 to all of you, thanks for coming. Many thanks for coming today to this session, number seven to six, in poetically titled, Farming and the Crescent Moon, Archaeological Insights into the Medieval Islamic Green Revolution. My name is Marcos García, I'm from the University of Granada, and I'm organizing this session with my colleagues, Jeron Ross, from the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, and Michelle Alexander from University of York, who is Imato Nautilif, and is able to join us today. In this introductory talk, we would like to present some general ideas concerning the central topic of this session. Many of the papers that will be presented cover the points that we want to make, but we wanted to begin from a broad, theoretical perspective of the, concerning the analysis of animal and plant husbandry in the medieval Islamic world. And the first idea we want to make is that when we think about husbandry, we refer to a complex phenomenon. So we all know plants and animal husbandry represent two of the main components of almost any of our system from the Neolithic period onwards, so their economic importance is without doubt. But there's another factor that we also forget, or usually it's forgotten, that is the social factors implied in these activities. In our view, the economic and the social significance of husbandry cannot be disentangled. And this is because farming is, above all, the production of food. For this reason, we suggest that the study of husbandry has to be combined with the analysis with a study of food waste in the past. People doesn't eat anything, not even what is best for us. So as Michael Daidler stated in this quote, diet goes beyond any biological need. So when dealing with the study of farming, we have to pay attention to this other side of the coin, particularly because consumption and the demand that makes it possible determines what vegetable and what animal species humans grow and breed. Arguably, in the case of the medieval Islamic, medieval food waste, this phenomenon is more relevant to animal husbandry than to the plant production and the consumption of vegetable food items. As none of the papers that will be presented today deals with the management of livestock, the livestock management, the Muslim medieval world, I'd like to present in a very summary way a key or a case study from my PhD thesis that illustrates a thing, that illustrates the close relationship between the spheres of food consumption and production. For this study, we analyze the farmer remains from a number of sites in southern Liberia with chronologies between the 7th and the 12th centuries. Among other results, we observe a correlation between the frequency of peak remains and the biometry of two species, of chicken and sheep. In those cases where the evidence suggested local breeding and consumption of pork, these two species, chicken and sheep, tended to be smaller in size than in cases where peak remains were absent. Given that hygrimid yield is correlated with larger bones, it seems plausible to link the increased size of these animals with their improved meat yield. As this trend correlates also well with the dramatic disappearance of peak remains in the soil archaeological record, this pattern is interpreted as being the result of the process of intensification of these two animals during the Islamic Iberia. In this sense, intensification refers to the management of chicken and sheep with the aim of increasing the quantity of food that they could provide, as a consequence, in my opinion, of the Islamization of Iberia and to the spread of the code of behavior that formed the Islamic orthoprocess, the orthoprocess of medieval Islam. This case of the study reflects the complexity of agrarian systems that are comprised by multiple interacting factors. So one change in the system caused the need to adjust the other elements of the system in order to find a new equilibrium, in this case, new sorts of animal protein, to substitute those derived from pork. Economic reasoning is therefore not the only variable to take in mind, to bear in mind, when we study a husband during the past. Other aspects, such as the social factors, are equally relevant for the comprehension of why and how people bred their animals and rode in crops. In other words, why and how people produce food in the past. Our second point we want to make is more closely related to the title of this talk, and also makes sense in the framework of this session. The knowledge of foreign systems in the Islamic medieval world has been built as any scientific endeavor by the only efforts of countless scholars. In this sense, the contribution of Andrew Watson has to be highlighted. It seems as he was the first who proposed that the early medieval spread of Islam was followed by the fashion of a new package of plans, of intensive methods of farming, particularly irrigation technology, and a subsequent rise in crop production, referring to this process as the Arab agricultural revolution. The value of Watson's contributions is of paramount relevance, given the profound implications that they hold for the comprehension, for our understanding, of the medieval hascentry in a general sense, but also because the influence and the impact of its thesis. In this graph, here on the bottom, in which the number of citations of his first and most influential article on this topic published in 1974 gives a crude but a very illustrative measure of its symbol and also showing a surge of citations in recent years. We will not review here the criticisms of the whole of Watson's thesis, given that the main elements are well known. Instead, we'll focus on two elements that have been much debated or play rejected by other scores. The first refers to the nature of innovation. It has been claimed that the impact of the medieval Arab expansion on agriculture was a complex phenomenon that took place over a longer period than the concept revolution implies. The chronology and the scope of Watson's proposed changes have been demonstrated to be problematic given the growing body of evidence for pre-Islamic diffusion of techniques, tools, and culturians in the Near East and the Mediterranean. Indeed, Watson's thesis was not based on archaeological evidence. Maraica van der Wien correctly underlines the fact that agricultural innovations are concerned less with invention and adoption and more with change and adaptation. And this is an assertion that has been widely accepted by other authors that undermines the possibility of radical changes in the agrarian past, the pre-modern agrarian past. This led us to a second issue, namely the concept of agricultural change and the agents implied. Concerning this topic somewhat overlooked by Watson, we have to highlight the work carried out in the European Peninsula by Thomas Bleak, and particularly the development of an original methodology known as Hydraulic Archaeology by Michel Barcelot and his team based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This line of archaeological inquiry is based on the grounds that the key element for understanding the Islamic Society of Alandos are peasant groups, peasant communities, considered as the main actors responsible for the agricultural change. One of the most significant contributions of Barcelot's team is the global perspective of social analysis that they adopted and the critical importance assigned to the social structure responsible for the management of the irrigated systems. In other words, this social perspective represents a valuable insight into the understanding of how husbandry systems are linked with socialist structures. In the sense, agricultural practices are conceived as social options that reflect political decisions. Peasant agency, therefore, plays the key role in the design and exploitation of any husbandry system. But peasants as social agents do not live in an historical vacuum. As Barcelot stated, agriculture doesn't exceed. What exceeds are peasant work processes more or less dominated by external forces, external political forces. Hence, as we've said before, if agriculture is amenantly the production of food, we have to pay attention not only to the sphere of production but also to the patterns of processing, storage, preparation, and consumption of this particular type of material culture that food represents. And rather paradoxically, this study of irrigation system has not been always fully connected with the analysis of these issues, limiting the global and systemic comprehension of historical agricultural systems. Precisely, the contribution of bioarchaeology and geoarchaeology helps or allows to fill the gap between the study of the agrarian areas of production and the places where produced items were processed, preserved, stored, consumed, and reduced. Scientific advances are only possible when significant and representative knowledge from particular studies have been acquired, it's been discussed, and shared. Particularly, especially when paradigmatic views of the past are so well-established as Watson's agricultural revolution model. And this is the end of the session. To bring together new archaeological evidence related to the consequences of the medieval Islamic conquest on farm ingredients. The eight papers that will be presented in this session have been arranged in a geographical order in the east to the west, so we'll move from Afghanistan, sorry, from Uzbekistan, to the Iberian Peninsula, to Iberia, via the nearies and seaside. We have planned two discussion slots that will be led by Geronros. The first focus on the seven first papers before a break at 7, sorry, at 10.30, and a second one, the last one, on the remaining two papers and for general discussion. And this would be not only 15 minutes, the last discussion slot, I mean, but maybe we can have it for a longer period, for a longer time. So thanks for your attention. Thanks for coming today. Thanks for presenting your answers and to present the session. We hope that it will be fruitful and interesting for all of us. It's my pleasure, without any interruption, without any break, to introduce the first speaker, this Robert Spengler from the Max Plan, who is the dean for the Science and Human History and who will present the paper, Archaeological Studies at the Tash-Bulak Archaeological Site during the Karogyanic period. Thank you.