Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the Nile Valley

by Daniel Zohary, Maria Hopf

In this definitive volume, the authors review the origin and subsequent spread of the plants on which Old World food production was founded. Their account is based on the detailed consideration of the plant remains found at archaeological sites and accumulated knowledge about the present-day
wild relatives of cultivated plants.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food History, Science, History

266 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 1988

Reviews

[Usfromdk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The page count of this book is not that impressive, but the amount of knowledge the authors managed to fill it with is. A very well researched and dense book of high quality. The coverage is very broad; the book covers a lot of different crop types (cereals, pulses, fruit trees and nuts, vegetables and tubers; there are even short sections on condiments and dye crops). The breadth naturally means that the amount of depth provided is limited - though especially as far as the cereals go, it's not actually that limited - but in the case of all crops covered in the book we get at least some information about what is known, how we know it (archaeology, genetics, linguistic evidence), and how strong this evidence is, according to the authors. A discussion of the wild ancestry of the crop in question is included for all crops (as far as I can remember), even if the 'discussion' is sometimes limited basically to an observation that we don't really know very much at this point. The book might feel slightly formulaic to read because it's the same sort of evidence that is encountered repeatedly and quite a few crops have quite similar domestication histories, but on the other hand there's no question that the formula applied works, which makes this a great book.

The book doesn't cover the entire 'Old World' in that China/East Asia is not covered in any detail - this was a deliberate decision made by the authors - but even so this is a highly edifying and comprehensive work.

I'd note that if you read both this book and Bellwood's First Farmers, the combination of those two books is arguably greater than the sum of their parts.