- Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar. Ancient sheep, goat and cattle bones show livestock racing across the island about 1,200 years ago, in step with forest clearance and the loss of elephant birds and pygmy hippos. People had arrived long before, so hunting alone is an insufficient culprit. Also I can’t imagine pygmy hippos being all that nice to eat.
- Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison. 115 ancient and 45 modern genomes show that past bison populations were widely connected, which means that today’s herds, while more fragmented, retain more diversity than was feared. Also, many modern bison lack the cattle ancestry long assumed to be ubiquitous, but wood bison do carry plains bison ancestry from 1920s translocations. So, swings and roundabouts.
- Whole-genome resequencing reveals genetic diversity, population structure, and selection signatures in tibetan yak. Three recently recognised Xizang populations (Chawula, Jila and Niangya) prove genetically richer than many others and cluster with Yushu and wild yak. Selection signals turn up at coat colour genes such as MC1R and at candidates for meat production. Has anyone done selection signals in bison?
- Selection of a phenotypic and functional core set for South Korean silkworm genetic resources, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). A core set is distilled from a larger collection on multiple morphological, physiological and quality criteria, a manageable shortlist so the genebank’s holdings can be more easily used rather than merely admired. What would a core collection for the bison look like, I wonder?
- Impact of genomic selection on genetic diversity in 5 local European cattle breeds. Genomic selection uses DNA information from across an animal’s genome to predict its breeding value, allowing breeders to select animals likely to pass desirable traits to their offspring earlier and more accurately than relying on observed characteristics or pedigree alone. But can it be bad for genetic diversity if applied to a small local breed? Well, it shortened sire generation intervals and evened out top-sire contributions, but inbreeding rose in two breeds and fell in three. Genetic management mattered more than genomic selection, so the lesson is to monitor, and adjust as needed. Possibly relevant to the bison?
- Adoption of support tools for biodiversity conservation: a mixed-methods analysis of ecosystem services awareness among Slovenian cattle farmers. Livestock farmers who are younger and with more positive attitudes to biodiversity and the European Green Deal are more likely to adopt biodiversity-supporting practices. Knowing this could have saved many pigmy hippos 1,200 years ago in Madagascar.
- A national fish pond dataset for Nigeria generated using automated detection and segmentation. A segmentation model run over imagery, with a Random Forest classifier filtering the candidates, yields an openly released map of aquaculture production that was previously hard to see, let alone manage.
- Pathways to recover Asian wild pigs from African swine fever. Since 2018 the virus has caused huge mortality in naive wild pig populations, and the authors set out eight priority actions, with early-warning surveillance, captive breeding and emergency financing the ones that can’t wait. Free-ranging domestic pigs and thin biosecurity at the wildlife-livestock interface keep kind of bring us back to where we began on Madagascar.
Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives
- WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
- Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
- Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
- Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
- An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
- Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
- Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
- Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?
Wine from the ashes
I’ve been following the vineyards of Pompeii for quite a while, it turns out. Maybe because archaeology and wine are two of my favourite things. As part of our anniversary celebrations, here’s a recap of the story, as it has unfolded on the blog over the past ten years and more. It was prompted by a recent piece by renowned wine writer Jancis Robinson. It’s unfortunately paywalled, but I found another source.
In 2013, I wrote about the vines I encountered growing among the ruins, planted where archaeologists had found evidence of ancient vineyards: casts of vine roots and the supports on which they had grown. The idea was to reconstruct not just a Roman vineyard, but something of the agricultural landscape that disappeared when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
By 2016, the experiment had progressed from vines to wine, and we duly Nibbled about it. The Mastroberardino winery was using archaeological evidence, ancient texts and surviving local grape varieties to recreate aspects of Pompeian viticulture. Some of the varieties thought to have been grown in antiquity were still being cultivated around Vesuvius. The reconstructed vineyards were producing wine too, although the winemaking was sensibly not being reconstructed quite as faithfully as the viticulture.
By 2020, the vineyards had become part of the experience of Pompeii itself, with harvesting and winemaking incorporated into the archaeological site’s interpretation of its ancient gardens and agriculture.
And now, in 2026, the project is entering a new phase. A new partnership aims to expand vineyard production within Pompeii, with around 30,000 bottles a year envisaged. The scale is very different from the experimental 1,500 bottles of a decade ago, but the basic idea remains: use archaeology, surviving agricultural biodiversity and modern expertise to recover something of Pompeii’s lost viticultural heritage.
Pompeii died two thousand years ago. It’s rather wonderful that its vineyards have come back to life.
Brainfood: Archaeology edition
- Editorial: Food matters. Antiquity‘s editorial puts food at the centre of archaeology, a window onto societies, economies, identities and power: a fair place to start a run of items that dig into the evidence.
- Pottery residues provide earliest direct evidence for domestication and dairy processing in equatorial Mainland Southeast Asia. Molecular traces in ancient pottery provide direct evidence for animal domestication and dairy processing 3000 years ago where the rest of the archaeological record can be frustratingly coy. Complicates assumptions that dairying was restricted by tropical conditions or in pastoral societies.
- Agricultural Practices of Rice and Millet at the Largest Zhou Dynasty Settlement by the Weishui River in South-Central China. How rice (mainly) and millets (foxtail and broomcorn) were grown, processed and consumed side by side, 1046-256 BCE.
- Ancient DNA reveals early use of melons in China’s Song dynasty. Genetic evidence from archaeological remains pushes back the record of melon use in China (960-1279 CE). They weren’t domesticated there, though. And they weren’t sweet.
- Origin and Dispersal of Domestic Chickens in Africa: Integrating Archaeological, Genetic and Historical Evidence. Archaeology is combined with genetics and history to trace how chickens arrived and spread across the continent in waves: via Egypt around 300 BC, then Indian Ocean connections during the first millennium AD, the trans-Saharan trade, Bantu movements and regional exchange networks.
- Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug. Not just food though. The archaeological record for habitual plant-drug use turns out to reach back a long way, approximately 25,000 and 16,000 years ago to be not-so-precise.
- Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East. No, plants are definitely not just food. A new volume treating plants as active participants in religion, art and symbolism, with chapters on plants as persons in Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and on meeting gods under trees in the Hebrew Bible.
When farming worlds collide
When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not? The transatlantic movement of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, and chili peppers to Europe, Africa and Asia, and of wheat, sugar, coffee, and livestock to the Americas, was profoundly transformative. It reshaped global agriculture and diets more dramatically than any single event in human history after the Neolithic.
But similar, if maybe smaller-scale, “exchanges” happened long before 1492. The deep history of agriculture features several ancient “mixing bowls,” let’s call them, where traditions from different geographic origins met and interacted in fascinating ways. These are natural experiments in how new crops become part of diversified farming systems, and I think they can be especially useful in thinking about “opportunity crops.”
Usually, by opportunity crops we mean local or regional crops that were perhaps once more important, and then declined. Or, even if they were never very important, they could still do more, given the chance, whether for diets or incomes, or resilience: indigenous fruits and vegetables, forgotten grains, traditional tubers, you know the kind of thing. Their local resurgence is a crucial path to diversification, for sure. But those agricultural mixing bowls suggest that crops from the outside also have a role in enriching local farming.