Last Sunday’s outing to Cerveteri and its Etruscan necropolis included a visit to the town’s small museum. Where we saw the following terracotta figurine:
The piece wasn’t labeled, and I had to take the photograph at a weird angle through glass, so the quality is not great. But that looks like an artichoke to me, or maybe a cardoon. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find much on the internet about the Etruscans and the artichoke, but they definitely had it. And it is still a big crop in the region. But I’m just not entirely certain. What do you think?
Nibbles: Bananas, Sorghum, Agave, Big vs small, Cauliflower, Wine, Chestnut, Farmers’ rights, India, Aquaculture, Medicinals, Tarpan
- How they grow bananas in Fadan Karshi, Nigeria.
- How they grow sorghum in Karamoja, Uganda.
- How tequila is ruining small farms in Mexico. Or is it?
- How small farms cannot feed Africa. Or can they? Join the debate! Via.
- How the Brits plan to rebrand cauliflower. This I gotta see.
- How the ancient Chinese made wine out of rice, honey, and fruit. Pass the bottle.
- How Georgia is mapping where its chestnuts used to be.
- How farmers’ rights are being implemented.
- How Indian agriculture should move beyond wheat and rice. Ok, but what would everybody eat?
- How microsatellites can be used to help catfish breeding.
- How Ni Wayan Lilir is helping people learn about the traditional healing herbs of Bali.
- How the Brits brought back the Konik.
Nibbles: Coffee, Barley, Sheep, Diary, Ancient chocolate, South African wine, Pleistocene Gibraltar, Roads
- Coffee: The World in Your Cup exhibit. I found it at Grist.
- Making beer with less water. At last a worthy use for germplasm collections.
- Rare Breeds Survival Trust take over sheep semen archive. Ah, those fun-loving Brits!.
- Illinois, 1937: farm diary in twitter form.
- Have chocolate, will travel.
- February 2, 1659: “…today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.”
- Neanderthals hung out with — and hung on thanks to — biodiversity.
- Yield is not enough.
Tule boat ahoy
You may remember a post I did last summer on sedges called tules. Although not domesticated, tules have (or had) a lot of interesting uses among the Native Americans of California, including in the construction of boats. People still build tule boats, mainly for fun. I bring all this up because of a recent article on some fascinating new thinking about how people spread around the world. It seems that there is increasing evidence that they may have done so by boat, including perhaps during the initial peopling of the Americas from Asia. In which case they could well have gone from kelp bed to kelp bed in tule boats. Incidentally, the oldest boat in the world is a pine dugout made by the Bog People of NW Europe in about 8500 BC.