of agriculturalists that still use or remember ‘traditional’, nonindustrial techniques, and to find a means for this knowledge to enter into the mainstream of various disciplines in a dynamic way. At the time, such an ambition was largely outside the mainstream tendencies of the different disciplines.

This group, called ‘Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage’ (EARTH) was recognised by the Sub-Committee on Cultural Heritage of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who formally admitted EARTH as a member of the PACT alliance of networks, and to the Fédération Européenne des Réseaux Européens de Coopération Scientifique et Technique de Coordination. EARTH was also formally accredited to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Unfortunately, however, these affiliations did not include funding for a project.

Preparation of this ESF (European Science Foundation) programme took several years: The first EARTH committee meetings were held in St. Vallier de Thiey, Southern France in 1998, funded by the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), then in Copenhagen in November 1999 and at Butser Ancient Farm in England in January 2001, culminating in an ESF-funded preparatory workshop at St. Martin de Vésubie, Southern France, in November 2001.

In parallel, from 2002 to the present, the CNRS funded a group of twenty French EARTH members working in France in different disciplines and field areas as a ‘Groupement de Recherche’ (GDR 2517, directed by P. Anderson). Its aims, similar to those of the European-based ESF programme, have been to use various media to record preindustrial agricultural activities from ancient times and the present day, prepare a database for films and images, and to feed this information into the EARTH network as a whole. The funding of new field research for its members has contributed to some of the articles in this book.

The Network: Working Methods Leading to this Book

The EARTH Monograph Series, entitled ‘The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8,000 years of resilience and innovation’, was born from a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary and international (especially inter-European) collaboration between 2004 and 2009 as part of the ‘Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage’ (EARTH) Scientific ‘à la carte’ Programme of the European Science Foundation (ESF, Strasbourg, France), financially supported by 15 European organisations, which were represented by Steering Committee Members of the Programme (p. 371).

This ESF-funded EARTH programme was organised and chaired by Patricia C. Anderson, Nice, France and Michael Given, Glasgow (replaced in 2006 by Leonor Peña-Chocarro, Madrid and Rome).

The originality of this programme lay in the means it provided for unusual networking methods and for innovative forms of output. The aim was to find new common ground for integrating different approaches, viewing agriculture from the standpoint of the human actors involved, and fit this together into a form which could be effectively transmitted for research and teaching, as well as for heritage.

In order to achieve the programme’s goals to stimulate the creation of new, integrated interdisciplinary approaches, collaborations and networks, researchers and advanced students were chosen from different disciplines but who worked in an interdisciplinary manner. Some were chosen by the programme organisers, whereas others were suggested to them by the contributing European national organisations (refer to page vi with the ESF Member Organisations), meaning that most of the group did not know one another at the outset. It brought together scientists from a variety of different disciplines of the human and natural sciences: archaeology (including archaeobotany and archaeozoology, microwear analysis of tool function, experimental archaeology), ethnography, history, geography and geology, from about twenty European countries, as well as from North America and the Middle East.

The researchers were organised into three teams, each led by two experts from different countries, while respecting the stipulation of the ESF that as many different disciplinary fields and nationalities as possible be combined in each team, as well as researchers of varied age and at different stages of their career. The European Science Foundation emphasised networking and learning through exchange and communication, and funded annual team meetings and three plenary meetings. Such meetings allowed comparison of different points of view and of agricultural systems in different regions.

Each team approached the theme of agriculture from a slightly different standpoint – that of Crop Choice and Diversity (Book 1 in the series), Skills, Processes and Tools (Book 2 in the series), and Agricultural Landscapes (Book 3 in the series). The networking was achieved largely by workshops held in archaeological and ethnographic field areas or local museums that were directly relevant to the research of certain members (see pp. 374–376). They provided an important opportunity to exchange as well as to talk with local farmers and artisans. Although a few grants were provided for members to meet and work on methodological fine-tuning, no funding was provided by this ESF programme for new field research to authors contributing to this book. Nevertheless, the richness and originality of the scope of the articles presented here was achieved in many cases through networking activities among scientists during the programme. The programme also funded activities for advanced students: to attend hands-on summer schools taught by members and run by Leonor Peña Chocarro in a traditional agricultural area of Spain, and grants to attend the Programme’s various meetings. All networking activities were efficiently implemented by Marie Russel, Paris, who served as the programme’s coordinator from 2004 to 2009.

Some of the papers in this series address field areas and topics emanating from the workshops, and they were developed gradually over the course of the five years of interdisciplinary exchange. Although the authors come originally from various different fields related to the study of agriculture, they shared an interest in developing a common ground where individual research fields could converge into a broader framework, and provide a new knowledge base. Many contributions integrate field and laboratory methodologies into the case studies, in a manner intended to be accessible to students and researchers in different fields, as well as to an interested general public. Ethnoarchaeological studies figure prominently, and help inject the human perspective into the study of agriculture.

Each article in these volumes has received doubleblind peer review from two outside experts. Using numerous illustrations, they provide synthetic, interdisciplinary overviews, or detailed accounts of individual and collaborative research, and in some cases relevant experts outside the programme were invited to participate. However, this book series does not seek to – and indeed cannot – provide complete coverage of all disciplines, research themes, time periods, or geographical regions relevant to the study of agriculture, nor could all the relevant experts in each field be included. Each book should instead be seen as a sampling of exciting ways to explore the subject of preindustrial agriculture and its relevance to life today. This book series is an example of the power of academic networking and of the benefits of approaching the theme of agriculture from different angles and perspectives converging into a common space different from that of the researchers’ individual fields of expertise. But it would not have seen the light of day without the devotion of the coordinating editor, Andreas G. Heiss, Vienna, and the language editor, Cozette Griffin-Kremer, Paris. Alexandre Chevalier, Brussels, ensured that abundant maps were made to cover the wide range of areas discussed.

The journey has been arduous, sometimes frustrating, but always fascinating and full of good memories. We hope that the final outcome of our programme, this book series, is of value to other scholars and interested people. It is also our hope that it leads to further work by opening new avenues into the study of agriculture.

Patricia C. Anderson

CNRS, Nice, France

Leonor Peña-Chocarro

CSIC, Madrid, Spain and Rome, Italy

Series Editors of the EARTH Series

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SECTION 1

Introduction

1 The Dimension of Tools, Skills and Processes: Exploring Diversity

Patricia C. Anderson, Annelou van Gijn, John C. Whittaker and François Sigaut(†)

Introduction and Objectives

Writing a book on agricultural tools, skills and practices is ambitious because the subject is vast. It has been studied in a variety of ways: archaeologists search for the first sickles, historians examine the documents produced by farmers, scholars, and governments, ethnographers study living agricultural systems in various parts of the world. The uniqueness of this book lies in its interdisciplinary approach: the question of agricultural tools, skills and processes is addressed from a variety of approaches ranging from archaeological and historical, to ethnographic and even agronomical perspectives. Each and every one of these disciplines have addressed the issue of agricultural tools and processes and published extensively on it. However, the EARTH project was innovative in the sense that it brought together people from different parts of the globe, with different research experiences. These people were not bound by common research questions or methods, but had to find a way to communicate their knowledge to each other and find common ground. This has led, we believe, to an original collection of case studies which enlightens and complements the more general textbooks that have appeared on this topic. In one sense the case studies in this book form an illustration of the kind of information that can be obtained by the various disciplines and methods of analysis used. In this way the book can be regarded as a methodological overview. However, the contributions also constitute windows into the vast variety of technological choices people made both in the past and in the present with respect to their agricultural practices. In doing so this book also shows the complexity of such choices, and how they change through time, shaped by the interrelationships between technology and other aspects of the human world, including social organisation and cultural rules, as well as peoples’ interactions with the natural environment (climate, topography, plants and animals).

The aim of our book is to explore and where possible explain the diversity of agricultural tools and processes through space and time. Agriculture encompasses both plant and animal husbandry, which are intertwined and interdependent (Bieleman 1992). For this volume, however, animal husbandry will be only marginally touched upon, the focus being on plant husbandry. This more restrictive definition of agriculture will emphasise the growing of cereals, although several contributions address other crops such as fruit and wild grasses. The book will not attempt to duplicate the numerous books that have been written on the agricultural process (e.g. Anderson 1999; Anderson et al. 2003; Damania et al. 1998; Zohary et al. 2012; Redman 1978; Cauvin 1994; Harris and Hillman 1989; Harlan 1975), nor to provide an exhaustive overview of agricultural tools and practices in the regions of focus. Instead, it departs from the knowledge and expertise of the various contributors to illustrate the difference in choices made in the agricultural process. In this, the people are central, and the case studies presented have attempted to elucidate these choices either by studying the ‘physical’ remains of agricultural technology (the tools, the plant remains, the depictions in historical documents), by examining iconography and texts in historical documents, or by interviewing and observing present-day actors. This brings us to another objective of this book, which is to show the range of fields which study agricultural phenomena: case studies come out of history, ethnography, agronomy, archaeology and art history. Consequently, various methods of analysis are represented as well, such as experimental archaeology and functional analysis of artefacts (use-wear and residue studies) or archaeobotany. An auxiliary objective therefore is to illustrate the kinds of information each discipline can contribute to questions of agricultural skills, knowledge and practices.

The geographical span of the book will be largely confined to Europe and the circum-Mediterranean areas. There is, however, the occasional venture to other continents as a comparison or to reinforce points we believe to be important. Our chronological focus starts with the Natufian, dated in the Near East around 12,000 BCE when we have the first evidence of ‘manipulation’ of the environment. A number of case studies addressing the agricultural process derive from various periods of the Neolithic, the period of the first farmers. The designation ‘Neolithic’ is, however, not without conceptual problems (Jennbert 1997). It is usually defined as the period during which the first farmers appeared, but clearly in many areas, especially in northern and western Europe, there is a long period of transition during which people probably had knowledge of farming but did not substantially change their hunter-fisher-gatherer way of life for a substantial period of time (Louwe Kooijmans 2007; Zvelebil 2000). However, this book is explicitly not intended to address the Neolithisation process, dealt with in numerous archaeological works (e.g. Fokkens et al. 2008; Price 2000; Whittle and Cummings 2007). Apart from case studies from prehistoric contexts, a number of studies concern Medieval and sub-recent times, relying on various historical sources such as works of art, old text fragments and museum pieces. Lastly, there is the ethnographic present, largely focused on the circum-Mediterranean area, illustrating agricultural practices in present-day societies. Some examples of the latter are presented in film clips, which can be watched by following the links in the referring datasets of our online database ‘Columella’ and the dedicated links pointing to Vimeo online service

The book has two main parts. The first part follows the different steps of the agricultural process: preparation of the fields (Chapter 2), tending the crops (Chapter 3), harvesting (Chapter 4), threshing (Chapter 5), conservation and storage (Chapter 6) and, last, processing the crops (Chapter 7). Obviously, there is not space here to exhaustively cover all the various steps, but case studies are used to illustrate diversity and aspects of choice, as well as different ways to approach research into agricultural processes and techniques. The second part of the book has a thematic approach. Chapter 8 addresses the transmission of skills and knowledge and shows the social embedding of agricultural practices. Chapter 9 explores how closely religious and legal aspects are related to agricultural practices. Finally, Chapter 10 discusses the long-term processes, the time depth of agricultural practices and the process by which some of them ended or were transformed, and how new inventions were incorporated into existing technological systems.

Studying the Agricultural Process: some Key Theoretical Concepts

Adopting agriculture changes the rhythm of the yearly cycle of hunter-gatherer-fishers, a lifestyle that lasted for millennia. Hunter-gatherers usually have a more or less mobile life-style determined by the availability of the different resources through time and across space. This mobility pattern allowed to some extent for a pastoral component, as animals can sometimes be moved when people move. However, mobility is more difficult for people growing crops as these require various activities that are widely separated throughout the year. From the preparation of the fields, to sowing the seeds, tending and harvesting the crops and, lastly, processing them, a period of at least several months passes. Throughout this period, time and effort need to be invested in the fields, requiring continued return or presence throughout the year. Orchestrating the agricultural tasks through the crop’s growing season is very difficult in a mobile lifestyle because of time/space restrictions (Carlstein 1982). Growing crops can thus severely restrict mobility, limiting the possibilities of obtaining other resources that require movement in space, or which consume time during crucial periods in the agricultural process, such as harvesting. It is thus no surprise that agriculture usually involves a relatively sedentary way of life, although in (sub-) tropical conditions this is not always the case (see for instance Politis 1996).

Each step in the agricultural process requires the investment of knowledge and skills. In pre-industrial agricultural societies, tradition was the backbone of agricultural practices. Knowledge about the land and the weather, the seasons and the life cycle of the crops, and of course about the necessary tools and techniques, was transmitted from generation to generation. From a very young age children became familiar with the agricultural way of life, gradually incorporating the skills until they were ‘second nature’ and became part of their ‘muscle memory’ (see Chapter 2 and 8). Agriculture was very much part and parcel of social and ideological life. This was especially so because it is inherently precarious: when sowing the crops there is no guarantee that they will come to fruition a number of months later. Historical accounts of famine and warfare or raiding are numerous. The entire process is therefore surrounded with social habits and regulations, legal restrictions and religious prohibitions and rituals (see Chapter 3 and 9).

Agriculture as a technological system is also a cultural construct, which gradually develops through time. It is often considered to be inherently conservative. However, the contributions to this volume show that the apparent conservatism is a vision enforced by law, and that individual farmers do indeed innovate. Such innovations are incorporated more generally when deemed suitable and fitting with the existing technological system (Lemonnier 1986). The technological choices made are varied and complex and not do not always follow the ‘logic’ of contemporary western rationale, yet they constitute a coherent system that can be studied. A key concept in analysing complex technological systems such as the agricultural process is that of the chaîne opératoire (the ‘operational sequence’, a term forged by Leroi-Gourhan 1964), a concept that requires further elucidation.

The Chaîne Opératoire of the Agricultural Process

In agriculture, as in all economic activities, production is the result of a number of operations that follow each other in ordered sequences. What has not been sown cannot be harvested, and sowing requires that the field has been previously prepared according to specific rules that depend on the soil, the climate, the season, and so on, and these rules are based on the experience people have gathered over generations. That is what the concept of an operational sequence (the chaîne opératoire) is about. This implies the sequence of technical operations, the human actions, but also the tools, products, and by-products of each action, and the way the operations are embedded in culture, particularly the rules which guide the sequence.

The problem is that complete sequences are often quite difficult to observe. Successive operations may happen to be quite widely separated in time or space (or both), so that it may be difficult or even impossible for the casual observer to acquire a complete view of the whole process. In that respect, archaeologists are typically casual observers, because they come long after the action has been carried out. But willingly or not, ethnographers are often casual observers too, inasmuch as they cannot possibly always be in the right place at the right time. It is because of all this that the concept of the chaîne opératoire is useful. Taken separately, operations cannot be completely understood. A view of the whole is necessary to understand each of its parts – and conversely.

The case of agriculture is especially complex because different kinds of sequences are mixed together in people’s daily routines in ways that are not easy to disentangle. In metallurgy, for example, operations are rather simply ordered from ore extraction to making finished metal items, and since they are usually done by craftsmen, the logic of the operational sequence is not especially difficult to find. In agriculture, there are many different sequences that happen to cross each other or to partially coincide in time and which must be made compatible within people’s daily or seasonal agendas. The problem was not clearly understood before the 1960s, when new techniques of programming provided engineers with mathematical tools to tackle it. We do not propose to use such techniques for the understanding of ancient agricultural systems, we simply want to stress the fact that what is called ‘agriculture’ is usually a complex of many tasks which are combined by people in ways that may be quite difficult to understand by outsiders.

Generally speaking, it may be added that agricultural systems are usually made up of at least three different kinds of operations. The first are seasonal and are done in the fields, from field clearance or first ploughing to harvest. The last are daily or weekly chores and are done in or near the household, such as preparing food, spinning, weaving, etc. And in between there are a lot of tasks that may be done in quite different ways according to time and place. Threshing, for example, may be done in or near the field, within a few weeks immediately following the harvest, or it may be done little by little, as a daily routine which will take place over the whole year. There are many such details. They concur to make agricultures in different societies very different things.

One important consequence is also that the concept of ‘agriculture’ does not have the same relevance from one place to another. In Europe, threshing clearly belongs to ‘agriculture’ proper; in many parts of Africa, southern Asia and pre-Colombian America, threshing is (was) included in the sphere of household tasks, which are the responsibility of the housewife, like milling, cooking, etc. The usual limits between what is agricultural and what is not are themselves the result of modern history in Europe. They cannot be extrapolated without any modification to other times and places.

The Social Organisation of Production

A number of agricultural tasks may or must be performed by individuals working alone. But even in those cases, working alone is the exception. The rule is rather that of working in teams, because it makes the work more pleasant, more secure, and more efficient. We expect digging a field with a spade to be an individual task, and in many cases it cannot be done otherwise. But in other cases, several persons, from three up to eight or ten, unite their efforts to cut and turn the same slice of earth at once, which may then be up to two or three metres long. Usually, however, teamwork implies cooperation among people doing different subtasks. The man who guides the plough is assisted by a boy who leads the animals, the person who reaps the grain with a sickle is assisted by someone who binds the sheaves, and so on.

Tasks should also be analysed according to their size (the amount of work to be done at the same time), which is often a consequence of seasonality. As has been already said, it is not the same thing to thresh the entire harvest of cereals at once in late summer, as to thresh a few pounds each morning for the meal of the day. In the first case, threshing is emphatically men’s work (with some exceptions). If women do cooperate, it is in relatively minor tasks. In the second case, threshing is women’s work and a man might be the object of sexual jokes if he happened to take any part in it. Similar differences can be observed within the borders of Europe. In most rural areas, for instance, bread making is a woman’s job (as is nearly everything belonging to food preparation). In towns of some size, it became a craft from at least the early Middle Ages on, and of course the craftsmen (the bakers) are men. But in areas where rivers freeze in winter, stopping the mills, bread has to be made in large quantities for the cold months, and it is again a man’s job.

Another important point is the degree of skill involved in each task, and the degree of apprenticeship it requires. Daily chores may sometimes require a long apprenticeship, during which time skill is acquired progressively by performing the chores as needed. Such chores may be performed by anyone, but allow women and children with less skill or developing skills to contribute to the farm labour. Whereas when the task is seasonal, intensive, task-specific training becomes more important, and differences in skill more decisive. Broadcast sowing may be one of the best examples. People are not occupied in sowing more than one or two months in the year, but since the stakes are so high, sowing requires the most skilled workers. Because broadcast sowing is technically very difficult, it follows that prior training here is of crucial importance. There are unfortunately few documents on this theme, but it cannot be by chance that broadcast sowing is almost without exception a man’s job. When for some reason men are absent, the sowing may be done by women, but their way of doing it will not be the same as men’s.

Methodological Approaches towards Studying Agricultural Tools and Practices

This book is based on research from different fields of study, notably archaeology, history, art history, palaeobotany, ethnography and agronomy. All of these disciplines encompass a range of methods and theories, discussed extensively in basic textbooks. Clearly this is not the place to dwell on them and we assume that most readers will be acquainted with these fields. Where necessary, specific information is provided in the individual chapters. However, a few specialist methods of study which are especially prevalent in this particular book will be briefly described here. For the most part, these concern methods utilised in the discipline of archaeology. Although the basic idea of archaeological study of the past is familiar to most people, archaeological approaches to material artefacts and subsistence processes are often useful in understanding the current world, and a number of technical approaches used by archaeologists are not very familiar to those outside the discipline. It is our contention throughout this book that all the methodologies can be used by all the different fields. Just as archaeological analyses are improved when texts produced by or describing an ancient society can be consulted, so too historians will find it informative to examine not only documentary sources, but the material objects, structures, and landscapes that people use in their lives.

Ethnoarchaeology

Ancient cultures are often interpreted in terms of observations made by ethnographers studying preindustrial cultures in recent times. Ethnoarchaeology uses such observations of current cultures specifically for the purpose of archaeological interpretation, and often focuses on learning what kinds of physical remains we can expect to see as the results of particular human actions and organisational structures. Numerous collections of representative ethnoarchaeological studies have been published (Anderson 1999; David 2001; Donnan and Clewlow 1974; Kramer 1979; Gould and Schiffer 1981; Staski and Sutro 1991; Terradas 2005; Yellen 1977).

Archaeologists have found it useful to perform their own ethnographic studies because until a decade or so ago, ethnography had moved away from detailed observation of all aspects of a culture to more focused and limited research, often with an emphasis on the non-material aspects of culture. While archaeologists are interested in the cultural rules, beliefs, and symbols that shape human behaviour, they cannot observe them directly, and thus emphasise observations of the material results of human behaviour. Artefacts, structures, residues, traces of wear, and the effects of human action on the natural environment can all be directly observed in the archaeological record. In the best cases, these can be interpreted in more human and cultural terms, but only if there is a firm foundation of understanding of how human behaviour is linked to material results in the modern world. Ethnoarchaeological studies are thus uniformitarian in nature. They attempt to produce analogical arguments allowing us to interpret material evidence in terms of human behaviour by comparison to behaviours and their results that we have directly observed, under the assumption that similar behaviours in the past will have produced similar results.

Ethnoarchaeological examples may be quite simple. For example, we can understand how sickles may be used in a variety of ways by working with living harvesters, and use that information to interpret the form of prehistoric sickles and the wear that develops on them as they are used. More complex examples support social and cultural interpretations. We expect from ethnographic observations that a particular kind of social organisation will often favour similar living arrangements, economic organisation, and ritual behaviour wherever it occurs. When we recognise the characteristic physical remains in archaeological contexts, we interpret them in terms of such known social forms. Specific ethnoarchaeological studies have approached issues such as the social organisation of production, the learning of skills and transmission of technological information, and the development of stylistic variation in artefacts and their social uses (Longacre and Skibo 1994; Hodder 1982; Stout 2002; Weisner 1983).

There is some danger in ethnoarchaeology that these modern analogues may confine us or bias us toward recognising only phenomena that have been observed in modern times, while we admit, at least theoretically, that some human behaviour in the past may not have modern analogues. This is especially true when we are considering ancestral human forms, and past societies that have been extinct for millennia.

Experimental Archaeology

Like ethnoarchaeology,