This book provides an overview of the driving theories, methodologies and main topics that have been addressed to date regarding agrarian archaeology. The text is presented as an introduction for students, a critical reading guide for other scholars, and an informative instrument aimed at a wide audience.

Using archaeological, archaeobotanical, and written evidence, this book explores what gardens meant in northern Spain and northern Portugal in the early middle ages - a question asked here for the first time. Dealing with a vast area of the Iberian peninsula that lay beyond Muslim al-Andalus, with great geographical diversity and wide variation in climate, this books spans the sixth to tenth centuries, showing that gardens might lie beside houses or scattered among arable fields or grouped together in garden zones. Gardens are difficult to recognize archaeologically but excavation suggests that many were terraces, as it also suggests that indicators of intensive use - through fertilization or irrigation or characteristic weed species - may be more useful for identifying garden activity than looking for a distinctive shape. The strongest indications of garden produce are that fruit was always important and so were legumes; and some gardens, especially those owned by monasteries, may have grown herbs. The most striking trend across the tenth century is that peasants sold gardens to monasteries, although there are regional differences, Catalonia having a more diverse land market. Peasants sold in order to get food and monasteries bought partly to provide garden produce, including herbs, for expanding communities but partly to use and increase garden space for textile plants--flax, hemp, and dye plants--for commercial reasons, especially urban supply. Gardens were vital for the supply of clothes. By scrutinising the logistics of small- and medium-scale ownership, the relations of owners with large-scale land-holders, especially institutions, and the ins-and-outs of those economic and social interactions, this wide-ranging book adds a new dimension to the environmental history of western Europe, in addition to contributing to an understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of the period more generally.

Environmental factors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have played a crucial role in the historical and social development of the region. The book delves into a broad set of historical literature from the past 15,000 years that neglected to consider environmental factors to their full effect. Beyond the broad historic analysis, the chapters derive conclusions for today’s debate on whether climate change leads to more social conflict and violence. Introducing a theoretical framework focused on adaptive cycling, this book probes and refines the role of climate in ancient and modern political-economic systems in the MENA region. It also underscores just how bad the 21st-century environment may become thanks to global warming. While the MENA region may not survive the latest onslaught of deteriorating climate, there is also some interest in how a region that once led the world in introducing all sorts of innovations thousands of years ago has evolved into a contemporary setting characterized by traditional conservatism, poverty, and incessant strife. Emphasizing regional dynamics, the book's central question deals with the role of climate change in the rise and decline of the MENA region. The book will be a key resource to students and readers interested in global warming, including academics and policymakers.

Phoenician and Punic archaeology have long been overlooked by Mediterranean archaeologists, who focused their attention on Greek and Roman cultures. Although the Punic cities and their rural landscapes are to be found along the southern shores and on the islands of the western Mediterranean basin, comprehensive studies of these archaeological remains are virtually non-existent. This book investigates Punic rural settlement in the western Mediterranean by bringing together and comparing the currently dispersed existing evidence for rural Punic settlement. The core of the volume is accordingly made up by a detailed discussion of the archaeological evidence for Punic rural settlement from Sardinia, Sicily, Ibiza, mainland Spain and North Africa. Because agriculture and agrarian produce have always been assumed to have played a critical role in the Carthaginian colonial expansion, the connections between the various colonial contexts and the local characteristics of rural organisation are explored in detail in order to enhance our understanding of these colonial contexts. This in turn provides better insight into Carthaginian colonialism and local Punic rural settlement and their role in the wider Mediterranean context. By publishing this evidence and these interpretations in English, the authors hope to draw attention to Punic archaeology in general and to these rural studies in particular, and to situate them in the wider Mediterranean context of both classical Antiquity and Mediterranean archaeology.