Abstract
The International Workshop of African Archaeobotany (IWAA) was founded in 1994, little more than a decade after systematic archaeobotanical studies began in Africa. This volume, based on IWAA's July 2000 meeting, offers 19 papers, extending geographically from the Canary Islands to India, in time from the Middle Holocene to the modern period, and in focus from fine-grained studies of individual plants to broad reviews.
The topic of widest interest in Food, Fuel and Fields is the origins of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Although evidence has been scant, Katharina Neumann concludes there is now enough data to affirm that it developed late. The oldest domesticate in the region, pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.), dates to 1800 BC. Other crops only begin to appear about 500 BC. The earliest sorghum in Africa dates to the 1st millennium AD. Why so late? Neumann proposes that foraging was such a highly successful adaptation on the vast and resource-rich savannas that it discouraged a shift to more labor-intensive subsistence systems.
In contrast to Africa, India has produced remains of African domesticates thousands of years older than the oldest finds in Africa. While these specimens raise the possibility of much earlier domestication in Africa, most scholars have been skeptical. Dorian Fuller concludes that, while some of the finds are spurious, there is secure evidence of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench), pearl millet, hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus L.) and cow pea (Vigna unguiculata L.) in India by the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. These plants must have been domesticated in Africa by the end of the 3rd millennium BC, still late compared with other areas.
Roger Blench's paper on the movement of plants between India and Africa highlights how little we know of domestication in Africa. He mentions 14 Indian crops believed to be from Africa, in addition to those Fuller discusses. They are poorly documented, if at all, in the African archaeological record, although most have great antiquity in India.
One reason for the paucity of data is that some African crops are raised for underground storage organs and leave no archaeological remains, such as enset (Ensete ventricosum Welw.) In her ethnobotanical study of this Ethiopian domesticate, Elisabeth Hildebrand suggests that foragers might have begun cultivating enset to increase its abundance, distribution, or palatability. But tracing its origins will be difficult given that it reproduces both by seeds and cloning, has ambiguous markers of domestication, and is unlikely to leave anything but phytoliths.
Botanists and archaeologists have better luck investigating the origins of seed crops. Ann Butler establishes that the Ethiopian pea (Pisum abyssinicum A. Braun), originally thought to be a variety of the Near Eastern common pea, is in fact a separate species, domesticated in Ethiopia. Dorothea Bedigian sets the record straight on sesame (Sesamum orientale L.), often cited as an African native. Through botanical and genetic evidence she determines that it was domesticated in India.
Trade in plants is taken up in several papers. René Cappers discusses Roman trade routes and his work at Berenike, a transit port on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. There he recovered extensive archaeobotanical evidence of plants in the Indian trade, such as pepper, rice, and coconut, as well as tropical African trade plants. Marijka van der Veen presents similar evidence of the Indian trade at Quseir al Qadim, another Roman port on the Red Sea coast.
Margareta Tengberg's paper on the archaeobotany of Oman complements the discussion of trade. She proposes that farming was based on Near Eastern crops grown in date orchards. She finds no evidence that Oman was on the South Asian trade route. Although several sorghum finds from the 3rd millennium BC raised the possibly, their identification is now highly dubious.
In their review of Yemeni archaeobotany, Dominique de Moulin, Carl Phillips, and Nadia Durrani also find that early farmers grew predominantly Near Eastern crops and played no role in the spread of crops from Africa to South Asia. Wild sorghum, recovered from a 9th century BC storeroom, however, suggests possible contact with Africa since the plant is not indigenous to Yemen.
A series of papers offer archaeobotanical reports on sites in North Africa. Ahmed Gamal-el-Din Fahmy discusses plant remains from a cemetery at the major Egyptian Predynastic site of Hierakonpolis. The plant remains from burial offerings and stomach contents are especially useful as they counterbalance evidence of farming and diet from the far more abundant trash mound deposits. One particularly interesting find was free-threshing wheat, a cereal that is rarely reported from Pharaonic period sites. Was this cereal grown on a small scale during the Predynastic and later dropped?
Patricia Crawford examines plant remains for evidence of adaptation at Tell el-Maskhuta, a 2nd intermediate period site south of the eastern Delta in Egypt. A marginal area, this was an unlikely place for settlement but may have been selected for its strategic location on a corridor to the Levant. The plant remains suggest that the residents herded livestock and, despite the harsh conditions, raised barley and some wheat, as well as clover.
Ruth Pelling examines farming in a nearly rainless region of Libya, the Wadi el-Agial. Her plant remains, from Islamic phases of Old Germa, indicate that the inhabitants cultivated a wide range of crops, despite complete dependence on wells. In addition to Near Eastern winter crops they raised sorghum and millet in the summer.
Jacob Morales reviews the archaeobotany of the Canary Isles. First inhabited in the 9th century BC, the islands differ from each other in environment and history, but they all show evidence of deforestation wherever there is data. As the inhabitants gathered fuel and cleared land for farming Near Eastern crops, the forests gave way to shrub or steppe vegetation.
The one ethnoarchaeology study focuses on wood and dung fuel in the Moroccan Jebala. Lydia Zapata Peña and colleagues offer valuable insights and cautionary notes for archaeobotanists. For example, they report that the villagers save charcoal residues and use them in other contexts, confounding any attempts by future archaeologists to determine how they selected fuel for particular activities.
Using archaeological wood specimens from caves, Barbara Eichhorn and Norbert Jürgens reconstruct the vegetation history of northwestern Namibia. Their terminal Pleistocene samples indicate cooler, drier weather than today, while the Late Holocene materials reflect conditions similar to the present.
Two papers deal with wood objects from Egypt. María Victoria Asensi Amorós finds in her analysis of nearly 1600 museum pieces dating from the Predynastic to Coptic era that 87% were made of imported woods. Nahed Mourad Waly finds the opposite for 33 Ptolemic and Coptic objects in the Cairo University Herbarium, in which 78% of them were of native woods.
Several papers mention plant impressions. Barbara Zach-Obmann deals with an assemblage in her report on Panicum turgidum (Forssk.) imprints on a 7,500-year-old potsherd from western Egypt. Still harvested today, the cereal was once widely gathered on the African savannah.
This excellent collection of papers does justice to the subtitle of the volume, Progress in African Archaeobotany. Still, despite the great strides, there is much work yet to be done. I look forward to the next volume of the IWAA.