ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a summary of current evidence for cultivated and wild plants in the Neolithic of Britain. It discusses the importance of cereal cultivation and provides a debate on how the archaeological record of British Neolithic and other periods should be approached and interpreted. It also approaches it by strictly archaeobotanical; specifically, the factors that give rise to the remains we find, and the contexts in which they are found. The chapter examines two ways in which taphonomic factors distort our straightforward pollen-type reading of the macrobotanical record: the relative importance of hazelnuts and cereals, and the significance of low-density cereal samples. The cereal remains recovered from Neolithic timber buildings in both Britain and Ireland represent a mixture of cleaned grain and crop processing by-products consistent with a purely domestic function, and provides no grounds for suggesting a 'special' kind of food.