Agropastoralism and archaeobiology: Connecting plants, animals and people in west and central Asia

One of the more intractable problems that archaeobiologists struggle with is how to characterise ancient subsistence systems when the plant and animal remains that we study are incommensurate in so many ways. Three examples from the upper Euphrates and Iran illustrate how changes in plant remains are associated with changes in animal exploitation. Two of them consider the agropastoral continuum on sites dating to the pre-pottery Neolithic (eighth to sixth millennium BC) and to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age (fourth to third millennium BC) in the dry-farming zone along the Euphrates. The third example considers how changes in woodland allow one to infer the presence of pastoralists in the southern Zagros even in the absence of nomad campsites.