I ran across this little bit about the history of cultivating forest ecosystems in Europe during the mesolithic (middle stone age). I though it was quite interesting to read how mesolithic europeans turned forests into areas of high food and resource productivity while staying in ecological balance. I think humanity should return to these methods of generating food while making the land as hospitable to as many other types of living things as possible. I found the portion about using english ivy to basically create feedlots for wild deer really fascinating.
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The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe
The indigenous Mesolithic societies of Europe never disappeared: they adapted, and survived in new ways. Their cultures, values, spiritual beliefs, and relationships with the land are encoded in the folk traditions and regional agroecological systems that persist throughout Europe. The elegance of t
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Contents
- People of the Hazel: Europe’s indigenous cultures return after the glaciers retreat, bringing their most cherished tree with them
- The Continent-Wide Orchard: Mesolithic people create Europe’s post-glacial ecosystems as vast forest gardens
- A Changing Climate: millennia of drastic fluctuations in the climate lead to the creation and spread of grain-based agriculture
- Strength in Diversity: early farmers innovate resilient crop mixes and companion planting to guard against climate change
- Hybrid Cultures: Europe’s new creolized societies mix the best of hunter-gatherer and farmer cultures, practices, livestock, and crops to create entirely new ways to grow food
- The Domesticated Forest Garden: farmers in the Mediterranean adapt their region’s hunter-gatherer forest gardens into diverse multi-story farms, creating resilient agricultural forests of domesticated crops that exist to this day
- Towards a New Culture: imperialist monoculture farming systems take precedence in Europe, but the indigenous forest garden methods survive in the margins. These ancient methods are nearly forgotten, but they can provide a framework for rethinking the way we live and grow food in a changing climate.
Introduction
In the hills above the Po river in northern Italy, there are a handful of farms that look almost the same today as they would have three thousand years ago.
There are rows of short pruned trees, with fruit-laden grape vines festooned between them. The trees are common natives in the area that produce fruit, firewood, basketmaking materials, and fodder for farm animals. The grapes are ancient cultivars that have been grown here for millennia. Between these rows of grapes and trees are diverse plots of cereals, hayfields, vegetables, and herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live and support the farmstead, and more to sell at a high premium. This is a resilient system - a farm modeled on a forest. Unlike monocultures of grapes or grain, diversity is the strength here. Disease outbreaks and unseasonable weather have a limited impact. If one crop has a bad year, there are a dozen others to pick up the slack. These are agricultural ecosystems designed to last millennia - and that is exactly what they have done.
A row of field maples (Acer campestre) trellis grape vines, and are pollarded to harvest ‘tree hay’ fodder for livestock. Maize grows beside the row. The grapes are harvested to make wine. Source.
This style of growing is called coltura promiscua - “mixed cultivation” - a practice with roots that run deep in these hills. It is one of a handful of truly indigenous systems of farming remaining throughout Europe, adapted and perfected over thousands of years from the earliest hunter-gatherers through to the present day. It has shrugged off extreme climate change events, countless wars and invasions, pestilence and plagues, cultural erasure and colonization. This is the kind of farming system that is needed in the 21st century: a fully-integrated three-dimensional farm ecosystem that supports people and animals, provides staples and specialty products, increases local biodiversity, and does not require chemicals or elaborate technology.
Whereas modern industrial agriculture is descended from a distinctly imperialist Roman plantation system based on slave labor, systems like coltura promiscua are the direct descendants of the indigenous forest gardens of pre-agricultural Europe. Since the Neolithic Revolution, an assortment of farming systems in Europe that relied heavily on monocultures and a handful of finicky staple crops often ended abruptly and violently. The diverse forest gardens of peasants, however, have quietly shrugged off ten thousand years of turbulent changes. This article is a look at the little-known history of these systems and their innovative strategies for survival.
As we search for ways to remake the way we garden, farm, and live in a time of climate change, extreme inequality, and political disarray, looking back at the innovations of Europe’s hidden agroecological past can provide invaluable lessons on how we might collectively move forward.
People of the Hazel
A Mesolithic shaman’s deer headdress from Star Carr in northern England. Source.
Our story begins with the last retreat of the glaciers from Europe around 15,000 years ago, a period known as the Mesolithic (‘middle stone age’) which ended with the introduction of farming from the Near East five to ten thousand years later. Mesolithic Europe, populated entirely by hunter-gatherer tribes, was an incredibly diverse place in terms of ethnicity, culture, land management, religion, and food. Societies across the continent innovated unique ways to thrive in their respective landscapes for millennia.
Mesolithic people constructed their houses from locally-available materials. Hazel poles often comprised the skeleton of the structure, and reeds like Phragmites australis (now endangered in Europe, but a common invasive in North America) were used as thatching. Mesolithic societies were experts at creating thriving societies whose only traces were stone tools and a more diverse landscape. Source.
After the glaciers retreated, the continent was a cold tundra of lichens, mugwort, dwarf willow, and sea buckthorn - populated by prehistoric megafauna and migratory bands of humans returning from their Ice Age refugia in the mountains. Around 9,600 BCE, global temperatures rose 7°C in less than a decade, allowing for temperate deciduous forests to return. Populations of Mesolithic humans expanded rapidly across Europe, bringing their most prized plant with them: hazel.
Much as peaches, once introduced, were spread across North America by indigenous people in a matter of decades, the pollen record shows that hazel (Corylus avellana) suddenly becomes ubiquitous across Europe as soon as the climate warmed, brought to every corner of the continent by hunter-gatherers. Hazel was the original Tree of Life for Mesolithic Europeans. The nuts are about 60% fat and 20% carbohydrates, and contain a wide range of proteins, vitamins and minerals - a few handfuls can cover most of a person’s daily energy needs. Its branches, tall and flexible but slender enough to cut with a flint axe, were used for tools and firewood. Mesolithic thatched huts were often made with hazelwood beams. From cradle to grave, the people of Mesolithic Europe relied on hazel more than any other single plant. Excavations of habitation sites from this period can turn up hundreds of thousands of roasted hazelnut shells. For over five thousand years, this single plant was the lifegiver to nearly all of Europe’s people.
The Continent-Wide Orchard
In addition to hazel, Mesolithic people utilized up to 450 different species of edible plants - many of which were common plants of forest edge habitats. Wild vegetables (many of which are considered weeds today) like nettle, knotweed, lesser celandine, dock, lambs quarters, fruits like sloe plum, rowan, hawthorn, crabapple, pear, cherry, grape, raspberry, and tubers of aquatic plants were all part of the Mesolithic diet. These European native plants were likely utilized by Mesolithic hunter gatherers for the same reason they are often seen as weeds today: they’re extremely resilient, aggressive, and adaptive species that can be encouraged to grow with minimal effort.
These were not bands of starving cavemen constantly on the precipice of death, but rich and resilient societies that had a much more diverse diet than most present-day Europeans. Researchers found that a young girl who died 5,700 years ago in southern Denmark ate duck and hazelnuts - a far richer (and tastier) diet than most kindergarteners in Western countries have today.
And for their rich and diverse diet, Mesolithic people worked less than anyone who came after. Hunting and gathering requires just a few hours of work each day - far easier than farming, much less modern work schedules. After helping to create Europe’s forests by bringing favored plants like hazel with them, they continued to manage their landscape with hand tools and fire. Europe was not a pristine wilderness, but a continent of handcrafted nut orchards and semi-wild forest gardens carefully managed for thousands of years. This tracks with common themes around the world: indigenous people in Australia, North and South America, and elsewhere have used fire and specialized hand tools to achieve unprecedented levels of environmental stewardship and management for millennia. Nor was this anything new: humans (and their Neanderthal and Homo heidelbergensis ancestors) have been shaping Europe’s ecology for over 800,000 years. These Mesolithic forest gardens were simply the most recent and nuanced manifestation of an ancient ecological relationship.
Controlled burns of the forest and savannah allowed Mesolithic Europeans to alter and diversify their environment on a large scale, creating new habitats that fed people and supported more wildlife. Source.
Areas around settlements and camp sites were regularly burned to limit the encroachment of the forest, and to favor food-producing forest edge trees species. These controlled burns established open park-like habitats, which could lead to a tenfold increase in the amount of wild game animals present, creating greater opportunities for hunting red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. In some places, people created forest openings to encourage the growth of English ivy (Hedera helix) - a favorite food of red deer. These ivy patches essentially served as semi-wild feedlots in the wintertime, allowing people to hunt deer, or possibly even to establish semi-domesticated herds (much as the indigenous Sami people in northern Scandinavia have today with semi-domesticated herds of reindeer).
Coppicing was another important strategy for managing the Mesolithic forest garden. Certain trees and shrubs, like hazel, can be cut to the ground every few years. Instead of hurting the tree, this effectively rejuvenates it, allowing the plant to live far longer than it would if unmanaged. Hazel in a wild state generally lives around 70 or 80 years, but with regular coppicing it can thrive and produce wood and nuts for centuries. Willow, another plant with many uses and benefits, is managed in this way as well. Coppicing lent itself perfectly to Mesolithic technology: without saws or metal tools, it was far easier to harvest small-diameter trees and branches than large trunks. For cultivating or regenerating patches of wild vegetables or semi-domesticated grains, Mesolithic Europeans also had a wide range of hand tools at their disposal, including flint axes, wooden and antler hoes, mattocks, and digging sticks. The open forest gardens that surrounded Mesolithic camp sites and settlements could be managed this way for millennia.
Hazel coppice woods are still maintained throughout northern Europe and Turkey
A Changing Climate
For thousands of years, Mesolithic people across Eurasia had lived by their covenant with the web of life: a sacred pact that was defined by reciprocal relationships with their human and non-human neighbors. Unbeknownst to them, however, major events half a globe away were about to change this way of life forever.
Around 10,800 BCE the North American ice sheets collapsed, causing glacial melt waters to cool the North Atlantic and kickstarting a global drop in temperatures. Within a few centuries, conditions in Europe and the Near East were almost as cold as the previous Ice Age. This period, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted for over a thousand years. In the Near East, hunter-gatherer cultures saw their entire way of life collapse. Their Edenic landscape of fruit and nut trees withered in the cold, the large herds of wild game disappeared. They had always grown and eaten the seeds of native grasses as a supplemental part of their diet. During the Younger Dryas, however, these grasses (and some legumes) became the only crops they could reasonably rely on. A thousand years of planting and harvesting had the effect of fully domesticating these species. When the climate finally warmed again in 9,600 BCE, they had a crop that had never been seen before: grain. Wheat, barley, peas, beans, and flax had gone from wild survival foods to domesticated staples. A period of dramatic climate change had brought about a new class of food that would forever change the world. This new age, defined not by hunting and gathering, but by the cultivation of grains, is known as the Neolithic (“new stone age”).
The traditional narrative states that the ‘Neolithization’ of Europe (the replacement of hunting-gathering with grain farming) occurred as a wave from ~6,500 BCE in Greece to ~2500 BCE in Scandinavia, with farming cultures from the Near East bringing grain and livestock, leading to the end of the inferior Mesolithic hunter-gatherer way of life. A wealth of recent archaeological evidence, however, points to a very different story.
Every dramatic change or fluctuation in climate, from the Neolithic to the present day, precipitates major changes in agriculture. As we’ve seen, people created productive environments by spreading hazelnuts across Europe when the climate warmed after the Younger Dryas. The Little Ice Age of the 17th century led to massive failures in Europe’s grain harvest, prompting the widespread adoption of the potato and other New World crops. Similarly, the adoption of cereal farming in Europe did not happen at a continuous pace, but occurred in surges associated with severe climate fluctuations over the course of thousands of years.
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