Islamic Agronomy in Mexico
Jeremy Cherfas over at Agrobiodiversity mentioned that I thought there were traces of the agricultural techniques of Medieval Islam in Mexico (and presumably the rest of Latin America).
I don’t think there is any doubt about this. Quite a few scholars, both English- and Spanish-speaking have looked at this. Here’s just a start.
Irrigation and hydraulic technology from Moorish Spain.
Lots of this came over. Scholars have a pretty good idea of indigenous irrigation techniques so that what was added from the Old World is pretty clear.
Among others, Thomas Glick of Boston University has studied this in Spain and Mexico. He is author of The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas. El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1972. Spanish version, in Los cuadernos de Cauce 2000, No.15 (Madrid, 1988); also in Instituto de la Ingeniería de España, Obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en América, I (Madrid, 1992), pp. 225–264. Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and its Legacy. Aldershot, Variorum,1996.
From personal experience, you see the remains of norias (wheels to lift water) all over the place.
The whole of the northern edge of the Bajío region–a key agricultural region in colonial times because it supplied the wheat, mules, etc to the mining districts of Guanajuato and Zacatecas–is riddled with hydraulic works: stone channels and damns that you run across everywhere if you roam through the hills.
I wish I could find the notes from a seminar given by a researcher at the Colegio de Michoacán. Anyway, he described how first the Spanish managed to control the aguas mansas, the gentle waters, the waters that flow year round in the two major rivers (ha!) that flow down from the north, the Laja and the Lerma. Then they tackled the aguas torrentiales (the torrential waters) because often much of the year’s rainfall occurs in two or three major downpours. Among the techniques were moveable woven damns to divert the waters into holding areas, and the creation of huge holding areas acres in extent where the water went from one pen to another until all had evaporated, still keeping the ground moist enough for a second crop.
It was a huge, and hugely labor-intensive system that survived until the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the small electric motor for pumping out groundwater.
And I recently went to a colonial hacienda in the Bajío, close to Irapuato, which had a system for collecting the waters from the huge areas of roof and running them through channels to irrigate the huerta (orchard/vegetable garden). I assume most of these techniques were inspired by or directly copied from Moorish Spain.
By the way I see that Simon Fitzwilliam-Hall who runs the al-Filaha site is an expert on hydraulic technology so he probably knows far more about this than I do.
Continuation of the medieval Islam transfer of plants
Obviously the Spanish picked up and brought to New Spain many of the plants that the Iberian peninsula owed to Islam. Bless their hearts, these plants, now expected to live with wet summers and dry winters instead of dry summers and wet winters, adapted and thrived, citrus for example. William Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain tracing the transfer of the technique of growing fruits in huertas from New Spain into what is now Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Sheep, Cattle, Horses and their Management
Not perhaps technically part of agronomy but very much part of the package that arrived, even if subsequently adapted to conditions in the Americas. And of course with reverberations in the cowboy culture in what is now the US but was once part of New Spain.
____________
Finally well-known food activist Gary Nabhan has had a shot at in his thought-provoking Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (though I wish that he was a tad more precise and analytical in his claims).
Fascinating post. It has always stayed with me how extraordinary it is (and yet how commonsensical) that the dates groves that flourish in Mexico’s Baja California oases were first planted by the Jesuit missionaries with seeds from North Africa.