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,...
Long-term research and transdisciplinarity: crossing boundaries to better understand the present
The ReSEED Project celebrates in November 2021 the third anniversary of a research path taken in a long-term and transdisciplinary perspective. Starting from the first one, you can ask: how far the project goes back to define this investigation as a long-term one? The...
What can be learned from the plants represented in museum collections?
Plants are represented in art either with a symbolic purpose within a narrative or simply as a decorative element. A considerable degree of subjectivity is acceptable since artists can favour creativity rather than realism and their main goal is not to convey precise...
The everyday challenges of Portuguese semi-industrial confectionery
In 2005 Rita João, Pedro Ferreira and I began researching the design of semi-industrial Portuguese confectionery, a term we coined to characterise the kind of one-portion, sweet pastries and cakes sold across Portugal as “Fabrico Próprio.” Meaning “Own Production,”...
