Medieval ‘Green Revolution’ provides future food lessons

Archaeologists will discover how societies across the Western Mediterranean overcame environmental challenges and inspired a ‘green revolution’ over the course of 1,000 years, in the most ambitious investigation yet of its kind.

With support from a 10 million euro (£8.8 million), six-year European Research Council grant, scientists at the universities of Reading, Barcelona, Granada, York, UCL, Basel, València, Murcia and INSAP (Rabat) will study how plants, animals and land changed over the course of a millennium in Spain, the Balearic Islands, and Morocco.

Between the 6th and the 16th centuries, the Western Mediterranean saw successive political and demographic changes, from the Arab conquests of North Africa and Iberia to the Christian conquests of Islamic Al-Andalus. The Arab conquests came alongside significant innovations in agriculture, including advances in irrigation, land management and the introduction of new crops. This ‘Green Revolution’ took place across the medieval Islamic world.

Professor Aleks Pluskowski, a medieval archaeologist from the University of Reading and one of the co-directors of the project, said: “From your orange juice at breakfast, to the rice you have for lunch, and the cotton sheets you sleep in at night, the legacy of the Green Revolution is still with us more than 1,000 years later.

“We still have many questions, and we hope this project will help to answer them. We suspect that migrating Arabs (and in Iberia, also Berbers) did not bring a ready-made agricultural toolkit with them, but instead adapted to the opportunities and challenges they encountered. We also want to see how later societies adopted and adapted these innovations.”

The project will map climate change in the Western Mediterranean in the centuries before, during and after the Arab conquests, when increasing aridity in some regions would have posed a significant problem.

Professor Dominik Fleitmann, a climate scientist from the University of Basel, said: “The Mediterranean climate will get hotter and dryer in the coming decades, so this will present major challenges to water and food security.

“In our globally connected society, this will affect us all, as shoppers have found in recent months, with some shortages of fresh food. We want to see how people overcame similar challenges in the past and whether we can learn anything from this.”

The techniques used by the project’s researchers will include the microscopic study of soils and sediments, analysis of food residues on ceramics, ancient DNA and isotopic analyses of plant remains and animal bones, alongside conventional archaeology.

Dr Rowena Banerjea, a research associate in geoarchaeology from the University of Reading, added: “We will use the latest scientific techniques to reveal stories that have been long hidden in soils, bones and artefacts. This will help us to understand how migrating populations changed the landscape and what they grew and ate, the legacy of which we still see in our lives today.”