News Archaeology 31 January 2018
Ancient societies deliberately cultivated weeds
Plant domestication, the theory runs, comprises a long history during which humans select traits advantageous to farming practice. Qualities such as seed size, nutritional content, climatic resilience and reproductive reliability ideally become concentrated, resulting in a comparatively small number of widely cultivated plants.
Research by a team of archaeologists and archaeo-botanists, however, has found that these cultivated qualities have not always been viewed as priorities. Indeed, in uncovering the practices of early societies that occupied “the middle ground between farming and foragingâ€, the scientists discovered that the plant species most encouraged to grow exhibited “traits that overlap a considerable degree with traits that are characteristic of plants now considered as weedsâ€.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/archaeology/ancient-societies-deliberately-cultivated-weeds
