Crop Husbandry at Gabii During the Iron Age and Archaic Period: The Archaeobotanical and Stable Isotope Evidence

Intensification of agricultural production to support demographic growth has been invoked as a necessary correlate to the important socio-economic changes involved in the urbanisation process of Western Central Italy at the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Yet, the agricultural economy of the early urban centres in the region remains poorly understood. Ongoing excavations at Gabii provide a new substantial archaeobotanical dataset that allows the investigation of crop production and farming practices during the transitional period between the eighth and the sixth century BCE. This study presents a multi-proxy approach that integrates archaeobotanical data with carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses on charred cereal grains to reconstruct Gabii’s crop husbandry regimes. Our results show an unexpected local combination of staples in which barley is the most common crop. No significant changes are visible throughout the period suggesting a remarkable consistency in crop selection and persistence of traditional practices. The stable nitrogen isotope analysis has revealed low values that we argue could be an indication of intercropping cereals and pulses. A drop in the water availability during the sixth century BCE could be related to a combination of environmental factors, human behaviours, and, possibly, production stress.