Digitally Enlightened or Still in the Dark? Establishing a Sector-Wide Approach to Enhancing Data Synthesis and Research Potential in British Environmental Archaeology and Beyond

In a 2019 Internet Archaeology article, Elizabeth Pearson posed the question 'are we back in the Dark Ages?'. This question was made in reference to a developer-funded archaeology sector that was generating vast quantities of evidence and, particularly, in recent years, specialist environmental data, but was failing to mobilise this in a theoretical framework that generated meaningful advancement in terms of research. The introduction to the 2021 Internet Archaeology special issue on Digital Archiving in Archaeology (Richards et al. 2021) went on to address 'a digital resource that is now in jeopardy' – not only because of the risk of technical obsolescence, but also because of crucial limitations to its interoperability and discoverability. This article builds on these arguments and complements vital work underway on high-level, internationally focused data infrastructure initiatives (e.g. Wright and Richards 2018). We emphasise here the importance of parallel discussions at a community level, particularly with the people who routinely produce archaeological data, as key to enhancing data synthesis and research potential. Specifically, we report on two surveys conducted by the 'Rewilding' Later Prehistory project at Oxford Archaeology, in collaboration with Historic England and Bournemouth University, which originated in the 'Rewilding' project's concern with improving access to palaeoenvironmental data produced within Britain. Substantial amounts of zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical data remain buried in grey literature, limited-access publications and archive reports (not to mention floppy disks, CDs and microfiche), with no integrative means of searching for particular periods or categories of evidence. This lack of accessibility inhibits specialists from contextualising their findings, and was exemplified recently by the Archaeology on Furlough project tripling the known number of aurochs finds in Britain by trawling online records, journals and museum records (Wiseman 2020). The results of the surveys presented here, which targeted both environmental archaeologists specifically and the wider sector, demonstrate a significant appetite amongst archaeologists to improve data networks and for their work to contribute meaningfully to research agendas. Contextualised within a disciplinary landscape that is increasingly dynamic in its approach to tackling the openness and connectivity of 'big data', we argue that better data synthesis in environmental archaeology, and the developer-funded sector more broadly, can be more than just a mirage on the horizon, particularly once the people who produce the data are given an active voice in the matter

Geometric Morphometrics sheds new light on the identification and domestication status of ‘new glume wheat’ at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

&lsquo;New glume wheat&rsquo; (NGW) is an archaeobotanical type increasingly recognised at Neolithic&ndash;Bronze Age sites across Europe and Western Asia. NGW has been recognised via aDNA and morphological analyses of chaff remains as a member of the&nbsp;Triticum timopheevii&nbsp;wheat group, recent cultivation of which is known only from western Georgia. This study combines geometric morphometric (GMM) analysis of NGW grains with updated results from a parallel study of chaff dehiscence, to assess the taxonomic classification and domestication status of NGW from the Neolithic East Mound at &Ccedil;atalh&ouml;y&uuml;k (central Anatolia). Results confirm close comparability of NGW with modern wheats from the group&nbsp;T. timopheevii, in a form which has remained remarkably similar over thousands of years. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that NGW was undergoing selection for domestication traits in terms of shattering behaviour and grain form during the 1150-year East Mound sequence. These findings are interpreted in the context of substantial archaeobotanical evidence for a broad-spectrum plant strategy at &Ccedil;atalh&ouml;y&uuml;k which mitigated the risk of resource failure and supported experimentation in cropping. Possible cultural and practical incentives are considered for investment in the crop, made despite the availability of a fully-domesticated glume wheat (emmer) with similar growing and processing requirements. Alongside this, the study demonstrates the sensitivity of GMM to differences between and within wheat species, with methodological findings that can inform future studies.</p

Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax): Grain Photograph Archive

The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax: 2017-2022) used bioarchaeological methods to address longstanding questions about the development of medieval field systems. As part of this research, FeedSax - in collaboration with doctoral researcher Tina Roushannafas - collated a large collection of microscope photographs of charred cereal grains from Anglo-Saxon and medieval archaeological contexts. These photographs, which are valuable both as a record of grains destroyed in biomolecular analysis and as a source in geometric morphometric studies, are deposited with the Sustainable Digital Scholarship platform at the University of Oxford (https://portal.sds.ox.ac.uk/feedsax)

Feeding Anglo-Saxon England (FeedSax): Digital Data Archive

The Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax: 2017-2022) used bioarchaeological methods to address longstanding questions about the development of medieval field systems. To this end, FeedSax created a large collection of archaeological data - both compiled from existing sources, and newly created through primary analyses - pertaining to charred plant remains, animal bones, stable isotopes, radiocarbon dates, and pollen records. The FeedSax digital archives includes the resultant datasets in CSV and Excel formats as well as a SQL database ('Haystack'), along with accompanying SQL queries and documentation in MS Word format. The archive is deposited with the Archaeology Data Service (https://doi.org/10.5284/1057492)