Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Veget Hist Archaeobot DOI 10.1007/s00334-017-0641-z ORIGINAL ARTICLE Subsistence strategies and vegetation development at Aceramic Neolithic Körtik Tepe, southeastern Anatolia, Turkey Corinna Rössner 1  · Katleen Deckers 1  · Marion Benz 2  · Vecihi Özkaya 3  · Simone Riehl 4   Received: 10 January 2017 / Accepted: 24 September 2017 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 oak woodland spread again and replaced these open grass- dominated stands, and the people of Körtik Tepe seem to have then favoured large-seeded grasses, nuts and legumes. Riverine taxa and a large diversity of edible plants were used for subsistence in both time periods. Increasing numbers of chaf remains and weeds in the Early Holocene samples suggest small-scale cultivation of the wild progenitors of cereals and pulses. Keywords Near East · Aceramic Neolithic · Subsistence strategy · Vegetation · Cultivation · Younger Dryas Introduction Investigating the transition of human societies from mobile hunter-gatherers to a settled way of life is essential for the understanding of early farming communities. Since Vavilov (1926) published his theory on the primary centres of diver- sity of crop species corresponding to “centres of origins”, a variety of diferent models for the origin of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East have evolved, some of them supported by archaeobotanical investigations (Childe 1941; Braidwood and Howe 1960; Binford and Binford 1968; Flannery 1969; Kenyon 1979; Hole 1984, 1998; Har- lan 1992, 1995; Lev-Yadun et al. 2000; Abbo et al. 2005). One of the models suggested that the origin of village farm- ing communities was in the Levantine corridor between the Mediterranean and the deserts (McCorriston and Hole 1991; Lev-Yadun et al. 2000; Gopher et al. 2001; Abbo et al. 2006, 2010). However, this model has recently been revised by archaeobotanical research and genetic studies suggesting at least three geographical origins: the western, the northern and the eastern Fertile Crescent or beyond (Colledge et al. 2004; Willcox 2005; Weiss et al. 2006; Bar-Yosef 2011; Abstract With the advent of sedentism, or living in per- manent settlements, a new way of life began. The hunter and gatherers’ well established subsistence strategy of thousands of years slowly moved towards farming, beginning with herding and cultivation and leading to the domestication of animals and plants. The Aceramic Neolithic site of Körtik Tepe in southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, provides insight into a permanent settlement of hunters and gatherers at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Early Holocene. Archaeobotanical investigations at the site including char- coal studies provide new information about the origins of agriculture in the northern Fertile Crescent. With the start of the Younger Dryas, there was an opening up of the oak woodland, which may have allowed widespread dense stands of annual, especially small-seeded grasses and riverine taxa to grow and thus provide staple foods for the inhabitants of Körtik Tepe. With the beginning of the Early Holocene, the Communicated by M. Tengberg. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00334-017-0641-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Corinna Rössner Corinna.roessner@ifu.uni-tuebingen.de 1 Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Eberhard-Karls- Universität, 72070 Tübingen, Germany 2 Department of Near Eastern Archaeology, Albert-Ludwigs- Universität, 79085 Freiburg, Germany 3 Edebiyat Fakültesi, Arkeoloji Bölümü, Dicle University, 20280 Diyarbakır, Turkey 4 Institute for Archaeological Sciences and Senckenberg Center of Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, 72070 Tübingen, Germany