Bronze and Iron Age People Focused on Olive and Grape Crops, Making Wine and Olive Oil a Priority

What would you arrive, if you could only water it? Do you want to irrigate your olives or do you irrigate your grapes? This may seem a strange question, but this is a question that farmers of the Levant Bronze and Iron Age were forced to consider.

According to a new study in Plos one, In bronze and iron age The agriculturalists of the Levant – a region which now includes the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel – were more concerned with the culture of grapes than by the culture of olives. After having analyzed thousands of samples of old seeds and wood from archaeological sites throughout the region, the study authors showed that farmers irrigate their grape cultures more than they were irrigated by their olives at around 5,000 to 2600 years, which suggests that the area prioritized viticulture in a period of climate change.

“Our research shows that farmers of the Middle East thousands of years ago made decisions on cultures to plant and how to manage them,” said archaeologist Dan Lawrence, study author and professor at the University of Durham, according to a press release, “balancing the risk of harvest failure with the necessary efforts to irrigate and the probable demand for their products.”

Find out more: The drunk hypothesis claims that ancient societies have been built with alcohol

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 the necessary nutrients and calories, crops also served as a significant source of income, for farmers and traders, thanks to their involvement in the production of coveted products such as olive oil and wine.

“Olive and grapes were key crops,” said Lawrence in the press release, “providing both food for residents and exportable products that have facilitated trade between the Levant and Mesopotamia and beyond.”

But the commitment to the culture of these cultures has however changed over time, as the climate and culture of the eastern Mediterranean have been transformed. To understand these changes a little better, Lawrence and her colleagues decided to study agriculture of olives and grapes, turning to archaeological sites through the Levant and its adjacent areas.

Evaluating stable carbon isotopes from around 1,500 burned seed samples and bronze and iron ages (both of which were periods of climate change), the team identified what plants were watered as they were cultivated. Since stable carbon isotopes indicate the amount of humidity that was available for past plants, and as they do not deteriorate over the years, they were the perfect tool for disentangling irrigated crops and what cultures were not.

The results revealed that olives and grapes were watered and that these watering practices are accelerating between the ages of bronze and iron, allowing these cultures to be cultivated in more dry and dry regions. More importantly, research revealed that there was a stronger commitment in the irrigation of grapes than to irrigation of olives, and that the spread of grapes was wider than the propagation of olives, extending in regions which would have been too dry for the culture of grapes without additional watering.

Find out more: The oldest wine in the world discovered with ashes of man of the first century

Culture considerations

According to Lawrence and her colleagues, the fact that the irrigation and propagation of grapes have exceeded those of olives show that the people of the Levant valued viticulture on olive growing in bronze and iron. But that also suggests that they were confronted with difficult choices concerning culture and culture agriculture, thousands of years ago.

Faced with these choices, farmers considered the resilience and humidity requirements of their plants, as well as their profitability, which fluctuated when the climate has changed.

“It reminds us that people in the past were just as intelligent as people today,” added Lawrence in the press release, “and that apparently modern problems such as resilience to climate change and the need to carefully allocate resources have stories carefully.”

Sources of articles

Our Discovermagazine.com writers use studies evaluated by high -quality peers and sources for our articles, and our publishers examine scientific precision and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article: