Manure Matters Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives

In pre-industrial societies, in which the majority of the population lived directly off the land, few issues were more important than the maintenance of soil fertility. Without access to biodegradable wastes from production processes or to synthetic agrochemicals, early farmers continuously developed strategies aimed at adding nutritional value to their fields using locally available natural materials. Manure really mattered, its collection/creation, storage, and spreading becoming major preoccupations for all agriculturalists no matter what environment they worked or at what period. This book brings together the work of a group of international scholars working on social, cultural, and economic issues relating to past manure and manuring. Contributors use textual, linguistic, archaeological, scientific and ethnographic evidence as the basis for their analyses. The scope of the papers is temporally and geographically broad; they span the Neolithic through to the modern period and cover studies from the Middle East, Britain and Atlantic Europe, and India. Together they allow us to explore the signatures that manure and manuring have left behind, and the vast range of attitudes that have surrounded both substance and activity in the past and present.

Chapter 1 Why Manure Matters, RichardJones; Chapter 2 Science and Practice, RobertShiel; Chapter 3 Middening and Manuring in Neolithic Europe, AmyBogaard; Chapter 4 (Re)cycles of Life in Late Bronze Age Southern Britain, KateWaddington; Chapter 5 Organic Geochemical Signatures of Ancient Manure Use, IanBull, RichardEvershed; Chapter 6 Dung and Stable Manure on Waterlogged Archaeological Occupation Sites, HarryKenward, AllanHall; Chapter 7 Manure and Middens in English Place-Names, PaulCullen, RichardJones; Chapter 8 The Formation of Anthropogenic Soils Across Three Marginal Landscapes on Fair Isle and in the Netherlands and Ireland, BenPears; Chapter 9 Zibl and Zir?’a, DanielVarisco; Chapter 10 Understanding Medieval Manure, RichardJones; Chapter 11 Lost Souls, HamishForbes; Chapter 12 Manure, Soil and the Vedic Literature, VanajaRamprasad; Chapter 101 Postscript;

Richard Jones is Lecturer in Landscape History in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on settlement history, agriculture, place-naming and nature in the middle ages including The Medieval Natural World (Longman) and two co-authored books Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: Beginnings and Ends (Windgather Press) and Thorps in a Changing Landscape (University of Hertfordshire Press). He is also co-editor of Deserted Villages Revisited (University of Hertfordshire Press) and Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England (Shaun Tyas).