Archaeobotanical and stable isotope data, photographs, and R code for the Late Neolithic Herpály assemblage analysis (Duffy et al., 2026)

Late Neolithic settlements in southeastern Europe expanded to unprecedented sizes, potentially reshaping agricultural practices and household-level production strategies under increasing demographic and environmental constraints. On the Great Hungarian Plain, such population aggregation occurred within landscapes characterized by extensive wetlands and limited arable land, raising questions about how cultivation regimes were organized and whether growing communities fostered emerging inequalities in access to agricultural resources. We address these issues at the large tell settlement of Berettyóújfalu-Herpály (Hungary) through an integrated analysis of over 33,000 charred archaeobotanical remains from nine contemporaneous houses destroyed by fire in the mid–fifth millennium BCE. Combining functional weed ecology (FIBS) and cereal morphometrics, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope measurements on individual grains (n=104), we reconstruct field conditions, manuring intensity, water availability, and labor investment at the scale of households. Emmer and einkorn wheats exhibit consistently high δ¹⁵N values, indicating sustained manuring and broadly shared access to dung, while weed assemblages reveal reduced weeding intensity relative to earlier Neolithic garden-cultivation systems. Barley, by contrast, displays lower nitrogen isotope values and weed communities characteristic of lower-input regimes, suggesting spatially differentiated crop management in which wheats were grown in more intensively tended plots and barley in wetter or more distant fields. Variation among houses in isotopic values and grain size signals emerging household-level differences in access to labor, land, or livestock, while mixed cropping of emmer and einkorn reflects risk-buffering strategies in a hydrologically-constraining landscape. Overall, work at Berettyóújfalu-Herpály suggests early population centers on the Great Hungarian Plain maintained predominantly intensive cultivation while selectively experimenting with extensification at the scale of crops and households. Household variability did not translate into major disparities in stored crops, implying that cooperative mechanisms tempered the development of sustained inequality.