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. Manure really mattered, as 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 book, international scholars working on social, cultural, and economic issues relating to past manure and manuring, use textual, linguistic, archaeological, scientific and ethnographic evidence as the basis for their analyses spanning the Neolithic through to the modern period, with studies from the Middle East, Britain and Atlantic Europe and India.