In Britain, domesticated animals and plants were introduced from mainland Europe around 6,000 years ago, at the start of the Neolithic period, with cereal agriculture as one of the main food production strategies. Extensive archaeobotanical research has shown, however, that the cereal cultivation by Neolithic communities across parts of the British Isles dramatically decreased, or saw a reduction in taxa types cultivated, after a few centuries and only began to dominate botanical assemblages again in the Bronze Age (ca. 4,500 years ago), potentially linked with the arrival of new farming communities. This project seeks to investigate whether these gross changes in cereal production and availability represent a genuine, widespread reduction or a localised phenomenon and its connection to climate deterioration and associated environmental change taking place at this time. This PhD will study materials from a range of Early, Late Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements across the territory of Britain. This project will apply a multi-proxy approach to the study of Late Neolithic plant subsistence in Britain, focusing on chronological modelling, spatial modelling and settlement analysis in addition to machine learning and AI assisted archaeobotanical analysis.
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