TY - JOUR
T1 - Innovation or preservation? Abbasid aubergines, archaeobotany, and the Islamic Green Revolution
AU - Fuks, Daniel
AU - Amichay, Oriya
AU - Weiss, Ehud
N1 - Funding Information:
This paper was written with support from the Bar-Ilan Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program and the Rottenstreich Fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers; Steven Rosen, Suembikya Frumin, and Rosemary Melinek for their useful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts; Martin Carver for important comments on an even earlier lecture presentation; Simcha Lev-Yadun and Dafna Langgut for advice on anthracological and palynological finds; Tammy Friedman for database assistance; and Nahshon Roche for editing assistance. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Zohar Amar for introducing us to the Islamic Green Revolution thesis and to Andrew Watson for a short but inspiring correspondence.
Funding Information:
This paper was written with support from the Bar-Ilan Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program and the Rottenstreich Fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers; Steven Rosen, Suembikya Frumin, and Rosemary Melinek for their useful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts; Martin Carver for important comments on an even earlier lecture presentation; Simcha Lev-Yadun and Dafna Langgut for advice on anthracological and palynological finds; Tammy Friedman for database assistance;?and Nahshon Roche for editing assistance. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Zohar Amar for introducing us to the Islamic Green Revolution thesis and to Andrew Watson for a short but inspiring correspondence.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2020/2/1
Y1 - 2020/2/1
N2 - The topic of agricultural innovation in the Early Islamic empires has become increasingly relevant for archeology, history, and even agricultural science. The validity of Andrew Watson’s original “Islamic Green Revolution” thesis will ultimately be verified or vindicated through archaeobotanical research, as Watson himself has suggested. However, rigorous criteria for exploiting the available archaeobotanical data and testing the basis of this thesis are needed. A simple theoretical framework relating archaeobotanical data to agricultural revolution is advanced below, and methodological criteria are presented for interpreting plant species introductions from the archeological record. These are applied to archaeobotanical “first finds” from an unprecedented assemblage of mineralized plant remains from an Abbasid Jerusalem bazaar, which included the earliest evidence for eggplant (Solanum melongena) in the Levant. Finally, we advocate a regional, crop-by-crop strategy for further interdisciplinary research on the Islamic Green Revolution.
AB - The topic of agricultural innovation in the Early Islamic empires has become increasingly relevant for archeology, history, and even agricultural science. The validity of Andrew Watson’s original “Islamic Green Revolution” thesis will ultimately be verified or vindicated through archaeobotanical research, as Watson himself has suggested. However, rigorous criteria for exploiting the available archaeobotanical data and testing the basis of this thesis are needed. A simple theoretical framework relating archaeobotanical data to agricultural revolution is advanced below, and methodological criteria are presented for interpreting plant species introductions from the archeological record. These are applied to archaeobotanical “first finds” from an unprecedented assemblage of mineralized plant remains from an Abbasid Jerusalem bazaar, which included the earliest evidence for eggplant (Solanum melongena) in the Levant. Finally, we advocate a regional, crop-by-crop strategy for further interdisciplinary research on the Islamic Green Revolution.
KW - Agricultural revolution
KW - Archaeobotany
KW - Crop diffusion
KW - Early Islamic
KW - Food globalization
KW - Islamic Green Revolution
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078439756&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s12520-019-00959-5
DO - 10.1007/s12520-019-00959-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078439756
SN - 1866-9557
VL - 12
JO - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
JF - Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences
IS - 2
M1 - 50
ER -
