ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a series of comparisons used in Bogaard to eliminate implausible Neolithic farming scenarios based on the ecological configuration of arable weed flora, which provide a detailed reflection of crop growing conditions and hence farming practices. The broad chronology of the spread of agriculture across Europe, and its mixed character as a cultivation and herding 'package', is well established. For Central Europe, and the continent as a whole, four major models of early farming have emerged in the archaeological literature, deriving from a mixture of ethnographic analogy and what are often conflicting interpretations of indirect evidence. Traditional farming areas and agricultural experiments provide weed survey datasets that can be compared with archaeobotanical weed data in terms of their ecological characteristics, as gauged through functional attribute measurements. The 'dichotomous key' of farming models was applied to archaeobotanical sample weed data from Neolithic Central Europe.
