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Innovation or preservation? Abbasid aubergines, archaeobotany, and the Islamic Green Revolution

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Abstract

The topic of agricultural innovation in the Early Islamic empires has become increasingly relevant for archeology, history, and even agricultural science. The validity of Andrew Watson’s original “Islamic Green Revolution” thesis will ultimately be verified or vindicated through archaeobotanical research, as Watson himself has suggested. However, rigorous criteria for exploiting the available archaeobotanical data and testing the basis of this thesis are needed. A simple theoretical framework relating archaeobotanical data to agricultural revolution is advanced below, and methodological criteria are presented for interpreting plant species introductions from the archeological record. These are applied to archaeobotanical “first finds” from an unprecedented assemblage of mineralized plant remains from an Abbasid Jerusalem bazaar, which included the earliest evidence for eggplant (Solanum melongena) in the Levant. Finally, we advocate a regional, crop-by-crop strategy for further interdisciplinary research on the Islamic Green Revolution.

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Notes

  1. Watson’s full argument was published as a book in 1983, reprinted with a new forward in 2008. We hereafter cite this as Watson 2008.

  2. For additional relevance to the big questions of history, see Squatriti 2014, p. 1206.

  3. In what follows, an archaeobotanical find’s status as the earliest occurrence of its kind is termed “prevenience”, literally the act of coming earlier or being antecedent. In addition, the terms “agricultural innovation” and “agricultural revolution” are here used more or less interchangeably. See Van der Veen 2010 for a nuanced distinction by ultimate impact.

  4. Throughout this article, the “Levant” corresponds geographically to the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate province Bilad al-Sham. The “Southern Levant” corresponds to the region ranging from southern Syria and Lebanon in the north to the Red Sea in the south, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea in the west and the Jordanian desert in the east.

  5. These legume species are more commonly known as mung bean and black gram, respectively.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was written with support from the Bar-Ilan Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program and the Rottenstreich Fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers; Steven Rosen, Suembikya Frumin, and Rosemary Melinek for their useful and encouraging comments on earlier drafts; Martin Carver for important comments on an even earlier lecture presentation; Simcha Lev-Yadun and Dafna Langgut for advice on anthracological and palynological finds; Tammy Friedman for database assistance; and Nahshon Roche for editing assistance. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Zohar Amar for introducing us to the Islamic Green Revolution thesis and to Andrew Watson for a short but inspiring correspondence.

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  1. Archaeobotany Lab, Martin (Szusz) Land of Israel and Archaeology Department, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 5290002, Israel

    Daniel Fuks, Oriya Amichay & Ehud Weiss

  2. Israel Antiquities Authority, Rockefeller Museum, PO Box 586, 27 Sultan Suleiman Street, Jerusalem, Israel

    Oriya Amichay

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Fuks, D., Amichay, O. & Weiss, E. Innovation or preservation? Abbasid aubergines, archaeobotany, and the Islamic Green Revolution. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 50 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00959-5

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