Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of domesticated plants in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin

by Daniel Zohary, Maria Hopf, Ehud Weiss

The origin of agriculture is one of the defining events of human history. Some 11-10,000 years ago bands of hunter-gatherers started to abandon their high-mobility lifestyles in favour of growing crops, and the creation of settled, sedentary communities. This shift into an agricultural lifestyle triggered the evolution of complex political and economic structures, and technological developments, and ultimately underpinned the rise of all the great civilisations of recent human history.
Domestication of Plants in the Old World reviews and synthesises the information on the origins and domestication of cultivated plants in the Old World, and subsequently the spread of cultivation from southwest Asia into Asia, Europe, and north Africa, from the very earliest beginnings. This book is mainly based on detailed consideration of two lines of evidences: the plant remains found at archaeological sites, and the knowledge that has accumulated about the present-day wild relatives of domesticated plants. This new edition revises and updates previous data and incorporates the most recent findings from molecular biology about the genetic relations between domesticated plants and their wild ancestors, and incorporates extensive new archaeological data about the spread of agriculture within the region. The reference list has been completely updated, as have the list of archaeological sites and the site maps.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food History, Science, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 1988

Reviews

[Usfromdk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The page count of this book is not that impressive, but the amount of knowledge the authors managed to fill it with is. A very well researched and dense book of high quality. The coverage is very broad; the book covers a lot of different crop types (cereals, pulses, fruit trees and nuts, vegetables and tubers; there are even short sections on condiments and dye crops). The breadth naturally means that the amount of depth provided is limited - though especially as far as the cereals go, it's not actually that limited - but in the case of all crops covered in the book we get at least some information about what is known, how we know it (archaeology, genetics, linguistic evidence), and how strong this evidence is, according to the authors. A discussion of the wild ancestry of the crop in question is included for all crops (as far as I can remember), even if the 'discussion' is sometimes limited basically to an observation that we don't really know very much at this point. The book might feel slightly formulaic to read because it's the same sort of evidence that is encountered repeatedly and quite a few crops have quite similar domestication histories, but on the other hand there's no question that the formula applied works, which makes this a great book.

The book doesn't cover the entire 'Old World' in that China/East Asia is not covered in any detail - this was a deliberate decision made by the authors - but even so this is a highly edifying and comprehensive work.

I'd note that if you read both this book and Bellwood's First Farmers, the combination of those two books is arguably greater than the sum of their parts.