What would you water, if you could only water one? Would you irrigate your olives, or would you irrigate your grapes? It may seem like a strange question, but it’s a question that the Bronze- and Iron-Age farmers of the Levant were forced to consider.
According to a new study in PLOS One, Bronze- and Iron-Age agriculturalists in the Levant — an area that today encompasses the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel — were more concerned with the cultivation of grapes than they were with the cultivation of olives. After analyzing thousands of ancient seed and wood samples from archaeological sites throughout the region, the study authors showed that farmers irrigated their grape crops more than they irrigated their olives around 5,000 to 2,600 years ago, suggesting that the area prioritized viticulture in a period of climatic change.
“Our research demonstrates that farmers in the Middle East thousands of years ago were making decisions about which crops to plant and how to manage them,” said archaeologist Dan Lawrence, a study author and a professor at Durham University, according to a press release, “balancing the risk of harvest failure with the effort needed to irrigate, and the likely demand for their products.”
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Oil and Wine in the Ancient World
Due to their nutritional and economic value, olives and grapes have had an impressive impact on the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, in addition to providing populations with necessary nutrients and calories, the crops also served as a significant source of income, for farmers and for merchants, thanks to their involvement in the production of coveted products like olive oil and wine.
“Olive and grape were key crops,” Lawrence said in the release, “providing both food for locals and exportable commodities which facilitated trade between the Levant and Mesopotamia and beyond.”
But the commitment to the cultivation of these crops changed over time, however, as the climate and culture of the Eastern Mediterranean transformed. To understand these changes a bit better, Lawrence and his colleagues set out to study olive and grape agriculture, turning to archaeological sites throughout the Levant and its adjacent areas.
Assessing the stable carbon isotopes from around 1,500 samples of burned seeds and woods from the Bronze and Iron Ages (both of which were periods of climatic change), the team identified which plants were watered as they were grown. Since stable carbon isotopes indicate the amount of moisture that was available to past plants, and since they do not degrade over the years, they were the perfect tool to tease out which crops were irrigated and which crops were not.
The results revealed that both olives and grapes were watered, and that these watering practices ramped up between the Bronze and Iron Ages, allowing these crops to be cultivated in drier and drier regions. More importantly, the research found that there was a stronger commitment to the irrigation of grapes than to the irrigation of olives, and that the spread of grapes was wider than the spread of olives, spanning into regions that would’ve been too dry for grape cultivation without additional watering.
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Crop Considerations
According to Lawrence and his colleagues, the fact that the irrigation and spread of grapes surpassed those of olives shows that the people of the Levant valued viticulture over oleiculture in the Bronze and Iron Ages. But it also suggests that they were confronted with tough choices about crop cultivation and agriculture, thousands of years ago.
In the face of these choices, farmers considered the resilience and moisture requirements of their plants, as well as their profitability, which fluctuated as the climate changed.
“It reminds us that people in the past were just as smart as people today,” Lawrence added in the release, “and that seemingly modern issues like resilience to climate change and the need to allocate resources carefully have long histories.”
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