This covers the second half of Robert Spengler III’s Fruit from the Sands.
As I was preparing to send this summary out, I came across this interesting article in The Atlantic: America’s Lost Crops Rewrite the History of Farming.
While it’s true that the book we discussed was related to paleoethnobotany in the Old World, this article deals with similar research in the New World. Mentioned in the article is “prominent lost-crops scholar Gayle Fritz.
One interesting bit on her website is a link to an online lab manual for paleoethnobotany techniques and references for seed identification. She also included a (broken) link to a book I have always loved: the USDA seed identification manual. To the best of my knowledge the link provided here should be correct – I found it by searching for the book title, should this link also happen not to work. Now weighing in at over 1000 pages, you can download this treasure and have your own copy!
Once again, Spengler’s website is excellent with lots of material that seems to be updated pretty regularly.
Last time I showed some slides from a class on the archaeobotany/paleoethnobotany flotation technique that I took so I didn’t have permission to provide copies of those slides. This time, however, I found a short (1:35 min) video from Spengler’s website on the flotation method used to recover the material for analysis. I also found a much longer (23 min 55 sec) video that is a general introduction and basic terminology. The sidebar on my youtube page for that link suggests lots of other interesting videos on the topic.
One talk I do want to mention is by Pam McBride, a local paleoethnobotanist. This link is to a talk she gave for the Taos Chapter of the Native Plant Society of New Mexico in 2016. She’s a member of the Albuquerque Chapter, where she’s very active. So, you might see her around town.
Reading the book makes it quite clear that the task of the paleoethnobotanist is difficult to impossible so one question is – why do it? This 7 min 43 sec video is told from the point of the view of an archaeologist on how the plant information creates the context for understanding the human activities and presence at a site.
This video is from a series A-Z of Archaeology. This clip is for the letter ‘S,’ I happened across the ‘D’ is for dendochronology, not particularly relevant to THIS book, but definitely interesting.
Although the book does have a map, this history video has maps of several incarnations of the Silk Road over time, which can be helpful visualizations.
Last time I had found what seemed like a sort of odd/cute video on staple foods but now that I’ve had time to check it out some more, it’s actually really good. This 9 min 9 sec video is about staple foods/worldbuilding cuisine. The narrator speaks briefly of the Elush (?) but really speaks about language and the basics of the foods… in some ways it serves as a 10-minute overview of the entire book. She speaks of Elush culture but I can’t find anything about it… I will say that she has an amazing list of sources which I am shamelessly copying here. We’ve read two of the books, one being the Spengler book we’re reading now, but some of the others look pretty interesting and might show up in our future book lists.
Sources:
The Triumph of Seeds, Thor Hansen
Consider the Fork, Bee Wilson
Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, Robert Spengler
Bread: A Global History, William Rubel
Nuts: A Global History, Ken Albala
Corn: A Global History, Michael Owen Jones
Rice: A Global History, Renee Marton
Beans: A Global History, Natalie Rachel Morris
Pasta and Noodles: A Global History, Kantha Shelke
Potato: A Global History, Andrew F. Smith
The Rice Economies, Francesca Gray
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4354385
https://journalofethnicfoods.biomedce…
In trying to find something about Elush, I came across a writer named Emily Lush. Possibly the source for the word Elush although I don’t think so… She has an interesting post on UNESCO Food Culture that provides information on “25 food-related rituals on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list.” Not exactly about paleoethnobotany but interesting.
Throughout the book, Spengler makes reference to the “founder crop complex.” Here’s an explanation of what it is.
As in the first part of the book, it’s difficult to find interesting video clips of the various plants Spengler describes. As something of a spoiler alert, I did much better with the spices in Gary Paul Nabhan’s book.
Cannabis came in for a one-time, one word mention in the book but is featured more prominently on his website with a couple interesting articles, such as this one. The archaeological work described in the article was picked up for a short sketch by Trevor Noah.
One of the links from Spengler’s website press page is to this article in Botany One. If you aren’t familiar with Botany One, it’s a great resource for all things plant news. And another link goes to another of my favorite sites – Atlas Obscura. And that article links to one about apples.
And, a new one for me… awkward botany. What’s not to love about a website with that name and the subheading – amateur botany for the phytocurious! The Spengler website link was to a post on the origins of agriculture.
I had some information about apples when we discussed Pollan’s Botany of Desire. The link about the Geneva NY apple collection is gone but I found information about it, now called the PGRU collection (unless that is something else altogether) here. What is left at the old website where I had found the link we discussed in the past is a page with an apple crossword puzzle.
Interestingly and for what it’s worth, in the notes from that discussion, I came across a link to an article about cannabis use – the same artifact described in the other links here.
I was interested to read that the fruit of the Russian olive is edible. I found it mentioned on this edible wild food site, though without any recipes. This video talks about Russian olives and confusion about common names.
And, finally, I’ll just mention tea. Early botanical evidence was found in the Han Yangling Mausoleum and was cited as the oldest tea by the Guinness world records. Apparently, tea trading centered on one route that became known as the tea horse road. This video is over an hour long and seems a bit rambling but perhaps has some interesting bits. The narrator does begin by asking why this route isn’t documented which seems a reasonable question to me. Except, you know, a quick search on Tea Horse Road suggests that people have been doing some research…