AGRAS · The role of animals in the Arab aGricultural Revolution in Al-Siqilliyya. The introduction of new sheep husbandry practices and breeds, and the spread of Arab culture into medieval Sicily.

Animal husbandry has been a core productive area of the European economy since the introduction of domestic animals during the Neolithic. In today's geopolitical scenario, past husbandry regimes can provide essential insights into improving the resilience of animal production, adapting to local resource availability while maximising yields. The research context of this project is medieval Sicily. Located in the centre of the Mediterranean, Sicily has always been a melting pot of different cultures; the clear affirmation of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman/Swabian rules during the Middle Ages entailed the development of distinct socio-cultural and economic models, each influenced by and adapted from previous practices. This makes Sicily a primary case-study for the understanding of the integration of different cultures and the impact of different politico-economic systems. Between the 7th and the 13th c. AD, the Mediterranean Basin witnessed an important transformation in landscape use and its management defined in the 1970s as ‘the Arab agricultural Revolution’. This concept has been revised and nuanced since, and it was probably a more gradual process than initially thought. In contrast to other materials, animal bones and teeth have been overlooked, despite they provide direct evidence of dietary habits, landscape management strategies, and economic dynamics of the past. Preliminary research suggests that the Arabs managed to produce bigger animals (and thus higher meat yields) across the Mediterranean, but how? For the first time, AGRAS will develop a multidisciplinary research combining traditional archaeozoology, collagen fingerprinting (ZooMS), isotopes (oxygen, strontium, carbon and nitrogen), dental meso and microwear to understand the reasons enabling Arabs to produce higher meat yields in a context of demographic increase and competition for resources on a European scale.