Résumé
This study documents the diversity of Andalusi agricultural production and practices in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula between the 11th and the 14th centuries, based on unpublished case studies from the “Landscapes of (Re) Conquest” project and pre-existing published data. At the heart of this research lies the question of agricultural innovations that are widely associated in the scholarly literature with the Arab-Berber expansion across Iberia. The most recent overviews spoke for themselves: none of the crops of the medieval ‘green revolution’ mentioned in the texts (e.g. cotton, sugarcane, spinach, eggplant, etc.) had been discovered (Peña-Chocarro et al. 2019; Ros et al. 2019), and it is only in the last two years that new taxa (e.g. citrus fruits, rice) have begun to appear in Andalusi archaeological contexts in Iberia , on a very occasional basis (Peña-Chocarro and Pérez-Jorda 2023; Peña-Chocarro et al. 2024). These data raise the question of the real expansion of Arab-Berber agriculture in the West, and of the “new plants” and their rhythm of diffusion: was this really a uniformly widespread phenomenon throughout the entire medieval Muslim West? Or was it limited to the landed estates of the urban aristocracy and to the large areas of specialized production (e.g. al-Andalus), well known from written sources? Focusing on Iberia, did the areas at the frontiers of Andalusi territories continue to practice agriculture that was strictly identical to that of the Roman and/or Visigothic periods? Or did they experience similar trends to those in neighbouring Christian territories, i.e. a boom in rye and certain spring crops (e.g. millets, flax, hemp) (Ros et al. 2023)? This innovative research lays the foundations for a new reflection on the persistence and evolution of the production and management of plant resources in the face of the major political, social and economic changes that took place in the Peninsula during the medieval period. They also highlight an otherwise neglected topic in the field of archaeobotany – the contrasting agrarian dynamics of political heartlands and frontiers.