Machine summary:
"Given the water requirements of lentil, it suggests spring or summer irrigation was important at both Sharafabad and Godin; Sharafabad is also the only site with flax, another crop that would have been irrigated; note that in earlier times on the Deh Luran plain, Tepe Sabz had large flax seeds indicative of irrigation (Helbaek 1969: 408).
As at the much earlier Ali Kosh, negligible quantities of wood charcoal relative to burned seeds at Farukhabad and Sharafabad suggest dung must have been used at those lowland sites (Miller 1996).
Seed analysis of three sites along the Euphrates River (fourth- second-millennium BC), has demonstrated that the distribution of plant remains across time and space may reflect agricultural practices (Miller 1997).
If you compare the proportions of the major domestic food animals, the highland and lowland sites show similar proportions of caprines relative to cattle and pig, the seed remains suggest some differences in foddering (Table.
1981), Malyan (Zeder 1991)) the west; Hans Helbaek (1969) pointed out that the wild ancestor of emmer wheat is restricted to the Levant and was domesticated there, so the domesticated emmer at Ali Kosh is evidence for the spread of farming cultures to the east.
Although this paper has emphasized charred plant remains as direct evidence for crops and other plants that grew near a site, our understanding of ancient life will advance faster as we begin to integrate different kinds of archaeobiological evidence, from molecular residues and DNA, to microscopic phytolith and starch, to even larger archaeobiological remains: seeds, wood, and bones."