fruit · foodway6 bonds · 6 sourced

fig

Every Mediterranean civilisation afterwards coded the fig as sacred, and the open question is whether the first thing we planted was a calorie or a sweetness we already knew.

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Cultural layer

Origin

Western Asia and the Mediterranean; a candidate for the earliest cultivated fruit, on carbonised remains dated about 11,300 years before present, though whether they show cultivation is disputed

Routes

Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean civilizations, Spanish missions brought figs to California

Context

Nine carbonised figs from a Jordan Valley site, dated about 11,300 years ago, were published as the earliest known domesticated plant: parthenocarpic, fruiting without pollination, which in the wild is a dead end and in a garden is a variety somebody kept going by planting cuttings. That would put the fig roughly a thousand years ahead of wheat and barley. Denham answered in 2007 that people gathering wild parthenocarpic figs would leave the same remains, and the field has largely left the question there. The entry is worth keeping precisely because it is unresolved. Every Mediterranean civilisation afterwards coded the fig as sacred, and the open question is whether the first thing we planted was a calorie or a sweetness we already knew.

Behind this layer

Tim Denham, Early fig domestication, or gathering of wild parthenocarpic figs? (Antiquity, 2007)

Route

Pending

The routes are written. They are not yet mapped.

This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.

1 of 404 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype

What renders here when it lands