Why read Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds?

Book cover of Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds: A Case Study in Quantitative Archaeobotany

Book description

There is a growing recognition within Anglo-Saxon archaeology that farming practices underwent momentous transformations in the Mid Saxon period, between the seventh and ninth centuries AD: transformations which underpinned the growth of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and, arguably, set the trajectory for English agricultural development for centuries to come. Meanwhile, in…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Anglo-Saxon Crops and Weeds as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Paolo Squatriti

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Perhaps not a page-turner, but a deeply engrossing study of how English people grew and foraged for the food that sustained them in the first millennium AD. The great value added here is the reliance on the very latest archaeobotanical data, in other words, on the fossil remains of plants, their seeds, glumes, bits of stems, and their pollens, which archaeologists have begun to salvage from digs and cores, to analyze in labs, and now thanks to McKerracher also to historicize.

The excellent British system of preservation, cataloguing, and online dissemination of archaeobotanical information bears fruit in a book that…

From Paolo's list on The best books on how plants make human history happen.