Daniel Fuks

The “Moving Plants” special issue of Vegetation History and Archaeobotany presents a collection of papers on the archaeobotanical and historical evidence for 1st millennium ce crop diffusion across the Middle East and Mediterranean. Adopting a region-by-region approach, the papers offer the most extensive collection of evidence for Roman Agricultural Diffusion (RAD) and the Islamic Green Revolution (IGR). Together, they indicate the unprecedented transformations to agrobiodiversity occurring during the “long” first millennium, while also enabling more nuanced understandings of RAD, the IGR and the trajectories of dozens of crop plants.