Manure Matters

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. In this essential quest, agrarian communities utilized an extraordinary range of elements drawn from the animal (including human), vegetable, and mineral spectrum. 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. For some scholarly observers, manure and manuring are the product and act which articulate much of human history. Manure has been cited, for example, as the crucial by-product of the process of domestication, and the sustaining force behind the creation of permanent cereal cultures and the development of early sedentary societies. Access to large quantities of manure has also been mentioned as a critical factor in Western Europe's rise to global economic dominance in the early medieval period. And conversely, its relative scarcity has been seen to have presaged the concomitant demise of Asian and Middle Eastern economies. Consideration of manure and manuring should not, therefore, be viewed as a fringe activity of the academy; rather it is a subject which should form one of its central themes, the study of which leads to a deeper understanding of the economic and cultural developments of past societies. This book brings together the work of a group of international scholars - based in Britain, Europe, north America, and the Indian subcontinent - currently working on 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, geographically and culturally broad; they span the Neolithic through to the modern period and cover studies from the Middle East, mainland and Atlantic Europe, and India. Together they allow us to explore the signatures that past manure and manuring have left behind, and the vast range of attitudes surrounding both substance and activity which developed in contexts as culturally diverse as the prehistoric, Classical, medieval and modern worlds and under religious systems including Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.