The onset of faba bean farming in the Southern Levant

Even though the faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is among the most ubiquitously cultivated crops, very little is known about its origins. Here, we report discoveries of charred faba beans from three adjacent Neolithic sites in the lower Galilee region, in the southern Levant, that offer new insights into the early history of this species. Biometric measurements, radiocarbon dating and stable carbon isotope analyses of the archaeological remains, supported by experiments on modern material, date the earliest farming of this crop to ~10,200 cal BP. The large quantity of faba beans found in these adjacent sites indicates intensive production of faba beans in the region that can only have been achieved by planting non-dormant seeds. Selection of mutant-non-dormant stock suggests that the domestication of the crop occurred as early as the 11(th) millennium cal BP. Plant domestication| Vicia faba L.| Pre-Pottery Neolithic B| radiocarbon dating| Δ(13)C analysis

Le plan de gestion des données (Data Management Plan) en archéologie : des principes à la pratique

Developing an effective method for recording the data produced, sharing it, and preserving it are essential tasks of the archaeological profession. Although international and national rules are in place, archiving archaeological data is often left to the discretion of the archaeologist in charge of the excavation. It is essential that data management be developed in accordance with the FAIR principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (hence the acronym FAIR). Granting agencies, such as the European Research Council and several National Research Funds, require a data management plan as soon as applications for project contributions are submitted. The plan is intended to promote the use of datasets by specifying the standards that will be used to organize the data and metadata and the digital repositories where they will be kept. The plan is also used to define permissions for access to the dataset. From this perspective, archaeologists are expected to make excavation data accessible and interoperable in accordance with the rules specific to their research domain. The purpose of this article is to review the application of FAIR principles in data management plans developed by archaeological projects. First, we will describe the steps necessary to publish archaeological information on the Semantic Web, then we will examine the laws and standards for archiving archaeological data, and then we will review the most commonly used archival systems in the field. In the final section of the article, we will discuss the topic of the data management plan and propose best practices to follow in developing an archaeological data management plan. The set of practices presented will be useful to researchers in managing the life cycle of data from archaeological research

Short-term climate fluctuations inferred from the carbon stable isotope analysis of 14C-dated plant collected in Ebla and Qatna, northern-syrian proto-historic sites

Electronic publication: http://www.wac6.org/livesite/precirculated/2071_precirculated.pd

AMS 14C-dated plants as a tool for investigating palaeoeclimate: new data for analysing social complexity in Ebla and Qatna (North-western Syria) in the light of 3rd millennium BC Climate change

The societal "collapse" of the urban-based system, which is part of the rise-flourish-and fall cycle of the protoshistoric societies of the Near East, is investigated via an integrated approach based on the identification of short-term climate changes by stable isotopes analyses on archeobotanical remains and variations in settlement pattern

Garbage disposal in the Middle Bronze Age in Tell Mardikh-Ebla (NW Syria): using plant remains to investigate midden formation processes

We explore the informative potential of discarted archaeobotanical remains well beyond the sphere of food strategies, and to outline the dispersal behaviour pattern of a well-established Syrian city-state of Ebla during the Middle Bronze Ag