 Okay, so today I'm going to talk about crop production. Where in Britain we're mainly talking about speltweed. And talk about the results of a big synthesis project and then some more recent data using isotope approaches to look at cultivation practices in more detail. So I'm just going to give you a quick bit of our political context where is Britain. A history of arch-intank research a llwyddoch chi'n ei sympasys a oedol i gynhyrch. Felly yn Brytyn, ymy'r meddwl Yn Aidd, mae'n gweithio'r 600-100 bc i'wch yn ymgyrch, mae'n ymgyrch o'i wneud, sy'n holl gwybodaeth o'r hollll ymgyrch. Rhaid i'n fawr i'r lleiwch cymddech chi'n gwyllfynu iawn. Mae'n gweithio ymgyrch o'i ddweud yn ffwrdd â syniadau, mae'n gwybod ar hyn o gweithio'r ffordd, oeddiad, oeddiad a bod ymgyrch o'r lleid. Rwy'n ei gwaith i'r Eid, oes i ni'r 100 BC rwy'n adeithaith i 43, rydych chi'n gweithio bethau'r ysbyty o ffordd Llyfrgell, Ylethau, Gweithneidio, Llyfrgell, etc. Ond ond, nid rydyn ni'n gweld ychwaneddau ac oherwydd mae'r adeithaith agri-gwyl. Yn ydych chi'n gweithio'r pethau'r adeithaith i 43, rydych chi'n gweld yr ysbyty a'r Gweithneidio, at the edge of the empire until AD 410 when the early medieval period begins. So my main kind of questions in terms of the Roman period are how can we investigate the scale and intensity of agriculture in relation to food supply to feed the Roman army and renew urban centres. So we have a very long history of our archaeological research in Britain with the first kind of systematic studies being taken place in the late 1970s with the work of these people and then from the late well kind of late 70s onwards we had a lot of what we call ancient monument labs undertaking detailed really high quality archaeological work. From 1990 we had developer funded archaeology introduced which is great because it means we have a shed load of data however it has also meant we have a lot of fragmentation in terms of archaeological analysis but the key point is that we have an awful lot of data and no real way to kind of deal with it or synthesise it which is something which I'm going to hopefully touch upon. So just in terms of what our data set is like now so back in 1981 there were 55 sites from the Roman period many of them were handpicked antiquarian studies. Moaika van der Wien study in 2007 had over 600 site phases and the most recent study found nearly 1400 site phases without any urban and military sites so there's a large corpus of data in this region. In terms of the archaeological data for the Iron Age there's been relatively limited amounts of synthesis. We've broadly known that we have a move from Emma to Spellwet as the major crop and there's been two kind of regional synthesis. So Kate Parks undertook a detailed study of the east of England where she found that we have a kind of gradual decrease in Emma, increase in spelt and kind of continuity in Sixwell Horde barley. More recently I did a smaller study in an area of kind of central southern Britain and again we have basically gloon wheat spelt and Emma, Sixwell Horde barley and then very small proportions of pulses free refreshing wheat etc. So into the Roman period we do have teeny evidence for fruit crops and agriculture so there's about 10 sites now in the central Midlands where we have some evidence for vineyards. One of them has great pollen, the others are a little bit more dubious but on the whole he seems to be a kind of failed short-term experiment and it's really only cereals that remain crop in this period. So turning now to the results of a Roman rural settlement project, this project collated all of the excavated rural settlement data from Britain and produced summery archovatankle data. So looking at presence absence data we can see in its spelt wheat in Sixwell Horde barley, the most frequent crops in all of the different regions. The lower frequencies of Emma, free refreshing wheat, rye, oats etc and then through time there is very little change so basically a gradual increase in rye impulses and a gradual decline in Emma but nothing major at any point. Zooming into a few particular periods we do have some indications of regional emphasis on different crops so in the south east in Kent we have a mix of barley spelt wheat with some more pulse in some areas through to Hampshire in the bottom left hand corner so an area of Chalkland we have more emphasis on barley and then through to the east Midlands in the top left hand corner we have much more emphasis on spelt wheat and if we drill down to sample level data you can see us a bit more clearly so on the right hand side we have the east Midlands and by the late Roman period there's an awful lot of black so basically a very high alliance on spelt wheat. So we have a reasonably clear understanding of our crop choice changes through time in Britain but we don't have a very good handle on how crop cultivation methods changed and how they relate to different site types or you know different areas of the country so to that end I've recently undertaken some stable isotope analysis as we've heard about previously so I don't need to explain the methodology in too much detail so the first case study is a site called Stannock which is a long term site of occupation from the Iron Age through to the late Roman period it's in the east Midlands so on an area of gravel and clays and it was a long term detailed excavation in the 1980s producing abundant archiv material so this was an initial kind of pilot study with 41 samples so in the top left hand corner we have a delta 13c results so broadly looking at water status and in Britain we're expecting the water not to fluctuate too much because it's quite wet in many periods so broadly you can see in the barley and the spelt about one per mil different which is what we see in crops at many sites and it seems to be a physiological difference and then there's very little difference between what Iron Age and Roman period in terms of carbon in terms of nitrogen we have a decrease from the Iron Age to the Roman period in all crop types by about one per mil and the main crops so barley and spelt are actually very comparable in their values so we're seeing both a decrease in probably manureing through time but we'll like the same treatment of these two main crops so to take this analysis further I've undertaken a larger study in an area of the Chalkland in southern Britain I'm taking the same time span so for Iron Age through to the late Roman period but also integrating it with the previously published faunal isotope data so these are a series of sites around a hill fort called Dainbury so we go from Dainbury hill fort itself and through to several late Iron Age enclosed settlements and then to mid late Roman villas to give the whole kind of time slice and I selected these sites because they're all in a very small micro region as you can see here so they're all within say 10 kilometers of each other so we can control for a lot of a variation which we know can affect carbon and nitrogen isotopes so we've got Dainbury hill fort in the centre of the two Roman villas to the north and west on the late Iron Age farmsteads in the area around Dainbury so first off we can look at the carbon results through time so hopefully you can see in it again we have this space in between barley and wheat of around one per mill but it does fluctuate over time but the clearest pattern is that the delta 13c values decrease in the late Iron Age period which should suggest that there are kind of either wetter or more closed conditions and we have a range of multi foxy evidence for climate in this period but you can see that the periods which are indicated as wetter by several lines of evidence it's several periods throughout this whole time slice so it can't be that the late Iron Age isotope shift is purely due to climate so instead I would suggest that it's due to more local choice in the soils that are being used so the late Iron Age sites with those lower delta 13c values are on areas of a landscape with wetter soils so at the edges of river rallies there was the late Roman sites of higher delta 13c values are on the clay soils so we see the choice of different areas of landscape so looking now at the delta 15n values which we're mainly interested in from manure ring hopefully you can see that there's on the whole quite low values so we're going from zero to six per mill here so nowhere near like the 12 we saw in Natalia's presentation I'm broadly speaking a decrease through time so that late Roman, lately Miller values are down to very low so zero per mill so part of this low delta 15n is due to the calcareous soils so there's been several recent studies by Rick Shelting and others that have shown that faunal, herbivore isotope values are very low on chalk soils and we're not entirely sure why but what we can do here is use a wild herbivore baseline constructed from previous isotopic analysis and then put those manure ring bands on which have been built from the experimental studies in Oxford so broadly speaking we can see that most of the crops are either being manure in a kind of medium way or they're not receiving any manure at all so the main kind of pattern here isn't we have extensification so a lower input of manure in Malay Roman period interestingly you can see that Dunkirk barn and greatly are pursuing quite different strategies so these are two rulers about a few kilometres apart which is very interesting and also at most sites where mean for barley and spelt is exactly it's statistically identical so there's no different treatment of different crops other than a natal bank crops which is a late iron age banjo enclosure so bringing in the herbivore data now hopefully so what i've done here is plotted what were expected chaff um delta 15n values would be so we know that there are about 2.4 per mill lower mimer grain values and then if we plot on the sheep and the cattle and then we can expect that there's about 4 per mill dietary trophic level so that would imply that the chaff of these manure crops is very likely to be a main dietary source for these herbivores so what it suggests is that we have a system of sheep folding taking place in the mid and late iron age whereby sheep placed onto the recently harvested fields making then graze on the stubble of the harvested crops and then they directly manure the crops as grazing so what i would suggest is that the late roman um delta 15n shift is indicating that it's kind of sustainable system is actually breaking down so perhaps may have become so focused on cereal production that they're kind of neglecting the manure supply or they're just trying to maximize their crops so much that they really extended areas under cultivation so just to kind of summarise what this is talking about the late roman and rillar economies we know in a cultivating barley and spelt we eat in the same conditions um values as kind of a rotation or just an iron age kind of mixed cropping system we're not quite sure um we see a different targeting of soil types um in the late iron age period but really a kind of ex densification especially at greatly rillar and if you look at these two rillars in more detail greatly it has a clear emphasis on crop production it has seven grain drying ovens huge iron barns whereas duncurt barn it's much more of a kind of um wealthy residence with a bath house and ornamental garden so it suggests that rillar more into kind of market orientated production is going for a more extensive farming practice and then just to end east shifts let me see towards pre-fresing cereals in many other parts of europe and not taking place in britain in the iron age or roman period and those changes don't really happen until early medieval period um as recent work by marma kerritcha has shown and spelt wheat which is really dominant in the late roman period basically disappears by the sixth century so something clearly very major is happening in that early medieval period so just to conclude we clearly have a shift towards a roman period farming system based on spelt wheat and hold barley treated very similarly and the application of crop stable isotope analysis has shown that we do see a shift towards more extensive husbandry conditions in the late roman period all right thank you