ERC Palaeorigins: Introduction

This ERC project will take us to southwest Asia to tackle one of the most studied-yet challenging research themes in Prehistory: the transition from foraging to farming. Research in this region is at a crucial stage. The most recent models indicate that more than a ”Revolution”, the shift to food-production was a protracted process that started at least 23,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers began to regularly exploit the wild ancestors of modern domesticated crops.

PalaeOrigins focuses on the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 23–11,600 cal BP) and seeks empirical answers to some of the most important hypotheses explaining the origins of plant food production. How did these communities begin to cultivate plants? Were climatic factors the trigger for these early cultivation activities, or were cultural dynamics, such as the need for specific foods, the motivation for the shift from gathering to production?

One of the main challenges of this project is to develop a holistic approach to studying subsistence in the past. While previous archaeobotanical studies have traditionally focused on characterising the economy or the environment during the Epipalaeolithic, PalaeOrigins aims to combine both aspects to reconstruct, for the first time, the complete sequence from the availability of plant resources in the environment, through their procurement and exploitation, to their preparation as food and consumption.

This project therefore has three main objectives:.

  1. To assess the impact that climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene had on the availability of plant resources.
  2. To provide a detailed assessment of plant management and exploitation of the environment during the Epipalaeolithic.
  3. To define the food culture of hunter-gatherers and assess their role during the transition to agriculture.

This project will therefore contribute key information to our understanding of the interactions between humans and the environment that preceded the development and expansion of agriculture.