Bar-Oz started out as a biologist, and most of his years in academia were spent as an archaeo-zoologist, focusing on studying animal bones from archaeological sites. His entry into the world of plants was a novelty for him. “There are groups in Israel studying the country’s fruit trees, but they consist mainly of botanists who focus on the taxonomic differences between varieties. They don’t study the ‘roots’ of trees, their cultural history. As an archaeologist, I can see that trees are part of culture.”The living tree on which archaeology was done is a 1,500-year old olive tree, discussed at the beginning of the article.Bar-Oz admits that this is a somewhat odd type of archaeology, since archaeological digs were never done on living trees, which hold historical data. Previously, this type of information was not studied. “In Israel, and in the entire Mediterranean basin, fruit trees have been nurtured for thousands of years. If we learn how to read them and understand the information embedded in them, we can learn about unknown chapters in the history of agriculture. We want to characterize the architecture of the ancient fruit orchard and how it changed over time. This is pioneering work which has not been done before, here or overseas.”
For the DNA analysis of the Negev wine grapes, see here. For more on the archaeology of the late-antique Negev, see here and links.
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