Category: Domestication

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Cooking the books

The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:

…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.

Wish I’d thought of that…

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Taro in the Indo-Pacific

The 19th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association is going to take place 29 Nov.-5 Dec. 2009 at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences Conference Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam. One of the suggested sessions is on taro:

Wet Cultivation of Colocasia esculenta in the Indo-Pacific: Archaeological, Technological, Social, and Biological Perspectives.

David Addison (American Samoa Community College) and Matthew Spriggs (Australian National University)
add1ison(at)gmail.com; matthew.spriggs(at)anu.edu.au

Wet cultivation of taro (Colocasia esculenta) is among the most productive traditional agricultural techniques in the world, rivaled only by the homologous systems based on rice (Oryza sativa). Some of the largest stone constructions in the Pacific relate to wet taro cultivation. Research on wet taro in Oceania has focused on: the role of agricultural intensification in development of political and social complexity; aggression and territoriality; risk management; and initial island colonization. This session seeks to bring together researchers from across the Indo-Pacific region to discuss the wet cultivation of Colocasia esculenta from diverse perspectives. Participants will be asked to have papers ready for posting to a website by 1 October 2009. This will give everyone a chance to read each other’s ideas in detail. The IPPA session will then consist of short presentations and ample time for discussion. Selected participants will be asked to revise their papers immediately after the conference for publication in an edited volume scheduled for early 2010.

Thanks to Lois Englberger for the tip.

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Domestication trifecta

We’ve blogged a number of times about the paradigm shift that’s occurring among students of plant domestication, driven by increasing interaction and synergy between archaeologists and geneticists. The idea of “rapid, localised” domestication is down if not out: all the talk these days is of domestication as a protracted, multi-locational and biologically complex process.

Well, there’s a very nice review of the history of this shift in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, at least as it concerns the crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. It is only very recently that geneticists have looked at their molecular data in the light of archaeological results and realized that there were other ways to interpret them apart from the conventional idea of domestication in one place over the course of a few human generations.

Meanwhile, a paper in Annals of Botany looks at another source of data, i.e. written sources. Chinese investigators have looked at references to eggplants in ancient encyclopedias, concordances and even poetry, and charted changes in size, shape and taste over the past 2000 years. The oldest reference dates back to 59 BC, and since then the Chinese eggplant has gone from round to a variety of shapes, has increased dramatically in size, and has become much sweeter.

Finally, our friend Hannes Dempewolf and co-authors have a paper in GRACE which looks in detail at domestication in the Compositae. Why have only a handful of species in this family been fully domesticated? Secondary defence compounds, inulin as a storage product and wind dispersal, the authors suggest.