Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Rouergue:
canabou
2.3
Retracing Hemp's Traces into
Antiquity
•
Saintonge:
charve
or
cherve
Savoie:
•
stenève
Vivarais:
2.3.1 The history of hemp: a challenge?
•
chanalier
•
Walloon:
chenne
What resources can we draw on to detect the
presence of hemp?
Palynology, the study of pollen in archaeo-
logical samples, gives us a good idea of
the location and time of hemp's arrival in
Europe (although palynological techniques are
not without caveats: pollen of
Cannabis
and
Humulus
are difficult to tell apart,
microscopically).
Cannabis pollen grains dating to 3450
BC
were recovered from a site in northern Italy;
samples from central and northern Germany,
Scandinavia, England and France have been
dated between 2900 and 1700
BC
; and in
central Germany, pollen indicated a continu-
ous presence of hemp from 2000 to 530
BC
.
The tip of the arrow went from stone to bronze
to iron, but hemp remained the fibre with
which it was tied.
The detection of hemp pollen in an
archaeological dig implies that hemp existed
near enough the site for wind to carry the
pollen in a practical radius of approximately
12 km. Cannabis pollen has been found to be
mixed in variable proportions with pollen from
other species, indicative of plants growing wild
as opposed to under cultivation. Even where
pollen has been found in high concentrations,
it remains difficult to confirm that these origin-
ated from cultivated fields of hemp. Hemp
plants can grow in fairly dense stands in the
wild. Whether cultivated or a feral camp fol-
lower of the earliest pioneering humans, hemp
would have been a botanical resource vital to
even the most mundane aspects of primitive
life: string.
To this we must also add the names used
to describe hemp seed:
chènevis
,
chenève
,
chenevardou
,
chenèvard
,
cheneveux
.
Not only can we unearth these names
from different regions of France and periods of
history, but also hemp has given its name to a
number of French villages.
A study of the toponyms suggested that
hemp cultivation was widespread:
•
Cambe, Canabal, Canabièra and Chanbier
(Correze and Lot)
Canabols (Rouergue)
•
•
Chanabert (Ardéche)
•
Chanavard (Loire)
•
Chanavas (Vaucluse and Savoie)
•
Chènevière (Val de Marne and Haute
Marne)
Chenôve (Burgundy)
•
This list of rural place names that all refer
to hemp provided evidence that hemp was
known and cultivated throughout most
of France.
The roots of
cannabis
can be found in
classical Latin
kannab
; in Arabic
kannab
;
in Hebrew
kanneb
; and in Assyrian
quanabu
.
Though the suggestion has been resisted,
for obvious reasons, linguistic analysis indi-
cated the
kaneh-bosm
referred to five times in
the Old Testament was, in fact, cannabis
(Benet, 1936). Bennett (2010) has pursued
the linguistic and cultural evidence that canna-
bis was also the principal ingredient in the
recipe for the Vedic
soma
and Zoroastrian
haoma
.
While we know from Herodotus that the
horse-riding Scythian warriors were well
acquainted with the psychoactive properties
of cannabis, we are left to speculate whether
divergence had already occurred between
their recreational cannabis and the fibre with
which they formed their bridles. It is possible
that it had. We perceive in this crop the arti-
fice of ancient breeders, lost under desert
sands.
2.3.2
Chinese origins and the role of
Central Asia
In China, formal proof is readily available,
either from archaeological discoveries or from
the administrative documents preserved by this
country.
