In the Middle East, grain, vegetables and olive trees grow in particular. But that was not always the case. In the Bronze Age, the local residents mainly maintained wine production, as a new study shows. The farmers used sophisticated growing methods and irrigation systems to maintain viticulture despite climatic challenges. With the dry climate in the Iron Age, the wine in the Middle East did not lose importance and even had a higher priority than the olive cultivation.
In the course of human history, olives (Olea Europaea) and grapes (Vitis Vinfera) were always important crops. Regardless of the historical internal and foreign policy developments in the Middle East, they consistently had a high priority. Because they have a high nutritional value and you can make valuable commercial goods such as olive oil and wine from them. “Olives and grapes were important crops that provided food for the locals and exportable raw materials, which made it easier for the trade between Levant and Mesopotamia and beyond Egypt, Turkey and the other Mediterranean,” explains senior author Dan Lawrence from Durham University. Where these plants and their fruits grew well, however, over time, due to changes in culture and the climate.
Plant samples from the Bronze and Iron Age
A team led by Lawrence and Burfutor Simone Riehl from the University of Tübingen has now examined how agricultural practices have changed in terms of grapes and olives in the Middle East. For this purpose, the researchers took over 1,500 seeds and wood samples from charred plant residues from archaeological sites in the Levant and in the northern Mesopotamian regions. These sites lie in seven climatic zones in today’s countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Northern Iraq and were managed from the early Bronze Age to the Iron Age, about 5000 to 2600 years ago. Riehl and her colleagues analyzed and compared the carbon isotopes in the wine and olive samples- as an indicator of how much water the plants were available during their growth.
It was shown that the plants were inferior to seasonal and regional moisture fluctuations during the early Bronze Age and that the woods had traces of regular drought stress accordingly. The plant samples from the late Bronze Age and Iron Age also have a few such indications for dry stress. However, these were less pronounced during the course of the year and overall. In addition, the researchers found olive and wine plants from these two later epochs, even in dry regions with fewer rainy days.
This distribution suggests that the ancient farmers used irrigation systems from this time in order to supply their crops evenly even in the dry summer months. This is particularly noteworthy with a view to the vines that need a lot of care and more water than olive trees. “Overall, wine growing is significantly more labor -intensive compared to olive cultivation, especially with regard to soil processing, protection against pests and irrigation during the fruit period,” the team writes.
Maising when choosing the crops
However, the results coincide with earlier archaeological finds, according to which people have been intensively irrigated their wine cultures since the middle of the Bronze Age and grapes in poorly suitable, dry climate zones. Accordingly, grapes and wine were of particular cultural and economic value and were more important than olives and olive oil. This is now confirmed by the new finds. They also show that people in the Middle East were once more involved in viticulture than for olive cultivation. Because the olives showed dry stress much more frequently than the grapes, especially from the late Bronze Age.
“Our research shows that farmers in Southwest Asia made decisions 4,000 years ago about which crops they should grow and how they should manage them, whereby they brought the risk of a crop failure to work for irrigation and the likely demand for their products,” explain the researchers. “This reminds us that people in the past have been as wise as people in the past and that apparently modern issues such as resilience to climate change and the need to carefully distribute resources have a long history,” adds Lawrence.
Source: Plos and Durham University; Specialist articles: Plos One, DOI: 10.1371/Journal.pone.0330032