Did Late Neolithic farming fail or flourish? A Scottish perspective on the evidence for Late Neolithic arable cultivation in the British Isles

This paper critically assesses the recent claim (Stevens and Fuller 2012) that cereal agriculture was abandoned in the Late Neolithic of the British Isles. The Scottish archaeobotanical dataset is considered in detail to test the universal applicability of the model proposed by Stevens and Fuller (2012) and a series of alternative hypotheses are suggested to explain the nature of the current evidence. It is argued that the importance of arable agriculture probably varied on a local as well as a regional scale and that caution should be exercised when attempting to apply unitary models to complex datasets.