Fields, gardens, and staple states

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Notes on contributor

Jennifer R. Pournelle is a Research Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina, where she does her imperfect best to reach across the disciplinary boundaries of various social and natural sciences. She has participated as a principal investigator and landscape archaeologist on surveys and excavations in Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, and elsewhere, using imagery, ethnography, geosciences, and biosciences to investigate millennial-scale urban sustainability and resilience.

ORCID

Jennifer Pournelle http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3055-0380

Notes

1 Such as Ehrlich and Ehrlich’s claim (2004, 4), that ‘the once thriving Sumerian civilization disappeared almost 4,000 years ago,’ erroneously citing Jacobsen and Adams (1968). By 2004 it was clear that the central alluvium, abandoned two (not four) millenia ago, illustrates coupled systems, not ‘arrogance’ or ‘unsustainable irrigation practices whose destructive effects were ignored by elites.’ Integrated (irrigated) plow agriculture, fallow pasturage, palm gardens, and marshy backswamps ameliorated salinization, but contributed to ‘channel flipping’ that progressively shifted agrarian centers along with riverbeds (Adams 1981; Postgate 1992; Wilkinson 2003).

2 See reviewers herein and Scarborough (2018).

3 See Crawford (2013).

4 Study of ancient Semitic-language state records (Akkadian, Old Assyrian, Aramaic), kept after Akkadian conquest of Sumer, before the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III).

5 African yellow rice claimed the bloody heart of 17th-century slave trade to the Carolinas.

6 Along with these grasses, we must include accounting of ‘pseudo-cereals:’ amaranth, buckwheat, chia, and goosefoots—known in the Americas as quinoa, from the Quechua, among whom they remain a staple.

7 Clovers, beans, peas, vetches, lupin, mesquite, and ubiquitous peanuts were also American staples.

8 The cereal-legume-oilseed triad continues: maize-soybean-cottonseed, or wheat-alfalfa-rapeseed.

9 In three early writing systems—Egypt (Saqqara), Sumer (Uruk), and Harappa— fish and reed logographs were ubiquitous among earliest administrative markers (van Ess and Neef 2013, 189; Kenoyer 1998, 71, 168). The Egyptian logograph ‘aD’ (striped mullet) was part of the administrative title of the Nile delta officer responsible for taxing annual catch. Harappan carp, eel, shad, and marine catfish were traded 900 km from the coast.

10 ‘String of dried fruit’ (probably dried apples from Elam) appears in Sumerian accounts early on. Others include pears, plums, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, quince, rose hips, and pomegranate. These rose family staples were hardly central to Sumerian state-making, but may have been so along the Zagros piedmont, where dried and fermented mandarine, pomelo, and citron (and their hybrids: orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, and clementine) were common. In Egypt, one can hardly discount olive and fig.

11 See Sluyter (1994) on Mesoamerican ‘intensive wetland agriculture’.

12 Producing on average 50 km of fruit per tree (Baloch et al. 2014)—enough to feed an adult male performing heavy labor for two months—70 ha of palm gardens could meet nutritional needs for 50,000 people.

13 Illustrated in van Ess and Neef (2013), 114–115.

14 Examples: Carter and Crawford (2010); van Ess and Neef (2013).

15 Nissen (1988) contrasts the architectural and administrative organization of Uruk’s two major districts: the older religious redistributive center, dedicated to the sky god Anu and fish; and the newer, dedicated to Innana, goddess of love, beauty, sex, desire, fertility, war, justice, and political power, where cattle and slave rations were managed.

16 Drought-tolerant even on marginal soil, cassava now feeds half a billion (especially tropical) people worldwide.

17 Wolf (1982), 58–60; Goldstein (2004).