Seasonality at prehistoric Franchthi: the use of large sample sets

Abstract Understanding the seasonality of resource exploitation provides critical insights into past human behaviours, how prehistoric communities structured their subsistence strategies, organised resource use, coordinated social activities, and interacted with their environment. These insights benefit from large sample numbers, increasing robustness, enabling statistical correlations of contextual information with specific seasons as well as the identification of synchronous collection events. Here we present these benefits as a result of high-throughput and high-resolution seasonal analyses of 180 archaeological mollusc shell samples using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) from the prehistoric site of Franchthi (Greece). These results focus on the Neolithic but also include information on the Final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods. They offer rare glimpses into meal practices and seasonal scheduling that are often elusive in traditional archaeological analyses, thereby highlighting the ability of large sample sets to reveal nuanced aspects of prehistoric subsistence and social practices.