Vol.:(0123456789) Vegetation History and Archaeobotany https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-025-01044-9 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Food crops known from literary and documentary sources in Roman Italy and the empire Geoffrey Kron 1 Received: 30 December 2024 / Accepted: 20 February 2025 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025 Abstract This article is a synthesis of scholarly research into the literary and documentary evidence for the food crops exploited or imported into Roman Italy or other regions in the Roman Empire. Special attention is devoted to the ongoing controversy regarding the relative importance of Watson’s Islamic Green Revolution (IGR) and what Fuks has described at the Roman Agricultural Diffusion (RAD) in promoting the diversification of food crops in the Mediterranean, Near East, Italy and Europe. Keywords Islamic green revolution · Roman agricultural diffusion · Fruit · Vegetables · Spices · Agronomy Introduction This article aims to research and synthesize the literary evi- dence for the plants exploited in Roman Italy, and the extent to which these identifications can be corroborated or clari- fied by archaeobotanical studies, so as to clarify the compet- ing claims of Watson’s Islamic Green Revolution thesis, and what Fuks has aptly described as the Roman Agricultural Diffusion (RAD) (Fuks et al. 2023). While a full discussion of Watson’s thesis would be out of place here, a few remarks regarding the protracted debate are in order. Watson’s appre- ciation of early Islamic agronomy and agricultural practice is a remarkable achievement, one which has been unfairly under-appreciated because of the heavy criticism of Wat- son’s claims that early Islamic agriculture represented a revolutionary transformation of ancient agronomy (Ashtor 1985; Decker 2009, pp 189–190), based as it was on a hostile caricature of the latter fashionable among European Medi- evalists in the 1950s and 1960s, but already discredited when Watson wrote, and surely untenable today, with the long- overdue re-evaluation of the sophistication of ancient (pri- marily Greco-Roman) intensive mixed agriculture (Pleket 1990; Peters 1998; Frass 2006; Kron 2008, 2012, 2015, 2017; Bartoldus 2012; Zainaldin 2020; Marzano 2023). Fuks has offered a detailed recent synthesis of the history of the controversy, and particularly judicious assessments are provided by Butzer et al. (1985, 1994), who appreciates the sophistication of Islamic agronomy and agriculture, while recognizing its origin in, and great debt to, ancient practice. The superb new synthesis by Muthukumaran (2023) is a remarkable contribution, and Decker (2009) and Amar and Lev (2017) provide important correctives on many points. Van der Veen (2011) stands out, along with Butzer, for her balanced analysis as well as an excellent command of the archaeobotanical data available at the time. Arab and Hellenistic‑Roman trade before Islam When considering the relative importance of early Islamic (IGR) and Roman (RAD) contributions to the introduction of new agronomic techniques, foodways, medicines, and plants from India, China, South Asia, and Africa into Mesopota- mia and the Mediterranean world it is critical to understand and consider the history and the means and infrastructure of diffusion. Trade between the Mediterranean and the East was by no means an innovation of the Islamic Caliphates, but had had a long history, with a prominent role for trad- ers from Dilmun (modern Bahrain) and Palmyra (Hoyland 2001, p 74), clear from documentary sources since at least the 2nd millennium BC, as Muthukumaran’s ground-break- ing recent synthesis (2023, pp 16–63) reminds us. South Communicated by F. Schmidt. * Geoffrey Kron gkron@uvic.ca 1 Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria V8P 5C2, Canada