per Iberia e Sardegna

Eduardo Blasco Ferrer Paolo Francalacci – Alberto Nocentini Giuseppa Tanda (a cura di)

Iberia e Sardegna Legami linguistici, archeologici e genetici dal Mesolitico all’Età del Bronzo Atti del Convegno Internazionale «Gorosti U5b3» (Cagliari-Alghero, 12-16 giugno 2012) Proceedings of the International Congress «Gorosti U5b3» (Cagliari-Alghero, June 12-16, 2012)

LE MONNIER università

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Ringraziamenti di Eduardo Blasco Ferrer

VII

Sezione linguistica Presentazione di Alberto Nocentini Palaeosardinian di Eduardo Blasco Ferrer The Languages of the Mediterranean Basin in the First Millennium B.C.: a Typological Assessment di Alberto Nocentini Hispania Indoeuropea y no Indoeuropea di Joaquín Gorrochategui Hipotéticas protolenguas y posibles formas de contacto lingüístico en la prehistoria europea di Javier de Hoz Da Iberia a Urbara… o viceversa…, o…? di Xaverio Ballester Celtic and Celtiberian in the Iberian Peninsula di Eugenio R. Luján Encuentros y desencuentros sobre la lengua ibérica di Carlos Jordán Cólera Protovasco: comparación y reconstrucción… ¿para qué y cómo? (Por una vascología autocentrada, no ensimismada) di Joseba A. Lakarra Diferentes tipos de aspiración en vasco (con análisis espectrales del dialecto suletino actual) di Ander Martínez Egurtzegi Avances en la morfología (pre)histórica vasca di Borja Ariztimuño López L’etrusco nel bacino del Mediterraneo di Giulio M. Facchetti

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Sezione archeologica Presentazione di Giuseppa Tanda

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Le Néolithique en Méditerranée occidentale: contacts, interactions, parentés culturelles di Jean Guilaine Between Sardinia and Catalonia: contacts and relationships during the Neolithic di Juan Francisco Gibaja Bao, Vanessa Léa, Carlo Lugliè, Josep Bosch, Bernard Gassin e Xavier Terradas Il Neolitico antico in Sardegna di Giuseppa Tanda Il megalitismo della Sardegna di Riccardo Cicilloni

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Sezione genetica Presentazione di Paolo Francalacci Crops and People: Diffusion of Farming in South-Western Europe di Lydia Zapata e Leonor Peña-Chocarro New Insight on the Genetic Origin of Sardinians di P. Francalacci, D. Sanna, D. Obinu, A. Useli e L. Morelli Sardinia: a Living Snapshot of Western Mediterranean Prehistory di Maria Pala Genetic Analysis of the Prehistoric Populations from Europe di M. Hervella, Neskuts Izagirre, Santos Alonso e Concepción De La Rúa The Pyrenees in Ancient Times di Ana María López-Parra The Origin of the Basques di Saioa López, Neskuts Izagirre, Concepción De La Rúa e Santos Alonso I partecipanti al convegno

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Crops and People: Diffusion of Farming in South-Western Europe*

Riassunto In questo articolo si riconsidera la diffusione dell’agricoltura nell’Europa sudorientale per mezzo delle prove archeobotaniche. Si analizzano i dati esistenti in questo vasto territorio e in particolare nei Paesi Baschi. Nella costa mediterranea della Penisola Iberica i più antichi cereali databili si collocano fra il 5600 e il 5500 a.C. Le prime piante coltivate comprendono diversi tipi di frumento, orzo e legumi provenienti dal Vicino Oriente e sconosciuti fino ad oggi nella nostra zona di indagine. Nel Golfo di Biscaglia l’agricoltura è documentata a partire dal 5200-4600 a.C., quasi un millennio più tardi rispetto ad altre aree peninsulari. In questa zona la rilevanza dei gruppi mesolitici induce a credere che le popolazioni locali avessero adottato l’agricoltura.

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Introduction

The history of foods and crops is a very good indicator to know how subsistence systems have changed in the past and also to assess contacts and interactions among people and regions. Sometimes the Western Mediterranean has acted as a dead end, the far western location where exotic plants ended several millennia after having been domesticated in other places. During Prehistory and classical times we can point out three phases extremely significant in terms of crop acquisition in the Western Mediterranean (Zohary et alii 2012, Cappers – Neef, 2012, Zapata et alii 2004): **

The work of the authors is part of the Project AGRIWESTMED (Origins and Spread of Agriculture in the Western Mediterranean Region) funded by the ERC (European Research Council) through an Advanced Grant (ERC-AdG-230561) and Projects HAR2008-01920/ HIST Orígenes y expansión de la agricultura en el sur peninsular y norte de Marruecos: aportaciones desde la arqueobotánica y la genética and HAR2011-23716 Nuevos cultivos, nuevos paisajes: Agricultura y antropización entre las primeras sociedades campesinas del norte peninsular from the Plan Nacional I+D+I. L. Zapata is part of the Research Group IT-622-13/UFI 11-09 of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU and L. Peña-Chocarro is part of the Programa Consolider TCP-CSD2007-00058. We want to thank Eduardo Blasco for the invitation to participate in this meeting and our colleagues C. de Rúa, J. Gorrochategui and J. Lakarra for insightful comments on genetics and languages.

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Sezione genetica

Early Neolithic: The transition to a production economy, this is to say, the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East is a subject that continues raising a lot of research and publications (for the case of cultivation see the last volume edited by Willcox et alii 2012). The expansion of this “package” through Europe is also the focus of research although archaeological information is not homogeneus nor chronologically nor geographically (Colledge – Connolly 2007). As a general rule in Western Europe domestication of indigenous wild plants and animals did not happen and the main crops were introduced from South-West Asia: different types of wheats (both hulled einkorn Triticum monococcum and emmer Triticum dicoccum and free-threshing Triticum aestivum/T. durum), barleys (Hordeum vulgare, naked and hulled) and pulses (lentil, pea, faba bean, vetches, grass pea). The exception might be poppy (Papaver somniferum) whose wild and weedy forms grow only in coastal areas of the Western Mediterranean basin, including islands. This suggests a west Mediterranean domestication (Zohary et alii 2012, pp. 109-111). Bronze Age: Archaeobotanical studies document the introduction and first cultivation of millets (broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum and foxtail millet, Setaria italica) during this period. These plants were domesticated in Central and Eastern Asia. In particular, Setaria italica is the principal crop of the Neolithic agriculture in Northern China, an old domesticate probably first taken into cultivation there (Hunt et alii 2009, Zohary et alii 2012, pp. 69-72). Iron Age and Roman Times: systematic arboriculture (the cultivation of olives, grapevines, figs, apples, plums, cherries, etc.) is introduced in Western Europe much later in the history of food production. First clear evidence of fruit tree domestication appears in South-West Asia during the Chalcolithic in the seventh millennium BP. The cultivation of fruit-bearing trees relies on a completely different strategy from the one we can see in annual crops such as cereals and legumes. It relies on perennial plants that reach full productivity years after having been planted and thus, it is more related to settled ways of life and certain intensification in the exploitation of the landscape. Fruit trees are rarely raised from seeds and, instead of sexual reproduction like in the wild, they result from new techniques such as cutting and rooting of twigs (grapevine, fig and sycamore fig), digging out of suckers (pomegranate), planting basal knobs (olive) and scion grafting (apple, pear, plum, sweet cherry, carob, pistachio, in general introduced into cultivation even later than the others) (Zohary et alii 2012, pp. 114-116; for the Basque Country see Peña-Chocarro – Zapata, 2005).

Bearing in mind this long perspective in crop acquisition in Western Europe, here we are going to focus on the diffusion of crops during the Neolithic, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Atlantic fringe of the Basque region. Plants, but also domestic animals and other materials (lithics, shells, etc.) are good proxies for the circulation of new ideas. Whether these movements of things are the results of demic diffusion or the outcome of the interaction of local people using local net-

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works is something very difficult to evaluate with archaeobotanical materials alone. That is why the interaction of different disciplines such as archaeology, linguistics and genetics is particularly important.

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First agriculture in Western Europe

The first domestic crops have been found on PPNA archaeological sites in the Near East in the 10th millennium cal BC. By the mid 9th millennium they are recorded on Cyprus and central Anatolia (Colledge – Conolly 2007, p. 64). In the Aegean agriculture is evident by the end of the 8th millennium cal BC (Valamoti – Kotsakis 2007, p. 78). In the central Mediterranean, the earliest Neolithic communities in Italy are documented c 6000-5800 cal BC in the South (Basilicata, Puglia and Calabria) and along the Adriatic and Ionic coasts. Afterwards, impressed pottery and other Neolithic features are progressively documented to the North. During the Early Italian Neolithic barley (Hordeum vulgare) is the main cereal together with hulled wheats (Triticum monococcum and T. dicoccum). Free-threshing wheats are very scarce. Pulses are also present but in low numbers (lentil, pea, grass pea, bitter vetch, broad bean and vetches and the same happens with flax and poppy: Rottoli – Pessina 2007). For Northern Mediterranean Morocco, the site of Kaft That El-Ghar shows the presence of naked barley, free-threshing wheats and emmer together with broad beans, grass pea and vetches (Ballouche – Marinval 2003). A cereal grain radiocarbon dated to 6350 ± 85 BP from this cave shows that earliest agriculture in North-Western Mediterranean Africa has a similar date to the ones documented in Southern Iberia (Peña-Chocarro – Zapata 2010). Farming in Western Europe starts to happen during the 6th millennium BC with practices that have nothing to do with previous uses and management of wild plants that we know from before (Aura et alii 2005; Mason 2000; Zapata et alii 2002). We understand agriculture as cultivation sensu Hather and Mason (2002), the planting of seeds (often cereals and pulses) or other propagules in a new situation. In spite of some stimulating proposals (Zvelebil 1994) which stressed Mesolithic-Neolithic connections in terms of plant use, we think that we cannot speak of continuity between Mesolithic gathering and Neolithic farming. The main plants used during the Neolithic are different and exotic and its reproduction needs to be planned and cared for. Moreover, the technology related to their management is also new and imported (preparation of the fields, weeding, harvesting with tools such as sickles, processing techniques in mass such as threshing, winnowing, dehusking, etc.). Probably few things remained to be invented in Western Europe regarding agriculture when farming – understood as agriculture and animal herding – arrived to this territory. This does not exclude that local adaptations would exist. They might for example be related with technology (see for example the “harvesting with-

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out sickles model” in Ibáñez et alii 2001) or with the development of plant varieties and crop systems better adapted to specific geographic conditions. In the Western Mediterranean the chronology of the dispersal of agriculture is more or less known although it still needs to be refined through the sampling of more archaeological sites and the radiocarbon dating of more plants. At this point we are trying to overcome these shortcomings through the project AGRIWESTMED, which includes the revision and dating of old samples as well as the excavation and sampling of sites from poorly known areas such as northern Morocco. The spread of agriculture in the Mediterranean was a relatively quick process, something that has been related to maritime colonization (Zilhao 2001). It is obvious that navigation existed as different materials prove, for example the presence of obsidian from islands in the continent (Lugliè 2010) or the introduction of domestic animals and crops from the continent in European islands (Rowley-Conwy 2011). But agriculture also spread very quickly in continental areas such as loess soils in Central Europe, in this case most probably through a farming colonization of a territory that was scarcely populated (Price 2000, 2003). In other places, farming expansion was not so quick (Bakels 2000; Guilaine 2003; Price 2000, Out 2008) and precisely a demic and social explanation has been put forward to explain this delay: the presence of complex hunter-gatherers in particularly rich coastal environments that would resist the adoption of farming (Arias 1999).

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First agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula: the Atlantic Basque region

In the Mediterranean world, Iberia is the last region to adopt agriculture. The peninsula holds a significant diversity of ecological conditions including a narrow fringe in the North with a humid oceanic climate. In Atlantic Iberia there seems to have been a considerable population density during the Mesolithic (Arias 2007, p. 63). These coastal territories have traditionally been considered culturally marginal and isolated during the Neolithic and research for this period has mainly focused on megaliths, the most visible structures of the period. It was assumed that during the Neolithic there was continuity with the Mesolithic and a difficulty existed in adopting cereal agriculture due to the geographic conditions of the Atlantic valleys, better suited to animal herding. These assumptions have been refuted on the basis of archaeological and ethnographic information (Peña-Chocarro 1999; PeñaChocarro – Zapata 2003) although we are far from knowing when and how the transition to farming happened. In the coastal area by the Eastern Bay of Biscay, during the obscure millennium (ca. 5200-5000 to 4200-4000 cal BC) prior to the building of the first megaliths, we find two types of archaeological sites that might be contemporaneous: (i) those with an emphasis on the procurement of wild resources, such as the sites of Herriko Barra (Iriarte et alii 2004) and Pico Ramos (Zapata et alii 2007), and

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(ii) those with abundant domestic elements, for example, Arenaza (Altuna 1980), Kobaederra (Zapata 2002) and El Mirón (Straus – Morales 2012). According to this picture, two types of situations might be put forward: 1) Farming is completely adopted in the Atlantic valleys but humans perform different activities at different sites and that is why we find such different evidences in Herriko Barra and Pico Ramos versus the other sites, or 2) different subsistence patterns coexisted and some groups ‘resisted’ the adoption of farming as it seems to be the case in other regions of the Atlantic façade (Price 2000, 2003). We have already argued (Zapata 2007) that data tends to support the first hypothesis, this is to say, that farming was generally adopted by this period. First, big caves with long sequences (Arenaza, Kobaederra and El Mirón) show a great diversity of activities and resources being used whereas sites with only hunting-gathering activities (Pico Ramos, Herriko Barra) show a high specialization – red deer hunting in Herriko Barra and sea mollusc gathering in Pico Ramos –. They cannot be showing the whole picture, they seem to be only a part of it. Second, the procurement of wild products (e.g., red deer in Herriko Barra, oysters in Pico Ramos and great auk on both sites) seems to be seasonally biased. Hunting and gathering of shells took place at the same time of the year, the end of the spring and beginning of the summer. If these populations were first farmers, this might have been the most critical time of the year, before the harvesting of cereals, at which time they might have had to rely on wild resources (for other European coastal areas see Milner 2002). Moreover, we do not find here the territorial pattern we see among hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers in other European regions where a resistance to farming has been proposed (Bakels 2000; Brinkkemper et alii 1999, Price 2000, Out 2008). In contrast to this, sites on the Basque-Cantabrian coast are juxtaposed in the same physical space. For Northern Iberia, we must not forget that research has focused on cave sites; we are missing open air settlements which had to exist and that might provide a different picture. If this was the case – farming being adopted more or less at the same time than nearby regions such as the Upper Ebro Valley – we should consider that hunting and gathering practices were still in use during the Neolithic as the cases of Herriko Barra and Pico Ramos suggest. How relevant they were in human subsistence is difficult to assess from arcahaeobotanical/archaeozoological evidence alone and would need the use of other techniques such as palaeodietary analyses (Arias 2005).

4

The people

The scale of the unstoppable expansion of farming in Europe was huge and eventually, it finished with previous hunting-gathering ways of life. Together with the arrival of modern humans in the continent, it is the biggest transformation it has undergone with tremendous consequences in terms of society, demography, economy and rapidity of historical change which clearly accelerates from the Neolithic on.

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How do people fit in this farming diffusionist picture? How did domestic plants and animals move westwards in the Mediterranean world and in Iberia? Different types of evidence have entered this discussion from C. Renfrew (1987) much debated and stimulating text linking archaeology/languages/genes, a research line that has continued (Bellwood – Renfrew 2002, Bellwood 2005) as we can also see in this meeting. In relation to names of crops and plant foods, D. Fuller (2005, pp. 770-771) points out four modes in the evolution/diffusion of words in a language: 1) Name evolves from earlier linguistic roots, sometimes from a generic related to its physical characteristics or to the processes of cultivation, harvesting or use; 2) name borrowed with food item (maiz, native Caribbean taino language adopted in Spanish and afterwards in English); 3) semantic shift, probably when the new crop becomes increasingly important or replaces the pre-existing item: a existing name is re-applied to a new species (artoa in Basque firstly named millets Panicum/Setaria; afterwards it named maiz from America, Zea mays), and 4) a compound name is created from existing words (Vicia faba or faba bean existed in Europe from the Neolithic; American bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, was named indaba in Basque: India baba, baba from India). Genetics also add to this debate and provide some support for immigration. The divergence dates for most European mtDNA lineages fall in the Late Paleolithic. But these studies allow perhaps 15-20% of modern European mtDNA to derive from Neolithic immigrants (Richards et alii 2000). Given that modern genetic pattern may be palimpsest of different migrations (Zvelebil 2000, p. 70), ancient DNA becomes particularly important as we have been able to see in this meeting (works by De la Rúa, Izagirre and Alonso). Recent research with ancient DNA is showing that the picture is more complex than previously thought and that there may be significant differences among regions in terms of the Neolithic influx and regarding the genetic diversity of Neolithic groups in different European regions (Hervella et alii 2012). From a continental point of view, different factors lie behind the adoption of farming, its rapidity and the way it was done, among others: 1) the local population: areas with small demographies such as Central Europe would be quickly colonized by farmers, whereas the existence of significantly well-adapted hunter-gatherers like the Scandinavian ones may slow down the process; 2) the more difficult adaptation of Mediterranean plants and animals in some Atlantic and Northern environments might also slow it down; 3) agency and human decisions, though difficult to see archaeologically, may be involved in the picture; local groups might respond differently when new products are available. In our opinion, it is very likely that in most of the Mediterranean world, due to the existence of a previous population, as Rowley-Conwy (2011, p. 434) summarizes “most Neolithic genes were native, but the major domesticates were exotic”. However, this author accepts that movements of people were probably frequent – although probably not so directional as Ammerman – Cavalli-Sforza (1971, p. 687) “wave of advance” –. Rowley-Conwy (2004, p. 97) mentions at least “leap-

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frog migration”, “trickle migration” and “creep migration” sometimes involving only movements of individuals and short time periods (but in any case involving mostly hunter-gatherer genes!). Going back to Northern Iberia, Mesolithic populations are well attested here, with a network of sites, many of them shell-middens by the coast, with a broad spectrum economy (Arias 2007, p. 60; Alday et alii 2012). Contacts between the coast and the Upper Ebro Valley have also been pointed from different types of evidence. Marine shells in Mesolithic sites from the inland is one of the most clear ones (Alday 2005, p. 388) but also the provenience of lithic raw material. In Herriko Barra, for example, 35% of the flint comes from the coastal Flysch, 50 km away, and 54% comes from Urbasa, in the Upper Ebro Valley, something that reveals contacts among both sides of the watershed, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean one (Tarriño 2006, p. 165). Certainly, existing networks could facilitate the introduction of the new Neolithic products and ways of life without having to resort to a demographic explanation. In the Basque Coast farming is well attested only from the first half of the fifth millennium cal BC – this does not mean it did not exist before –. How quickly it was adopted is an interesting point. Do we have a long transition here or was it a quick process? Is there a population input or precisely the absence of an exogamous population slowed down the transition? As a general rule hunting-gathering-farming transitions have been quick in Europe. Quick processes might even have a historical support since the economic practices of ethographically known societies fall mostly into hunting-gathering or into farming but rarely in middle situations (RowleyConwy 2004, p. 97 quoting Hunn – Williams 1982). Present zooarchaeological data from Neolithic sites in Northern Iberia do not show a lengthy transition either. Domestic animals are predominant from very early in sites were analyses are available: Arenaza (Altuna 1980), El Mirón (Altuna – Mariezkurrena 2012) or Kobaederra (Altuna – Mariezkurrena, work in progress). If we accept that existing Mesolithic population could not disappear in Northern Iberia, we must acknowledge that to a great extent they were participants of the neolithisation process. Neolithic ideas and ways of life were most probably adopted through the acculturation of an indigenous population thanks to Mesolithic networks that had been active from before. If population movements existed, they were probably not big and would be carried out by previous huntergatherers that had become farmers. Causality is a big issue for those of us who study the transition to farming. Different explanations – among others, environmental, social and demographic – have been put forward in order to explain why hunter-gatherers become farmers: No hunter-gatherer occupying a locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons is likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly. Energy investment per unit of energy return would have been too high. However, cultivation offered one major advantage: it allowed more calories to

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be extracted per unit area of land, albeit at the expense of much hard work and ecological damage (Hillman 2000, p. 393).

As G. Hillman says, work was hard but the returns in wealth and social terms must have been worth the effort. A few centuries later, another rapid and very visible change that took over the Atlantic façade was the adoption of megaliths, a whole funerary and symbolic new package that also spread very quickly among populations that in Iberia had been farmers for a very long time.

Conclusions

Present data show that the spread of agriculture along the Mediterranean was a relatively quick process – 3000 years for the 4000 km between Cyprus and Portugal or 2000 years for the 3000 km from the Aegean to Portugal (see different authors in Colledge – Conolly 2007) – spreading at a faster rate in the Western half (Guilaine 2003, p. 202). In the Iberian Peninsula cereal grains from the Mediterranean coast have been dated to c 5600-5500 cal BC (Bernabeu et alii 2003). First crops are exotic plants: different types of wheats, barleys and pulses. The Atlantic fringe by the Bay of Biscay has been traditionally assumed to show another pattern – a later acquisition of farming and maybe a higher focus on animal herding –. With present data, early agriculture here shows a delay with respect to other regions in Iberia with agriculture not starting until c 5200-4600 BC. However, this might be the product of present bioarchaeological data which is extremely scarce for the 6th millennium, so we cannot rule out the possibility that farming was adopted in a similar chronology as in other regions. Who was responsible for the introduction of farming in Northern Iberia and in the Basque region? Did new people bring the crops? Did new languages come along? Due to the importance of Mesolithic population in the region, we think we can assume that local people adopted farming through previous existing networks. This would not exclude small population movements, difficult to see archaeologically. We recognize that our interpretations may not be innocent because local developments, empowering indigenous peoples and re-emphasizing their cultural continuity and autonomous choice have long been stressed in European archaeology (Rowley-Conwy 2004, pp. 96-97). It is also difficult from archaeobotanical/zooarchaeological evidence alone to offer clear evidence on who brought domesticates. Mixing other knowledge areas (genetics, archaeology, languages) is academically very stimulating but we must also face that many of us are not very comfortable when we get out of our disciplines. We often find interpretations of our own data by others which may seem oversimplified. However, an effort needs to be done to obtain new data and, moreover, to integrate all sources of information. Lydia Zapata – Leonor Peña-Chocarro

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