One of the previously unexplored aspects of late Pleistocene and early Holocene prehistory in the circum-Mediterranean is the occurrence of millions of land snail shells in sites dating to between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. The snails were part of the human diet, and thus are of interest in trying to understand the character of the "broad spectrum revolution" that preceeded the adoption of food production in many areas. I've just published two papers on this which may be of interest, and they're available in pdf format. The links are
www.ualberta.ca/~dlubell/antibes.pdf and
www.ualberta.ca/~dlubell/ljubljana.pdf. I'll be interested to have feedback.
Nice to read you, David, and many thanks for providing access to your papers. Like many others, I'll certainly try to do my best in order to come up with comments or questions in a little while, but, for the time being, I am just curious about whether or not good evidence was found for the necessary association between these vast quantities of land snails and
Allium sativum.
Jacques
