Framing the Impact of Socio-Economical changes on medieval Mediterranean Agriculture – ISEMA

Medieval agriculture in the western Mediterranean is said to have experienced two major events between the 8th and 16th centuries that had a significant impact on its evolution: the Muslim expansion, which would have sparked a “green revolution”, and the expansion into Iberia of the Christian kingdoms, often found under the debated name of “Reconquista”. Although the impact of Muslim expansion on the medieval West is undeniable, it remains unevenly studied, and the actual expansion of Arab-Berber agriculture in the western Mediterranean, its chronology of implementation and the “new” plants and techniques that were supposed to accompany it is yet to be documented, especially in the rural zones, to determine whether or not it was a uniformly widespread phenomenon throughout the medieval Muslim Western world. Concerning the 'Reconquista', its impact on the agricultural world and material culture has been little explored, and the weight of Andalusian agricultural legacy in the newly Christianized areas of the peninsula, and the dynamics and rhythms of the diffusion of new plants and practices to other Christian dominated areas, such as southern France, remain to be explored.
To address these questions, ISEMA proposes to use an international (Spain, France), innovative (archaeobotany, quantitative eco-anatomy, geometric morphometrics, stable isotopic analyses) and broadly interdisciplinary approach, in order to tackle a complex agricultural reality that is difficult to grasp using textual archives alone. Through the study of a corpus of more than sixty archaeological sites (10th-16th c.) distributed between Mediterranean France and continental and insular Spain, ISEMA will seek to document medieval agrosystems (exploited plants, farming practices, agricultural landscapes) and their evolution over time. The objective will be to evaluate how medieval societies developed their agrarian strategies, according to the evolution of the cultural, socio-economic and environmental context, and to determine the role of socio-economic dynamics in the large-scale diffusion of certain agricultural productions.