Archaeology

March 17, 2008March 17, 2008

Nibbles: Bees, weird food, wagyu cattle, medieval agriculture, beer

India to research bees in detail.
Yak knob to go with your yak milk, sir?
George Lucas does his bit to conserve a weird cattle breed, the Japanese wagyu. Well, kinda.
Was the typical English village founded around 900 AD as a result of monastically-driven agricultural innovation?
Diverse healthy reasons to drink beer; Luigi unavailable for comment.

March 12, 2008March 12, 2008

Nibbles: Donkey, women, bees, databases

Archaeological evidence of donkey domestication from Egypt.
Empower women farmers to ensure food security. Sounds like a plan.
Good reporter visits good bee research centre. Read all about it.
Genomics blog discovers CGIAR databases, love at first sight.

March 3, 2008

Indigo in the Americas

I knew a bit about indigo — but not that in addition to the Old World’s Indigofera tinctoria there’s a separate species in the same genus that was used in ancient America for making dye. I found out because of some interesting detective work on the Maya pigment. I figured that the indigo plant mentioned in the research was something completely different, but it turns out to be I. suffruticosa. Although there do seem to be other genera that produce the colour.

March 2, 2008March 2, 2008

Nibbles: Branding, dogs

Commodity branding is older than you think. Via.
Ancient Scandinavian dogs not like modern Scandinavian dogs.

February 29, 2008February 29, 2008

Nibbles: Carnival, pomegranates, cattle, potatoes

Berry Go Round No. 2 is up with lots and lots of botanical links.
Pomegranate juice manufacturer says its juice is best.
Cattle and aurochs did the wild thing.
The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has a potato genebank. With pic goodness.

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025