Overview

How people produced or acquired their food in the past is one of the main questions in archaeology. Everyone needs food to survive, so the ways in which people managed to acquire it forms the very basis of human existence. Farming was key to the rise of human sedentarism. Once farming moved beyond subsistence, and regularly produced a surplus, it supported the development of specialisation, speeded up the development of socio-economic as well as social complexity, the rise of towns and the development of city states. In short, studying food production is of critical importance in understanding how societies developed. Environmental archaeology often studies the direct remains of food or food processing, and is therefore well-suited to address this topic. What is more, a wealth of new data has become available in this field of research in recent years. This allows synthesising research with a regional and diachronic approach. Indeed, most of the papers in this volume offer studies on subsistence and surplus production with a wide geographical perspective. The research areas vary considerably, ranging from the American Mid-South to Turkey. The range in time periods is just as wide, from c. 7000 BC to the 16th century AD. Topics covered include foraging strategies, the combination of domestic and wild food resources in the Neolithic, water supply, crop specialisation, the effect of the Roman occupation on animal husbandry, town-country relationships and the monastic economy. With this collection of papers and the theoretical framework presented in the introductory chapter, we wish to demonstrate that the topic of subsistence and surplus production remains of interest, and promises to generate more exciting research in the future.

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Dr. Maaike Groot (1973) studied provincial-Roman archaeology at VU University Amsterdam and completed her PhD on a large animal bone assemblage from the Roman site of Tiel-Passewaaij in 2007. She subsequently carried out a (Veni) post-doctoral project on the effect of the Roman occupation on animal husbandry in the central part of the Netherlands. She is currently working at IPNA, University of Basel as a Marie Curie Fellow. Her current research project investigates food production in the Netherlands and Switzerland in the Roman period. Her main interest is the use of faunal remains to answer archaeological questions on the economy, food consumption and the ritual use of animals. Dr. Daphne Lentjes (1980) studied Mediterranean archaeology at VU University Amsterdam and spent four years in Italy working as an archaeobotanist at the Laboratorio di Archeobotanica e Paleoecologia (LAP) of the Universita del Salento, Lecce. She recently completed her PhD on long-term developments in landscapes and land use in southeast Italy in the first millennium BC. Daphne's current investigations and teaching focus on environmental archaeology and the use of plant remains to study ancient landscapes and farming practices, with special focus on Italy and Greece. Drs. Jorn Zeiler (1955) studied biology in Groningen. He graduated in 1997 on a study of hunting and animal husbandry in the Netherlands during the Neolithic. He was a research fellow at the Biological-Archaeological Institute (the present Groningen Insti

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