ABSTRACT

Reconstructing the origins of plant cultivation in southwest Asia is crucial for understanding associated processes such as the emergence of sedentary communities and domesticated crops. Among the criteria archaeobotanists developed for identifying the earliest plant cultivation, the presence of potential arable weeds found in association with wild cereal and legume remains has been used as a basis for supporting models of prolonged wild plant cultivation before domesticated crops appear. However, the proposed weed floras mainly consist of genus-level identifications that do not differentiate between arable weeds and related species that characterise non-arable habitats. Here we test, for the first time, whether the potential arable weed taxa widely used to identify wild plant cultivation also occur in non-cultivated wild cereal populations. Based on modern survey data from the southern Levant we show that the proposed weed taxa characterise both grasslands and fields. Our findings, therefore, do not support the use of these taxa for reconstructing early cultivation. Instead, for future studies we suggest an approach based on the analysis of plant functional traits related to major agroecological variables such as fertility and disturbance, which has the potential to overcome some of the methodological problems.

摘要

重建西南亚植物栽培的起源对于理解相关过程（例如定居群落和驯化作物的出现）至关重要。在考古植物学家为确定最早的植物种植而制定的标准中，与野生谷类和豆类遗骸相关的潜在耕种杂草的存在已被用作支持驯化作物出现之前长期野生植物种植模型的基础。然而，所提出的杂草区系主要由属级鉴定组成，不区分可耕杂草和具有非耕地生境特征的相关物种。在这里，我们首次测试了广泛用于识别野生植物栽培的潜在耕地杂草类群是否也出现在非栽培野生谷物种群中。根据黎凡特南部的现代调查数据，我们表明所提出的杂草类群同时具有草原和田地的特征。因此，我们的研究结果不支持使用这些类群来重建早期栽培。相反，对于未来的研究，我们建议采用一种基于与主要农业生态变量（如肥力和干扰）相关的植物功能性状分析的方法，该方法有可能克服一些方法学问题。