Neolithic Farmers in Poland - a Study of Stable Isotopes in Human Bones and Teeth from Kichary Nowe in the South of Poland
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Neolithic farmers in Poland - A study of stable isotopes in human bones and teeth from Kichary Nowe in the south of Poland Master thesis in archaeological science Archaeological Research Laboratory Stockholm University Supervisors: Kerstin Lidén and Gunilla Eriksson Author: Staffan Lundmark Cover photo: Mandible from the Kichary Nowe site, photo taken by the author Abstract: The diet of the Stone Age cultures is a strong indicator to the social group, thus farmers and hunters can be distinguished through their diet. There is well-preserved and well excavated Polish skeletal material available for such a study but the material has not previously been subject to stable isotopes analyses and therefore the questions of diets has not been answered. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the cultures in the Kichary Nowe 2 area in the Lesser Poland district in southern Poland. Through analysis of the stable isotopes of Carbon, Nitrogen and Sulphur in the collagen of teeth and skeletal bones from the humans in the Kichary Nowe 2 grave-field and from bones from the fauna, coeval and from the same area, the study will establish whether there were any sharp changes of diets. The material from the grave-field comes from cultures with an established agricultural economy, where their cultural belonging has been anticipated from the burial context. The results from my study of stable isotopes from the bone material will be grouped by various parameters, culture, attribution to sex and age. The groups will then be compared to each other to investigate patterns within and between the groups. Acknowledgement: It is an interesting journey for a retired engineer to enter the humanistic world in the form of Archaeology. A keen interest in the lives of our forefathers carried me through the Archaeological studies. But a keen interest is not enough; without the support of Gunilla Eriksson and Kerstin Lidén at the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, this present work could not have been carried out. Lena Holmquist made me interested in the discipline of archaeological science and her arguments were very well put and made me change direction from general archaeology to archaeological science. Thank you for that Lena. I would also like to thank Heikke Sigmund at the Department of Geological Science at Stockholm University, who carried out the mass spectrometer analyses and in an engaging way showed me the technicalities of the mass spectrometer. I also want to thank Rachel Howcroft (Ph D student at the Archaeological Research Laboratory) and Sara Gummesson (Ph D student in the Osteoarchaeological Laboratory) for their help with identifying teeth in the material I worked with. The Polish scientists in the Stone Age collaboration project (SCP) were very helpful at the onset of the work with this thesis with their presentations of their work in this field. I want to thank Hanna Kowalewska- Marszałek, Karolina Bugajska, Witold Gumiński, Anita Szczepanek and Piotr Włodarczak for their contribution. I also want to thank Markus Fjällström at the Archaeological research laboratory and Tommy Powell (BA economy) for their help with Excel data base questions. 1 Content 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Research situation 4 1.2 Aims and research questions 5 1.3 Site specifics 5 2 Cultures 6 3 Material 13 3.1 Carbon isotopes 14 3.2 Nitrogen isotopes 16 3.3 Sulphur isotopes 16 4 Stable isotope analysis 17 5 Result 23 5.1 Sex attribution 28 5.2 Age attribution 30 5.3 Cultural attribution 31 5.4 Sulphur results 34 5.5 Teeth 35 6 Discussion 37 7 Conclusions 40 8 References 41 2 1 Introduction The Stone Age hunters learned how to use faunal resources to their benefit, the dog, for example, was domesticated by hunter/gatherers some 14 000 years ago and was used as a hunting aid (Scarre 2005: 183). Domestication can be regarded as a way for the Stone Age individuals to take control of that part of the nature that enabled them to take control of the means for survival. The domesticated animals and plants very soon displayed a different appearance compared to their wild origins, interpreted as the result of active breeding and selection. The early European animal domestication included herbivores as sheep, goat, cattle, pig and horse. These domesticated species are a small number of the available species and it is considered that the animals that were domesticated were also the species that were the easiest to manage. The early plant domestication in southwest Asia (eastern Mediterranean area) occurred from 9 000 BC to 2 000 BC and included species as wheat and barley (Scarre 2005: 184 f). This Neolithic economy eventually spread out over Europe and arrived to northern Europe in around 5 500 BC. Wheat production is recorded from 9 000 BC in the Middle East, whereas the earliest rice production is recorded from 7 000 BC in the region where China is today and maize was in use in western South America from 3 000 – 2 000 BC (Scarre 2005: 190). There are a number of theories why and how the spread of agriculture took place. When people learned to domesticate both crops and animals for their subsistence, they found that the new economy was more labor intensive but gave much safer subsistence means. As the population increased, maybe as a result of the new economy, a need for more land developed and some farmers moved to other fertile areas to establish new farmsteads and could thereby come into contact with other cultures that lived as hunter/gatherers. As the hunting economy could be unsafe as means of subsistence at times, it could be putative that the hunters took up the new economy and earned the farming instead. The spread of the farming culture could have occurred in a number of ways, both through migration and through knowledge diffusion. The agricultural economy spread to southern Poland around 5 500 BC eventually and reached Sweden around 4 000 BC. Traditionally the LBK Culture (from the German Linearbandkeramik) is ascribed to the development of the farming economy in the south of Poland, around 5 500 – 4 500 BC. Carsten Lemmen et al (2011) used the GLUES model simulater (Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator) to study the transition to agropastoralism in western Eurasia. They found that agropastoralism could have started in some Mediterrainean landscapes, but not in northern or central Europe, that were depending on import of both technology and material. They also found that both migration and knowledge diffusion can explain the transition in western Europe and the adoption of the new economy by the resident foragers. Lemmen et al claims that agriculture origins from an area between todays Lebanon/Israel and Iran/Iraque; it has been shown through archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and archaeogenetic works that all food crops and animals (except the dog) have their origin in this area, including wheat, barley, rye, lentils, peas, cattle, sheep, goat and pigs. The average speed of the expansion of agropastoralism from the Middle East to Europe is according to the GLUES model 0.8 km/year (Lemmen 2011:3459 ff). Although locally the transition time could vary. 3 The means and methods to investigate ancient conditions have improved substantially over the past 10 – 20 years. It is now possible to look into the ancient world in terms of analyzing the skeletal remains with the stable isotopes method and remains from pottery with lipid analyses. These analyses can enable us on the molecule level investigate diets and migration patterns. The Polish sites, included in this study, are relevant to the research in the Swedish Neolithic cultures, since Poland is situated strategically in northern Europe, in the middle of the routes from east to west and from south to north. The farming culture that developed in the middle of Europe, up to southern Poland soon spread further northwards to Sweden, either via northern Germany and Denmark, or via the Baltic countries and further to Finland, or from the Baltic to the south of Sweden. 1.1 Research situation The Neolithisation process, i.e. the transition process from Mesolithic hunters and foragers to Neolithic farming, has been of prime archaeological interest in Europe during ten to twenty years. With the new techniques to analyze remains from as far back as the Stone Age, the research situation is much improved. A number of dissertations, theses, essays and articles are reporting on investigations on human and faunal stable isotopes analyses in Scandinavia(e.g. Lidén 1995, Eriksson 2003, Eriksson 2004, Lidén et al 2004, Lidén and Eriksson 2007, Eriksson et al 2008, Fornander et al. 2008, Eriksson 2011, Dimc 2011 and Hinders 2011). Gunilla Eriksson et al. (2008) made a vast investigation on skeletal remains from Öland, an island situated off the Swedish east coast, in the Baltic. They analyzed human and faunal remains from 9 sites, ranging in chronology from the Mesolithic to the late Iron Age, from hunters/gatherer to farmer economies. They used stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur for diet studies and 14C for age studies. The 123 individuals and the 27 faunal species used as reference material in their material yielded stable isotope data from 338 human samples and 117 faunal samples. The argument for the investigation was to try to establish the point of transition from a hunting/gathering economy to a farming economy, which was said to have been swift and unison at the onset of the Neolithic. Their investigation could show that the food habits mainly were governed by culture, where the project was on the lookout for sharp diet changes that could be correlated with a cultural change.