Crop History Community

The Crop History Community will provide a forum for interdisciplinary research on ancient cultivation, usage, and geographic and evolutionary trajectories of crop plants in Afro-Eurasia during historical periods. The community will include researchers pursuing diverse methods, ultimately promoting improved multidisciplinary research and synthesis of crop histories.

Since the origins of agriculture over 10,000 years ago, repertoires of plants grown, introduced to, and made extinct from different regions have changed dramatically and dynamically. Some crops overcame the restricted natural distributions of their wild progenitors to become some of the most widely grown plants on the planet; others remained highly local. As a result, the crops we consume daily form a mosaic of global and local origins. Tracing the trajectories of crop diffusion thus contributes to improved understandings of premodern connectivity and processes of economic and cultural change which still impact our foodways and lifeways today (Fuks et al. 2024). For over a century, archaeology has contributed meaningfully to understanding these processes. Yet, much of archaeology-based crop history research has traditionally focused on the prehistoric origins of agriculture. Moreover, despite its long-recognized interdisciplinary nature (de Candolle 1885), crop history research has developed along parallel disciplinary lines. At this juncture, the potential for research synergies through interdisciplinary crop history research is high and recent developments now justify a new effort at integrating the amassing multidisciplinary research:

1. A critical mass of archaeobotanical research on historical periods across Afro-Eurasia is emerging, conducted by a new generation of researchers focused on later historical periods (e.g., Bosi et al. 2023; Fuks et al. 2023; Marston and Castellano 2023; Mir-Makhamad and Spengler 2023; Morales et al. 2023; Peña-Chocarro and Pérez-Jordà 2023; Ros et al. 2024).
2. Renewed interest in historical studies of plants in ancient texts is evident, as well as digital humanities tools for synthesizing this data (e.g., Muthukumuran 2023; Sallaberger, ed. 2020-23).
3. Over a century of ethnobotanical documentation of human-plant relationships is becoming more and more accessible through open-access online databases (e.g. Fern 2014; ProtaBase 2019; PlantUse 2020; PFAF 2023), although public awareness is limited.
4. Improved methodologies are being developed for applying a range of scientific analyses on ancient plant materials, among them improved genetic and archaeogenetic approaches.

These developments generate the need for a community forum in which archaeology-based or archaeology-related crop history research can be presented and discussed, ultimately leading to important networking opportunities, synergistic collaborations, and synthesis papers/volumes. It is this need that the Crop History Community will address, by forming a diverse, multidisciplinary community of researchers variously applying archaeobotanical, ethnoarchaeological, biomolecular, isotopic, historical and other methods of inquiry toward reconstructing crop histories, that will host and meet regularly at EAA sessions.

Bibliography

• de Candolle, A. (1885) Origin of cultivated plants. D. Appleton & Co. Bosi, G., et al. (2023), New crops in the 1st millennium ce in northern Italy, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1-16.
• Fern, K. (2014) Useful Tropical Plants Database, https://tropical.theferns.info/.
• Fuks, D., et al. (2023), Unprecedented yet gradual nature of first millennium CE intercontinental crop plant dispersal revealed in ancient Negev desert refuse, eLife, 12: e85118.
• Fuks, D., …(21 authors), Alexander, M., Gros-Balthazard, M. (2024) Orphan crops of archaeology-based crop history research, Plants, People, Planet.
• Marston, J.M. and Castellano, L. (2023), Crop introductions and agricultural change in Anatolia during the long first millennium, CE Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1-14.
• Mir-Makhamad, B. and Spengler III, R.N. (2023), Testing the applicability of Watson’s Green Revolution concept in first millennium CE Central Asia, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1-13.
• Morales, J., Speciale, C., et al. (2023). Agriculture and crop dispersal in the western periphery of the Old World: the Amazigh/Berber settling of the Canary Islands (ca. 2nd–15th centuries ce), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1-15.
• Muthukumaran, S. (2023) The Tropical Turn, Oakland: University of California Press.
• Peña-Chocarro, L. and Pérez-Jordà, G. (2023), Plants from distant places: the 1st millennium ce archaeobotanical record from Iberia, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: 1-14. PFAF (2023), Plants For A Future, https://pfaf.org/.
• ProtaBase (2019), https://www.prota4u.org/database/.
• PlantUse (2020), https://uses.plantnet-project.org/fr/.
• Accueil; Ros, J., Badri, F. E., & Pelling, R. (2024). Agrobiodiversity and crop diffusion in Morocco from Antiquity to the early Modern period (8th century bce–17th century ce): an archaeobotanical review, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 1-14.
• Sallaberger, W. (ed.) (2020-2023) Vegetable Oils and Animal Fats in Early Urban Societies of Syro-Mesopotamia: Digital Data Collection, https://www.i3-mesop-oil.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/