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A study of yam domestication practices among smallholders has provided an insight into how farmers exploit wild plant genetic resources so as to adapt them to agriculture. This book describes the domestication operations leading to Dioscorea rotundata yams in Africa. The biodiversity of these yams and of their wild relatives is investigated, and the authors put forward hypotheses to explain the phenotypic changes resulting from smallholder practices. These hypotheses could be possible lines of research for breeders.
This valuable reference will be useful for both scholars and general readers. It is both botanical and cultural, describing the role of plant in social life, regional customs, the arts, natural and covers all aspects of plant cultivation and migration and covers all aspects of plant cultivation and migration. The text includes an explanation of plant names and a list of general references on the history of useful plants.
Root and tuber crops are important to agriculture, food security and income for 2.2 billion people in developing countries. These species produce large quantities of dietary energy and have stable yields under difficult environmental conditions. This second edition of Tropical Root and Tuber Crops is an authoritative treatment of four important root and tuber crops: cassava. sweet potato, yams, and aroids.
This volume discusses the nutraceutical importance, production technologies, management and cultivation practices of underutilized vegetables, which can be described as those vegetable crops which are neither grown commercially on a large scale nor traded widely. While much of the crops addressed in the book are cultivated, traded and consumed at the local level, there are over 60 species of minor vegetables with high growth and yield potentials that are not cultivated to a large extent for greater populations. This work highlights the production technologies needed to grow these vegetables on a larger scale and under various adverse soil and climatic conditions, and their nutritional and medical benefits to assist with food security, health and poverty alleviation in rural areas. Production of underutilized vegetables is low, due to the unavailability of planting material, lack of awareness about the nutritional and medicinal importance among the farmers and inadequate information on the production techniques of these crops. In this context, there is an urgent need to take up a program on genetic resources exploration, management, utilization, and improvement of underutilized vegetable crops to ensure food and nutritional security. Readers will learn about these technologies and practices, while also learning about the unique properties and benefits of these underutilized vegetables. The book will be useful for academicians and researchers focusing on vegetable production and breeding, as well as farmers and sustainability scientists looking for underexplored sources of nutrition to benefit large rural populations.
Africa has a vibrant past. It emerges from this book as the proud possessor of a vast and highly complicated interweaving of peoples and cultures, practising an enormous diversity of economic and social strategies in an 2xtraordinary range of environmental situations. At long last the archaeology of Africa has revealed enough of Africa's unwritten past to confound preconceptions about this continent and to upset the picture inferred from historic written records. Without an understanding of its past complexities, it is impossible to grasp Africa's present, let alone its future.
Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
Environments, landscapes, and ecological systems are often seen as fundamental by archaeologists, but how they relate to society is understood in very different ways. The chapters in this book take environment, culture, and technology together. All have been the focus of much attention; often one or other has been seen as the starting point for analysis, but this volume argues that it is the study of the inter-relationships between these three factors that offers a way forward. The contributions to this book pick up different strands within the tangled web of intersections between environment, technology, and society, providing a series of case studies which explore facets of this common theme in different settings and circumstances and from different perspectives. As well as addressing themes of theoretical and methodological interest, these case studies draw on primary research dealing with time periods from the late Pleistocene glacial maximum to the very recent past, and involve societies of very different types. Running through all the contributions, however, is a concern with the archaeological record and the ways in which scales of observation and availability of evidence affect the development of questions and explanations. The diversity of the chapters in this volume demonstrates the inherent weakness in any attempt to prioritise environment, technology, or society. These three factors are all embedded in any human activity, as change in one will result in change in the others: social and technical changes alter relations with the environment–and indeed the environment itself—and as environmental change drives changes in society and technology. As this book shows, it is possible to consider the relationship between the three factors from different perspectives, but any attempt to consider one or even two in isolation will mean that valuable insights will be missed.