A Cereal Problem? What the Current Chronology of Early Cereal Domesticates Might Tell Us About Changes in Late Fifth and Early Fourth Millennium cal BC Ireland and Britain

Abstract

In the years since the last volume on plant domesticates in Ireland and Britain in the fourth millennium cal BC, a number of significant changes have occurred in archaeological practice. These have included the routine application of a range of archaeological science techniques, including Bayesian statistical modelling. This paper will present a new analysis of radiocarbon results from direct measurements on domesticated plant remains from Ireland and Britain to explore what these can tell us about the nature of the changes in the archaeological record at this time. Cereals may appear after the introduction of practices including monuments in the form of causewayed enclosures, tombs and post-and-slot-built structures, in several regions. This approach unpacks the ‘Neolithic package’, by comparing direct estimates on plant domesticates with the appearance of other forms of material culture and new site types. As well as allowing us to examine the fine-grained nature of changes, developments in chronological modelling should cause us to re-examine how useful our existing terms of engagement are; we need to think not only about the changes we can produce in the sequence of archaeological knowledge, but also in the structure of it.