Modelling agricultural land changes: mobilise historical sources to gather past knowledge with geographic evidence
The agricultural land changes we observe today are the direct result of a combination of social, economic, and environmental factors, varying at a range of spatial and temporal scales. Thus, many land-change models based on geographic theory and reconstructions of...
Between dryland and irrigation in Alentejo: agriculture and population development in the long term
Located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Alentejo is the largest of the Portuguese regions with more than 28 thousand square kilometres stretching from the coast to the Spanish border. This region lies within the dry Iberia being subjected to a...
Forgotten practices, techniques, and crops: recovery of agricultural memory in Galiza in the late 20th century
The Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrarias, better known by its acronym in Spanish (INIA), was and still is the main agricultural research centre in Spain. Its origin dates to the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period when it was founded in 1940...
Pulling the wool over our own eyes: agrarian historians, seed improvement, yields and productivity
Interest in old varieties of seeds, especially cereals, has grown in recent years for two main reasons. First is the risk to the genetic diversity that accompanies the loss of these varieties in a context of accelerated environmental change. Second is the considerable...
Pottery production as a significant part of the sugar production cycle
One can hardly trace a portrait of Portuguese economic history without considering the relevance of sugar’s production and trade since the late Middle Ages and during the Early Modern Age. Notwithstanding the number of research papers on the subject, it is still...
OASIS. Agrobiodiversity seedbeds
Baja California Sur is a territory colonised by the Jesuits, previously occupied by native peoples. With this colonising process in the desert territory, Misiones-Huertas were designed in which crops brought from Europe were planted, together with native seeds from...
Provincializing the Green Revolution
According to estimates by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), only a few Mexican states rely almost completely on commercial seed companies providing hybrid maize. The rest of the area under maize cultivation in Mexico is still mainly...
Seed-saving of diversity and autonomy in Portugal
The expression “perdi-lhe o inço!” is used in the Algarve (South Portugal) to indicate that the seeds (as well as seedlings or other propagation material) of a certain variety have been lost. In Alto Minho it is also customary to say “olha, já me desinçei disto!”,...
Evolution of soil perception through the work of Gabriel Alonso de Herrera (16th – 19th centuries)
In 1513, Gabriel Alonso de Herrera published the Work of Agriculture, considered the first treatise written in Spanish that systematised practical farming knowledge in the form of a manual. Its topics include the breeding of several domestic animals, the cultivation...
Archaeology of wine in Roman Lusitania
Phoenician traders from the region of what is now Lebanon probably brought the first wine to the Iberian Peninsula in the 9th-8th century B.C. After this, the first vines appeared in the Phoenician and Greek colonies founded in the southern coast of Iberia,...
