Across the western Mediterranean, from Iberia to North Africa, medieval societies faced the combined pressures of climate variability and political transformation. The emergence of Islam in the 7th century, followed by Arab and Berber conquests, brought new crops, irrigation techniques, and agrarian strategies that transformed local economies - a process often referred to as the medieval “Green Revolution”. Yet, much of our understanding relies on written sources, which are fragmentary and regionally uneven and they tell us little about the practical ways that rural communities managed crops, soils, and water in their daily lives. Archaeobotanical remains provide an exceptional opportunity to investigate these questions directly and to ask how medieval people adapted agriculture to cope with both climate shifts - such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age - and political, cultural and religious changes. In this PhD, you will apply stable isotope analysis (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) to carbonised plant remains from archaeological sites across Iberia and North Africa dating to the 6th–17th centuries CE. By examining staple crops such as wheats, barley, millets, and fruit trees including olives, you will reconstruct irrigation and manuring practices and explore how agricultural strategies varied across rural, urban, and fortified sites. You will also compare how crop management practices changed under different political regimes, including Islamic and Christian control. By integrating isotopic results with archaeological, historical, and palaeoclimate data, your research will contribute new insights into land-use strategies and long-term resilience in Mediterranean farming systems.
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