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175 16 Archaeobotany Lorenzo Costantini and Loredana Costantini Biasini In 1987, the Institute of Classical Archaeology conducted a program of archaeobotanical research along with its first campaign of archaeological excavations at Capo Alfiere. This project was also continued in the second excavation campaign during the summer of 1990 (Morter 1990, 1992, 1994; Morter and Iceland 1995). The archaeobotanical component was designed to identify the main crops of the agrarian economy of the Neolithic community via the recovery of charred botanical macroremains. Prior to this study, the data on the prehistoric agriculture of Calabria was limited to a few grains of barley and indeterminate cereals collected at the Neolithic site of Piana di Curinga, which revealed little or nothing about the ancient crops (Ammerman et al., 1976). However, as Tinè (2004) emphasized in his survey of the Calabrian Neolithic, the archaeological research begun in the early 1970s in the central and southern areas of the region was limited to surface surveys that covered large swathes of territory around Acconia, Crotone, and Stilo. The excavation at Capo Alfiere therefore offered a unique opportunity to obtain precious data on the agriculture practiced by the populations that occupied the Ionian side of central Calabria between the Middle Neolithic (Stentinello facies) and the Later Neolithic (Diana facies). Two concerns—the well-known problem of conserving botanical remains from Neolithic deposits in southern Italy, and the considerable disturbance of the archaeological deposits by intensive agricultural activity in the post-war period—dictated a procedure that allowed the archaeobotanical project to proceed alongside the archaeological excavation. Previous experiences at Pizzica Pantanello (Costantini and Costantini Biasini 2003) and at Scamuso (Costantini et al. 1997) had demonstrated that the results (in terms of the number of macroremains recovered) were closely linked not only to the sampling strategy and the method of soil processing, but also to a direct and immediate comparison between the preliminary results and observations made during the flotation of the soil samples and the archaeological evidence from the contexts from which the samples had been drawn. Materials and Methods The archaeobotanical project at Capo Alfiere was developed in three main phases: first, the establishment of a washing-area equipped with a flotation device; second, the preliminary testing of the washing system using soil samples taken from the upper levels of the archaeological deposit, in order to fine-tune the system and select the operational sieves; and third, the washing of the soil samples and initial sorting of the botanical remains. The extraction of the samples was designed to provide total representativity. A standard sampling unit of 5 liters of soil was established to make comparable the results from the various periods (levels) of the site’s occupation. Furthermore, because of the numerous stones present in the archaeological deposit in variable concentrations, the sampling strategy was intentionally made flexible to follow the evolution of the excavations: the number of samples taken from each context was determined by the nature of the deposit, the relative proportion of charred material visible, and the quantity of archaeological material recovered. All of the samples were treated with the same method (flotation), which employed three sieves with meshes of 2.5, 1.2, and 0.5 mm. In the course of the 1987 excavation campaign, 37 contexts were sampled for a total of 132 samples, equivalent to ca. 600 liters of soil. During the 1990 campaign, 72 samples were taken from 35 different contexts for a total of ca. 360 liters of soil. Combined, 204 samples were examined from 72 contexts, half of all of the contexts excavated in the two campaigns (144). This represents a total of more than 1 ton of soil washed with the flotation device (Table 16.1). Only 83 samples (40.69% of the total) contained charred botanical remains, while the remaining 121 samples were in effect archaeologically sterile (Table 16.2). 176 Archaeobotany Thecontinuous adaptationof thesampling method to the demands of the excavations and to the variable nature of the contexts as they were unearthed created an imbalance in the number of samples taken from the various levels (Table 16.3). The largest number of samples , 95 (46.57% of the total), was taken from Level IIb, but of these only 37 contained charred botanical remains; in the remaining 58 samples no archaeobotanical materials were encountered. In the other levels the quantity of samples varied from a minimum of seven, taken from the plowzone, to a maximum of 32, taken from Level IIa. In general, roughly...

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