This book is one volume in a series of monographs already published or in progress presenting the results of excavations at the site of Quseir al-Qadim, a Roman and Islamic period port settlement located on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. Excavations were carried out between 1999 and 2003 under the direction of David Peacock, Lucy Blue, and Stephanie Moser of the Department of Archaeology, Southhampton University. The site comprises two main occupations separated by almost 800 years. The first is securely dated to the Roman period between AD 1 and 250); this settlement has only recently been identified as the site of Myos Hormos, from which Strabo's Geographica reported that as many as one hundred twenty ships a year sailed to India and Arabia Felix to acquire spices, foodstuffs, spices, exotic woods, and other prestige goods. The Roman port declined and was abandoned in the mid-third century and after an 800-year hiatus, was preoccupied with the revival of the Indian Ocean trade during the Islamic period, which spans the later Fatimid through the Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods (mid-late eleventh through to the fifteenth century AD). During both periods, the settlement functioned solely and specifically as a hub and transshipment point in the Eastern, or Indian Ocean trade the nearest arable land or fresh water is 170 kilometers away in the Nile valley.

Archaeobotanical reports are typically published in the form of an appendix at the back of a site report. That this one has its own 300-page volume is due to the extraordinarily plentiful and well-preserved plant remains recovered in excavation from the extensive refuse heaps that accumulated in the dry washes, or sebakhs around the settlement proper. While most archaeologists must content themselves with the fortuitously carbonized remains of plant parts partially burnt in cooking fires and the occasional conflagration, Quseir's middens contained in abundance the desiccated remains of tiny seeds, cereal grains, chaff, nutshells, roots and stems, tubers and rhizomes, citrus rinds, and even onion skins. This remarkable preservation is due to extremely arid climate of the area—annual precipitation averages around 4 millimeters—and the fact the site was never disturbed by later settlement after its abandonment in the fifteenth century.

The first chapter introduces the site of Quseir al-Qadim and its location on the Egyptian Red Sea coast in the historical context of the Eastern, or Indian Ocean trade. The excavation strategy is then outlined, followed by an extensive section on the chronology of the site, supported by 70 radiocarbon dates, mostly taken from individual seeds, grains, and other plant parts. Medieval archaeology has not always taken advantage of radiocarbon dating, mainly because the error ranges for such dates are wider than those taken from ceramic or even documentary sources. Advances in what is called Bayesian statistical modeling have greatly increased the utility of radiocarbon dating in medieval contexts and this chapter provides a cogent and detailed introduction to the use of Bayesian statistics in the interpretation of suites of radiocarbon dates.

Chapter 2 presents a survey of the spice trade during the Roman and Islamic periods, using the archaeobotanical evidence collected at Quseir as a foundation. Spices are an interesting category of food trade item, because although many of the spices may have had use as medicines or preservatives, their value as commodities was prestige-related rather than nutritional—they were luxury items. The authors present a summary of the spices recovered at the site: black pepper was well-represented in both Roman and Islamic levels, but during the Islamic period several more exotic spices, including cardamom, ginger, and turmeric were introduced as well. None of these had been reported from an archaeological site this far to the west. The chapter concludes with a useful discussion of the social and cultural uses of luxury food items in Roman and Islamic times and finishes with a reflection on how and why a commodity as seemingly superfluous as spices could stimulate expensive and risky transoceanic trade voyages. The authors conclude that spices were prestigious not just because they made food taste good and were expensive, but more importantly by virtue of their originating from the East, which imbued these substances with a mysterious, magical quality. This kind of interpretation is generally in line with contemporary anthropological thinking about the nature and value of prestige goods in general.

Chapter 3 treats the wide range of crop plants recovered at Quseir, particularly the “summer crops” introduced from Africa and the Indian subcontinent during Roman and especially Islamic times. These include rice, sorghum, cotton, sugar cane, taro, eggplant, and citrus fruits—all crops that grow in the dry hot summer season and which required irrigation using primarily the animal-driven water wheel. These crops were the focus of Andrew M. Watson's “Arab Agricultural Revolution” thesis, first published in this JOURNAL in 1974 (“The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700–1100.” The Journal of Economic History 34, no. 1 [1974]: 8–35). Watson argued that the unification and expansion of the Arab world stimulated the diffusion of crops originating in tropical latitudes. The introduction of these summer season crops into the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin areas that hitherto had been dominated by crops watered by winter rainfall and snow melt added a new and productive growing season to the region, increased its productivity, and stimulated per capita incomes. Although Watson's thesis has subsequently been criticized on several fronts, Maryke van der Deen and colleagues are in a particularly good position to investigate empirically one of the earliest criticisms: that summer crops had already been available during the Roman period, and hence cannot account for a revolution in productivity in the Islamic period. They find that although three of Watson's summer crops—citron, cotton, and sorghum—were already present in the Roman period, they remained very minor crops. In contrast, all of the summer crops cited by Watson were present in Islamic Kusayr, and it is during the Islamic period that these crops become embedded as a major component of the agricultural system in Egypt during this time.

Chapter 4 changes the focus to the daily lives of the inhabitants of Quseir itself. The port's location presents some challenges to human settlement. The nearest land capable of supporting agriculture was 170 kilometers away in the Nile valley, a seven-day trip one-way over a road constructed in Roman times. Quseir's inhabitants were completely dependent on provisions, including probably fresh water, from the Nile valley towns of Coptos in the Roman period and Qus during the Islamic period. Chapter 5 shifts the focus to the collection, importation and use of woody plants for fuel, construction, and the manufacture of utensils such as bowls, spoons, and combs. The authors find an increase in the use of local Egyptian woods in the Islamic period, compared to the Roman period, when woods were being brought in farther afield, in Africa. Chapter 6 offers a brief summary and conclusion on how Qusair's location at the apex of a vast trade network in spices, woods, and staples affected the daily lives of its inhabitants during what can reasonably be argued to be one of the earliest periods of globalization.

This monograph is clearly written, meticulously edited, and handsomely illustrated with both black and white and color photographs of the remarkably preserved plant remains recovered at the site as well as modern examples of the various plant species in their cultivated contexts. Although technical site reports of this kind are usually published for the use of specialists (in this case, specialists in paleoethnobotany), this book is organized and written in such a way that it can be profitably and enjoyably read by economists, historians, and archaeologists with an interest in the development of the spice trade in the classical and medieval periods and in the role of agricultural innovation in the development of the medieval world.