As the world approaches 9 billion people it has become increasingly timely to study the processes that led humanity to this point, including the domestication of ancient crops and the intensification of their cultivation. Ancient people moved plants and animals around the planet and, in doing so, formed the cultivation systems that fuel demographic growth. The Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal (FEDD) project has focused on the most impressive chapter in the history of agricultural intensification: the movement of crops along the routes of the ancient Silk Road. The trans-Eurasian trade routes were responsible for bringing economically important plants from East Asia to Europe in prehistory and vice versa, shaping the cuisines of the modern world and allowing for the development of complex multicropping systems, including seasonal crop rotations. The FEDD team has consisted of an international group of top research specialists, with areas of specialty covering archaeobotany, history, art history, linguistics, ancient genetics, and molecular methods (ancient proteomics and metabolites). Collectively, these specialists have analysed archaeobotanical samples for 13 archaeological sites covering 6 countries. They have implemented a multidisciplinary approach, relying on morphological methods, as well as aDNA and biomarkers. The integration of historical texts and laboratory methods has required considerable discussion across of network of dozens of experts.
The team has focused in on several key research topics, among these, they have sought to identify the earliest agriculture in Central Asia and to push the dates for the spread of farming in this region back in time. They have also been interested in the intensification of farming systems in the medieval period, especially with the various waves of imperial expansion and conquest. Understanding how humans mediate farming systems in the face of continual militant intervention is telling about the human narrative more broadly. The FEDD team has also focused in on studies of water-demanding crops in arid regions of Central Asia, such as cotton and rice. The team has been especially interested in knowing when humans started cultivating long-generation perennials, notably in orchards, to this end, they have rewritten the stories of the pistachio, apple, plum, and Russian olive. Central Asia was the crossroads of the ancient world and in this way, people living their played a major role in the formation of empires, cultures, and technologies through time; until recently, this part of the world has received far less attention archaeologically, but the FEDD project has made major strides in filling in these research gaps. The conclusions of this project are allowing scholars to fit Central Asia into a broader cross-cultural study of human history, cultural development, social complexity, and agricultural intensification.
