Around 7,000 years ago, the first farmers in the western Mediterranean selected the most fertile land available, cultivated cereal varieties very similar to today's, and made sparing use of domestic animal faeces, as they do today. These are some of the elements that characterize the expansion of agriculture during the Neolithic period in Western Europe, according to an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), whose first author is Professor Josep Lluís Araus, from the Faculty of Biology at the University of Barcelona and member of Agrotechnio, the CERCA Centre for Research in Agrotechnology.
The study reconstructs the environmental conditions, crop management practices and the characteristics of the plants that existed when agriculture appeared in Western Europe, and takes as a reference the site of La Draga (Banyoles, Girona), one of the most significant and complex sites on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as including data on sixteen other sites from the beginnings of agriculture in the region. According to the conclusions, at the time of its appearance on the Iberian Peninsula, agriculture had already achieved a consolidated level in agricultural techniques for growing cereals, suggesting an evolution throughout its migration across Europe of the methods and genetic material originating from the fertile crescent, the cradle of the Neolithic revolution in the Middle East.
Experts from the University of Lleida (UdL) and the joint research unit CTFC-Agrotecnio, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the Universitat de València, the University of Basel (Switzerland), the Agri-Food Research and Technology Centre of Aragon (CITA) and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) also participate in the article. The excavations in La Draga are coordinated by the Archaeological Museum of Banyoles, within the framework of the four-yearly archaeological excavation projects of the Department of Culture of the Government of Catalonia.
What were the main crops grown on La Draga?
Since its appearance nearly twelve thousand years ago in the territories of the so-called fertile crescent, agriculture has transformed the relationship with the natural environment and the socio-economic structure of human populations. Now, the team has applied palaeoenvironmental and archaeobotanical reconstruction techniques to identify the conditions in the village of La Draga when agriculture emerged. Located on the eastern shore of Lake Banyoles, it is one of the oldest settlements of farmers and stockbreeders in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula (5200-4800 BC), and an extraordinary testimony to the first farming and stockbreeding societies in the Iberian Peninsula. To give a regional dimension to the study, cereal data from other Neolithic sites in the Iberian Peninsula and southern France have also been examined.
