Ancient grain tells the tale of our ancestorsâ?- cities

Archaeological digs in the Middle East have revealed the remains of ancient harvests that record how some of the worldâ??s earliest cities grew and developed. A study published in Nature Plants sheds new light on the agricultural and political economy that underpinned the growth of some of the worldâ??s oldest cities in Mesopotamia, in present-day northern Syria. The researchers, led by a team from the University of Oxford, used stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of charred ancient grains to reconstruct the conditions under which crops grew, building up a picture of how farming practice changed over time. They found that as populations in these early cities swelled, increasing demand for more food, farmers strove to cultivate larger areas of land, rather than plough more resourcesâ?'such as manureâ''into existing, more intensively managed fields. Extensive, land-hungry agriculture relies heavily on the ability to access more arable land and to exploit specialized plough animals, both of which could be monopolized by powerful families and institutions. The findings of this research therefore reveal how the growing importance of arable land, which could be controlled by the ruling few, led to increasing social inequality as urban populations grew. Project leader Prof Amy Bogaard from Oxfordâ?'s School of Archaeology, said: â''Each cereal grain found buried in an archaeological site holds within it a record of the environmental conditions under which it was grown.