- 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.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.
Nibbles: Festivals, Wheat breeding, Cowpea, Community seed bank, Mint diversity
- Festivals, rituals and seed-saving go hand in hand, as this photo essay on Koraput’s Adivasis shows for World Indigenous Peoples Day.
- Speaking of unlikely alliances, Israeli and Palestinian researchers have teamed up on wheat that can take the heat in a warming, drying Middle East.
- Not to be outdone in the resilience stakes, the cowpea shrugs off both drought and flooding, according to FAO.
- If all this talk of resilient crops has you inspired, here’s a how-to on starting your own community seed bank, in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter.
- And for when preservation is really about nostalgia: Romania’s Buzau genebank is keeping childhood mint flavours alive, chocolate, clove and vanilla notes included.
Brainfood: Unusual data edition
- The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations. Hundreds of plant species, many now forgotten, show up in archaeological assemblages stretching back tens of thousands of years. Exploiting an astonishing diversity of plants was a fundamental human adaptation long before agriculture. And the data was kinda always there.
- Evaluating cultivars for pollinator gardens. Some ornamental cultivars attract more pollinators than the wild plants they were bred from. The relationship between genetic modification through breeding and ecological function is not always straightforward. And I now want to see the descriptor “pollinator attractiveness” in evaluation datasets.
- Chemotypic Diversity and Integrated Metabolic Profiling of Myrtle (Myrtus communis L.) from Mediterranean Turkey. Dozens of different chemical compounds vary dramatically among individual myrtle plants that look much the same to the naked eye.
- Essential oil composition and ethnobotanical survey of male and female Juniperus seravschanica Kom. (Cupressaceae) in Iran. Traditional knowledge and chemical profiling show that juniper male shoots, female shoots and cones each produce distinct blends of essential oils, exposing a surprising layer of sex-linked diversity within a single species.
- Earth Metabolome and Digital Botanical Gardens Initiatives: Chemodiversity Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Millions of plant-produced molecules remain undocumented, forming an invisible dimension of biodiversity. We need global digital infrastructures to catalogue this vast reservoir of chemodiversity before it disappears. Of course we do.
- Herbaria Provide a Valuable Resource for Obtaining Informative mRNA. Decades-old herbarium specimens still contain usable messenger RNA, opening the door to studying historical patterns of gene expression from preserved plant collections.
- The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices. Data infrastructures may be open, but control over them often is not. And that probably goes even more for the unusual sorts of data represented by the above papers than for the crop diversity data we normally deal with here.
Nibbles: Fit for Biodiversity, Food value chains, FAO, SeedTracker, Morocco genetic erosion, Pastoralists, Cannabis seedbanks
- A conference on biodiversity in agri-food systems. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A photo essay about food value chains in India. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A few examples of FAO’s work on how agriculture sustains biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- An app to track seeds. And therefore agrobiodiversity.
- A warning that 75% of the agrobiodiversity of Morocco’s wheat and barley has been lost in the past 50 years. Ah, so that 75% number is true of something after all. Maybe they could use SeedTracker.
- A reminder that pastoralists guard biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- A Genesys for weed. Well, I guess it’s agrobiodiversity.