During the conquests of the Roman Empire, the administration, in addition to combining language, religion and culture, affected the nutritional habits as well as the viticulture it brought. In the case of sweet chestnuts, the medieval chestnut culture developed later, and the Selven (groves) in Southern Switzerland still testify to this today.
As the Swiss Federal Forest, Snow and Landscape Research Institute (WSL) announced Wednesday, four researchers tracked the ethnobotanical distribution history of the two tree species and published the findings in the journal “Environmental Archaeology.”
An investigation was started on the pollen finds. It provides the first comprehensive picture of the early distribution and cultivation history of chestnut and walnut in Western and Central Europe.
Accordingly, references to the cultivation of chestnut and walnut trees can be found as early as the 1st millennium BC. This is especially true for chestnuts. This had a real boom after the Roman expeditions, especially on the southern slopes of the Alps and in France. Walnuts were already common. But their cultivation was strengthened by the Romans.
The texts state that the Romans and Greeks cultivated chestnuts primarily for their rapid growth and durable wood. Chestnuts came to be used more and more as food and became known as “poor man’s bread”.
Known today as both chestnuts and tree nuts in Switzerland, walnuts are economically important for wood and fruit in Europe.
(SDA)